Past Events

Results

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The American Sublime and the Civil War

  October 23, 2008

  Landscape painting ranks among the supreme achievements of American culture in the half century before the Civil War. We tend to associate landscape painting with the picturesque virtues of the countryside, an escape from the political and economic problems of the city and the nation. Yet, as this lecture reveals, landscape painters responded to the threat, and onset, of Civil War with powerful and troubled compositions which register the nation’s trauma. Among the artists to be discussed will be Frederic Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade and Winslow Homer. The lecture closes with a re-examination of the role of landscape in the decades of reconstruction after the Civil War, when the Armory was built.

  Born and educated in England, Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London, and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and co-edited collections Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Stanford White, Architect

  November 12, 2008

  By the time of his death at fifty-three, Stanford White had transformed himself into the most celebrated architect in America. He was also one of its most prolific designers, a tastemaker of such stature that Harper’s Weekly declared he should be appointed Commissioner of Public Beauty. White’s passion for beauty was accompanied by an evolving taste. Early designs such as his collaboration on the Armory’s Veterans’ Room embraced the generous and inventive attributes of the Aesthetic Movement, while the work of his maturity reveals the same powerful imagination applied to a more traditional classical idiom. In spite of the diversity of architectural imagery in White’s portfolio, evidence of the hand and eye of the designer emerge with remarkable consistency, allowing us to develop a profile of the taste of Stanford White.

  This lecture coincides with the publication of Stanford White, Architect (Rizzoli, 2008) by Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. Their previous collaboration, McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks, published in 2003, documents the institutional and commercial designs of America’s most famous architectural office. Mr. White’s first book, The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, is the definitive monograph of their residential commissions. As a practicing architect and a great-grandson of Stanford White, Sam White brings a unique perspective to his discussion of the work of that firm.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  They Screamed Their Delight

  December 9, 2008

  It is unsurprising that, early in its history, the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory hosted “monster” concerts featuring the music of Wagner. The late Gilded Age was the heyday of Wagnerism in America. Anton Seidl, the raven-haired high priest of New York’s Wagner cult, led summer con-certs at Coney Island 14 times a week; Wagner Nights sold out the 3,000-seat seaside Music Pavilion. When Tristan was given at the Met, a religious silence followed the final curtain, after which women in the audience “stood on their chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed hours” (The Musical Courier). In fact, Wagnerism in America was a progressive, even subversive, women’s movement. Joseph Horowitz will share a recording and inquire: How was the Liebestod experienced in 1890?

  Joseph Horowitz’s eight books include his award-winning Wagner Nights: An American History. His Classical Music in America (2005), which also revisits Gilded Age New York in detail, was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. His most recent book is Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts.  A former Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, he has long served as an artistic advisor to various American orchestras. In 2001 he co-founded Post-Classical Ensemble of Washington, D.C., for which he serves as Artistic Director. He has curated many festivals and events celebrating Dvorak in New York (1892-95), including two concerts in October 2008 for the New York Philharmonic. 

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Indian Connection

  September 17, 2009

  This lecture tracked the rise in admiration for the art and design of South Asia among British and American designers, architects and theorists during the 19th century. Once considered merely another exotic style, Indian art was recognized by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament as exemplary — its simplified geometric patterns contrasting with the “ugliness” of Victorian design. For William Morris, the hand-made qualities of Indian design added a moral and political edge. American designer Lockwood de Forest (a member of the Seventh Regiment) found in Indian carving and textile design the perfect style of ornament for Gilded Age New York. The rich interior design of the Armory’s Veterans Room by Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists is a stunning example of the impact of Asian influences on American design, including the fascination for India.

  Born and educated in England, Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and he co-edited Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Boss Tweed

  November 17, 2009

  William Magear Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall and New York’s Democratic Party after the Civil War, wielded enormous influence over New York politics, but his corruption overshadowed the rest: bribing the state legislature, fixing elections, skimming money from city contractors, and diverting public funds on a massive scale. Was Tweed all bad? Under his leadership, immigrants were brought into the political mainstream, the city built some of its finest landmarks, and support for the neediest residents was increased. This discussion will cover the meteoric rise and highly public fall of Tweed and his Ring. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who was instrumental in bringing down the Tweed Ring, and James H. Ingersoll, Tweed’s partner in crime, were both prominent members of the Seventh Regiment.

  A writer and attorney in Washington, D.C., Kenneth D. Ackerman is the author of The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday 1869 (1988); Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A. Garfield (2003); Boss Tweed: the Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (2005), and Young J. Edgar Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (2007).

  Professor Kenneth T. Jackson has taught at Columbia University for more than forty years. A former president of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the Historical Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books including The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995) and Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1987).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Appetite City

  September 28, 2010

  This lecture by William Grimes will explore the rich culinary history of New York, from the simple chophouses and oyster bars of the early 19th century to today’s world of celebrity chefs. Food and restaurants reflected the larger changes transforming the city — physical growth, the economy, complex social rituals, and changing ethnic makeup — but also the genius of those culinary visionaries who changed the way New Yorkers ate. Central to the rise of social dining was Delmonico’s, the restaurant of choice for the business and social elite and the exclusive caterer to New York’s silk-stocking Seventh Regiment at the Armory. Photographs, menus, and other memorabilia, including 19th century originals from the Armory’s archives, will highlight this delectable journey.
  William Grimes, the author of Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (2009), was the restaurant critic of The New York Times from 1999 to 2004 and now writes obituaries for the paper. He has also written Straight Up or On the Rocks (2001) and My Fine Feathered Friend (2002) and was the co-author of The New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants (2004).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Inventing the Modern World

  November 15, 2010

  During the 19th and early 20th centuries, world’s fairs were the showcases for introducing advancements in the modern world. Universal in scope, they displayed decorative arts, paintings, and sculpture alongside scientific advancements and agricultural products. Above all, they democratized design unlike any previous forum. Their wide influence is witnessed by the Seventh Regiment’s presentation of the 1879 New Armory Fair, an event that followed members’ attendance at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition. Lecturer Jason T. Busch will broadly investigate the objects shown at world’s fairs from London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 to the New York World’s Fair in 1939. These fairs and the exhibitions demonstrated how innovative design could positively affect modern living.

  Jason T. Busch is Curatorial Chair for Collections and The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He was formerly Associate Curator of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. He is currently co-organizing with Catherine Futter the catalogue-exhibition Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at World’s Fairs, 1851-1939, which will be shown in 2012 at Carnegie Museum of Art and at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  A World on Fire

  October 11, 2011

  As America descended into Civil War, British loyalties were torn between support for the North-and its antislavery stance-and the South, which portrayed itself abroad as a small nation bravely fighting for independence and upon which the mills of England were dependent for raw cotton. More than 50,000 Britons volunteered for the Confederacy as soldiers, sailors, doctors, nurses, guerrillas, and spies. Hundreds more made their mark as observers, reporters, diplomats and - vitally for the South - blockade runners. This conflict also afflicted New York City, which was similarly heavily divided on the topic and economically dependent upon the South. It is a pertinent topic today as we watch civil unrest spread through much of the world.

  Speaking on her new bestselling book A World on Fire, author and historian Amanda Foreman will provide fresh accounts of Civil War battles and, more importantly, she will discuss how the war spread to Britain and was fought just as continuously there as it was in America. In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America will be examined by Foreman.

  Amanda Foreman is the author of the international bestseller Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1999), which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography. The book inspired a documentary, a radio play starring Dame Judi Dench, and a film, The Duchess, released in 2008, starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes. Foreman was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in both America and England. She received her doctorate in 18th-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998. She is currently a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Colonel Roosevelt

  November 7, 2011

  Of all our great Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Had Roosevelt won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Once the war began, Roosevelt went on to laud the men of the Seventh Regiment for their bravery as early volunteers to the front. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.

  For this lecture, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris will discuss the final volume of his award-winning three-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt, covering the last ten years of Roosevelt’s life.
  Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, Theodore Rex, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2002. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan’s authorized biographer and published the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. More recently, he has written Beethoven: The Universal Composer. He is now at work on a biography of Thomas Edison.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Romance of the Sister Arts

  November 15, 2011

  Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the relationship between music, painting and the decorative arts. The Aesthetic Movement was fascinated with synaesthesia-the relationship between sight and sound. “All art,” wrote Walter Pater in 1877, “constantly aspires to the condition of music.” Music is a powerful theme in the works of British painters Frederic Leighton and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was also central to the work of the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, who titled his canvases “Symphony in White” and “Nocturne in Blue and Gold.” This lecture explores, with visual and musical examples, the nature of this relationship, and looks beyond the fine arts to the elaborate decoration of music rooms in London and New York. The lecture concludes with an analysis of one of the most successful musical events of 1880–81 in both cities: Gilbert and Sullivan’s “original Aesthetic operetta,” Patience, which is a sparkling, affectionate satire of the Aesthetic Movement’s pretensions.

  Tim Barringer was born and educated in England, and is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and he co-edited Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Emancipating Lincoln

  October 24, 2012

  As we near the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary, author and historian Harold Holzer will examine this foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These 1,700 words caused Lincoln to be hailed as the Great Emancipator and pilloried by those who consider his effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted. Holzer uncovers Lincoln’s very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his “greatest act” in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln’s endeavor. Holzer examines the impact of Lincoln’s announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time.

  Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer and frequent guest on television, Holzer serves as chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization to the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), to which he was appointed by President Clinton in 2000 and which he co-chaired from 2001 to 2010. President Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Thomas Jefferson

  November 13, 2012

  Thomas Jefferson was an original thinker and a master politician who helped create and sustain the American republic. In his new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham brings to life the complete man, from birth to his last days—through the Revolutionary War and his years as president. We see the Founding Father who steered the states to nationhood, wrote the Declaration of Independence, and as a master politician president, doubled the size of America through the Louisiana Purchase. With a powerful narrative, Meacham guides us through the life and extraordinary times of a man often admired but, until now, never truly understood in all his complexity.

  Jon Meacham is an Executive Editor at Random House and a former editor of Newsweek. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, he is a graduate of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is the author of The New York Times bestsellers American Lion (winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography), American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Woodrow Wilson

  November 29, 2012

  A Democrat who reclaimed the White House after 16 years of Republican administrations, Wilson was a transformative president—he helped create the regulatory bodies and legislation that prefigured FDR’s New Deal and would prove central to governance through the early 21st century; he guided the nation through World War I; and, although his advocacy in favor of joining the League of Nations proved unsuccessful, he nonetheless established a new way of thinking about international relations that would carry America into the United Nations era. Professor John Cooper reshapes our understanding of the man himself: his Wilson is warm and gracious—not at all the dour puritan of popular imagination. Ever the academic, Wilson relied on the strength of his intellectual convictions and the power of reason to win over the American people.

  John Milton Cooper, Jr., is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Breaking the Heart of the World: Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations and The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, among other books. His most recent publication, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He was recently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Seventh Regiment

  December 3, 2012

  Military Historian and Park Avenue Armory Chairman Elihu Rose will present an overview of more than 200 years of New York City military history through one hometown regiment. Once nicknamed “The Silk Stocking Regiment” due to the high social status of its members, New York’s Seventh Regiment has a long history dating back to 1806 when a British ship’s firing upon a New York merchant vessel and the killing of an American seaman led to the formation of a new militia in New York to help guard the harbor. It was the first American militia to call itself “National Guard” and it played a vital role in New York City through the riots and violent labor disputes of the 19th century. It was famously known as the first militia to each the capitol when the South seceded in April 1861, though their role would be short-term guard duty until the US Army arrived. The Regiment’s moment of greatest military service was on the fields of France in World War I where the members of the Seventh were instrumental in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line.

  Elihu Rose graduated from Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations in 1978 from New York University and shortly thereafter started teaching military history. He has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland and recently retired after 29 years as Adjunct Associate Professor of History at New York University. He has also lectured at several other institutions nationally and internationally, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. In 2002, he received The Outstanding Teaching Award from NYU. Mr. Rose has published articles on military history and sociology.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Matthew Brady

  September 16, 2013

  Mathew Brady was one of the most prolific photographers of the 19th century – a master of both the studio portrait and field documentation of the Civil War. In his half-century as an icon of American photography, Brady had many crucial roles in the medium’s development— innovator, entrepreneur, role model, collector, and booster of the form’s artistic potential—but his achievement in the actual making of photographs, before, during, and after the war, should not be overlooked. Using his images to establish Brady as the master of his art form, Robert Wilson draws from his new biography, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, to reintroduce the photographs of the single most important American in photography’s first decades. Photos by Brady of members of the Seventh Regiment will also be on display.

  Robert Wilson is the editor of The American Scholar, a former editor of Preservation, the founding literary editor of Civilization (all three of which won National Magazine Awards during his tenure), a former book editor and columnist for USA Today, and a former editor at The Washington Post Book World. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post Magazine, and The Wilson Quarterly and on the op-ed, opinion, and bookreview pages of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  “I am afraid of this man”

  October 7, 2013

  Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt had a troubled but ultimately successful relationship with high society in New York. After years of mutual hostility, the turnabout came with his success in helping to invent the giant corporation. The practice of corporate diplomacy changed his own character to some extent, and the riches he gained allowed him to overshadow the patricians and force his way into their company. His business and social success set the stage for the later Vanderbilt dynasty that came to define the lasting idea of Gilded Age social aristocracy.

  T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, a New York Times Notable Book and a Journalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A past Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he is currently working on a biography of George Armstrong Custer with the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Thomas Nast

  November 4, 2013

  Thomas Nast, the founding father of American political cartooning and a member of the Seventh Regiment, is perhaps best known for his works portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast’s legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. Fiona Deans Halloran will focus this talk not just on Nast’s political cartoons for Harper’s but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlight the many contradictions in his own life.

  Fiona Deans Halloran, the author of Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, teaches American history at Rowland Hall St. Mark’s School in Salt Lake City. She holds a PhD in history from UCLA and has been the recipient of research support from the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, the Huntington Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and America

  November 18, 2013

  Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the radical artistic practices of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain and its American counterpart, the artists associated with the New York journal The New Path, which was dedicated to the “Advancement of Truth in Art.” The English painters John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti turned their back on academic art-making by returning to what they believed to be the truth and sincerity of early Italian painting. As the movement developed, it embraced a form of hyperrealism influenced by emerging technology. In America, a group of artists including William Trost Richards, John William Hill and Thomas Charles Farrer pioneered a distinctly American variant of Pre-Raphaelite realism, dedicated to the truthful delineation of the flora and landscape of the New World.

  Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime,and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book, Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock, and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).
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  Malkin Lecture Series

  A Tale of Two Lockwoods

  September 29, 2014

  Seventh Regiment member and artist Lockwood de Forest was one of the primary importers of East Indian crafts and design to America in the late 19th century, an influence which can be viewed in the Armory’s period decoration. His admiration for the skills of Indian woodcarvers introduced a new decorative element into the American interior — the elegantly perforated jali screen. De Forest, a charismatic, swashbuckling figure who began as a landscape painter but soon expanded his interests into the decorative arts, developed his passion for Indian art and architecture under the tutelage of an older man, his friend and business partner Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was one of the most fascinating figures in the history of the British Raj. A brilliant illustrator and a professor of sculpture at the School of Art in Lahore, he met de Forest when the American visited India with his new wife in 1880. Lockwood Kipling’s son Rudyard based the Jungle Book stories on experiences from this period in the life of his family. Between them, Lockwood Kipling and Lockwood de Forest Indianized the decorative arts of Britain and the United States. Professor Tim Barringer explores the relationship between the two Lockwoods and their impact, which can still be felt today.

  Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing the book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).

  Special Event
  This talk will be followed by a reception hosted by The Olana Partnership in association with their exhibition “All the Raj, Frederic Church and Lockwood de Forest: Painting, Decorating and Collecting at Olana” on display through November 2, 2014. The exhibition features oil sketches and paintings by Church and his student Lockwood de Forest, and a rare 19th century collection of decorative arts from India designed and provided by de Forest for the house at Olana. The reception will be open to all members of The Olana Partnership and Park Avenue Armory.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

  November 4, 2014

  Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece of memorial sculpture The Shaw Memorial commemorates the service and sacrifice of the first regiment of African-Americans formed in the North during the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, and their commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (a former Seventh Regiment member). Dedicated in 1897 on the Boston Commons, the work is an artistic essay on loyalty, self-sacrifice, and commitment. Using classical forms of art and symbolism with a thoroughly modern theme, the artist presents a commanding image of uncommon courage. The continuing power of the monument rests partially in its accuracy of historical detail and its combination of the “ideal with the real” as Saint-Gaudens expressed it. Curator Sarah Greenough examines the enduring significance of this beloved monument. Original daguerreotypes and carte-de-visite portraits of the actual members of the 54th Massachusetts along with works by such contemporary artists as Richard Benson and Carrie Mae Weems tell the story of the legacy of the 54th’s celebrated Battle of Fort Wagner and their enduring significance.

  Sarah Greenough is the Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She has organized numerous exhibitions for the Gallery, including Alfred Stieglitz (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography (1989), and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (2009). She was also co-curator of Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840 – 1860, (2008), Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial (2013), and curator of Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (2010). Greenough is the author of many publications, including My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915 – 1933, Yale University Press, 2011. Her exhibitions and publications have won many awards, including the International Center of Photography Publications Award for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Stepchild Regiment

  November 18, 2014

  The campaign to establish New York State’s first black National Guard regiment emanates from the belief that martial institutions are an instrument of full and equal citizenship. New York, far from progressive on matters of race, refused to recognize black militias in the Civil War and witnessed the deadly and destructive Draft Riots of 1863, targeting helpless and innocent black citizens, their homes, businesses, and institutions. With no recognition in the Spanish-American War, black New Yorkers, buoyed by their growing numbers as well as economic and political influence, determined to organize an institution dedicated to that end. Under pressure, the State recognized the mostly African-American Fifteenth New York National Guard in 1916. The Fifteenth Regiment, Harlem’s “Rattlers,” went on to fight in France in 1917 and 1918, but their experience in training and combat differed sharply from that of the other two Upper East Side regiments, the Seventh Regiment and Squadron A. In the end, the Harlem Rattlers became one of the most decorated United States units in World War I.

  Jeffrey Sammons is a professor of history at New York University, where he has taught since 1989. He is a graduate of Rutgers College and earned his masters degree in history from Tufts University followed by his Ph.D. in American History at the University of North Carolina. From there, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston and in 1983 – 84 was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town. In 1987, Sammons was named Henry Rutgers Research Fellow at Rutgers University-Camden and completed his critically acclaimed Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. In 2001 he was awarded a fellowship by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and soon after received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2002 – 2003 in support of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War which was published in April 2014 by the University Press of Kansas.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  An Aristocracy of Wealth

  December 1, 2014

  The Gilded Years of the late 19th century were a vital and glamorous era in New York City. Families of great fortune sought to demonstrate their new status by building vast Fifth Avenue mansions filled with precious objects and important painting collections and hosting elaborate fêtes and balls. This is the moment of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” the rise of the Vanderbilts and Morgans, Maison Worth, Tiffany & Co., Duveen, and Allard. Old and new wealth competed in excess expenditures, and members of our own Seventh Regiment (Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Kemps, Harrimans, Belmonts, and Stewarts) were some of the best examples. Curator Jeannine Falino surveys the social and cultural history of these years through the lens of the architecture, furniture, fashion, and jewelry of the time.

  Jeannine Falino is an independent curator and museum consultant. She was formerly the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currently she is adjunct curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, where she will open What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision in September. She is also co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York exhibition entitled Gilded New York: Design, Fashion & Society. Falino was co-curator for the major survey exhibition entitled Crafting Modernism: Mid-Century American Art and Design (Museum of Arts and Design, 2011), lead author and co-editor of Silver of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Vol. 3 (2008), guest co-curator for Artistic Luxury: Fabergé-Tiffany-Lalique (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008), co-author and co-editor for American Luxury: Jewels from the House of Tiffany (Antique Collectors Club, 2008), and curator for Edge of the Sublime: Enamels by Jamie Bennett (Fuller Craft Museum, 2008).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  New York City's Historic Armories

  September 24, 2015

  Between the Civil War and World War II, New York built the most sophisticated and monumental armories in America for the State National Guard. This collection of fortresses epitomized a new and uniquely American building type and served as models for the nation. The Seventh Regiment Armory was at the forefront of this movement and has been described as the flagship for the new American armory, a model never matched for its grandeur. This lecture will trace the evolution of the armory through local military history and discuss the reasons for the rapid pace of the construction of armories across the five boroughs, focusing on Manhattan and Brooklyn examples, and how those armories were used for training, as clubs, and for social activities. Architectural historian Nancy L. Todd will also examine the 20th-century decline of the armories in our city; what’s been saved and what’s been lost.

  There will be a tour and reception of the historic Seventh Regiment Armory at the conclusion of the lecture. This event is part of Armory Month with the Landmarks 50 Alliance.

  Nancy L. Todd is a lifelong resident of New York’s capital district and an architectural historian who recently retired after 31 years at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, where she worked to preserve landmarks of the Finger Lakes Region. She is the author of New York’s Historic Armories: An Illustrated History (State University of New York Press, 2006) for which she received the Adjutant General’s Award from the NYS Division of Military and Naval Affairs.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated Artists Decorate Mark Twain’s House

  October 28, 2015

  Mark Twain and his family moved into their new house in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1874 and lived there until 1891. The years between were filled with endless dinner parties, billiard games, the raising of three daughters, the meteoric rise of Twain’s literary success, and the ascendance of his social standing in the elite Nook Farm neighborhood. In 1881, the family hired Associated Artists, the decorating firm put together by Louis Comfort Tiffany, to redecorate the interior of the house just after the firm finished its work at the Park Avenue Armory. Tracy Brindle, the Mark Twain House’s new curator, will examine Twain’s connections with Tiffany and Associated Artists, including Candace Wheeler, Lockwood de Forest, and Samuel Colman, and the extensive decoration of the house, known by Twain as “the loveliest home that ever was.” The house went through many alterations through the decades, coming close to demolition at one time, and has undergone a series of meticulous restorations since 2003.

  Tracy Brindle is the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Chief Curator at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. She joined the museum’s staff in April 2015. New to the East Coast, she previously worked as the Collections & Exhibitions Assistant at Midway Village Museum in Rockford, Illinois, a living history museum composed of a group of structures of the Gilded Age. There she was involved in many exhibitions and translated the museum’s collections into compelling local stories as author of an acclaimed museum blog.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  When Iridescence Met Incandescence

  November 18, 2015

  Thomas Edison and Louis Comfort Tiffany—innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs, autodidacts, visionaries, and friends—both loomed large in Gilded Age America. They worked together on the design of the old Lyceum Theatre on Fourth Avenue, the first theater in the world to be fully electrically lit. Their meeting also gave the world the Tiffany lamp. Both men worked on the Seventh Regiment Armory, although at separate times; Tiffany as designer of two rooms in 1880 and later Edison’s company provided electricity to the building in 1897. Join historian Francis Morrone for an illustrated talk on these two creative titans whose backgrounds could not be more dissimilar but whose parallel paths yet converged and lit up the world around them.

  Francis Morrone is an architectural historian and a writer, author of eleven books, including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013) and, with Henry Hope Reed, The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (W.W. Norton, 2011), as well as architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and Brooklyn. He was for six and a half years an art and architecture critic for The New York Sun, and his writings appear in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Daily News, The New Criterion, and Humanities.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Holiday Entertaining in the Gilded Age

  December 1, 2015

  Discover the elaborate etiquette and enchanting entertainments of a century ago with vivid descriptions of dinner parties, cotillions, and elegant holiday events that will transport you back in time. The Gilded Age— a time of calling cards, horse-drawn coaches, afternoon tea, formal dinners—a time when even picnics were served on fine china. Learn the popular toasts of the era and when it’s proper to remove your gloves or tip your hat as you play a guessing game on the uses of dozens of unique, but now obsolete objects of the time.

  Francine Segan one of America’s foremost food historians, is a public speaker, author, TV personality, and consultant. She is a noted James Beard-nominated author of six books including her most recent two on Italy, Dolci: Italy’s Sweets and Pasta Modern: New & Inspired Recipes from Italy. She is the host on NYC’s popular i-italy TV series “Americans Who Love Italy,” and also appears on many other programs, including the “Today” show and “The Early Show” and has been featured on numerous specials for PBS, the Food Network, and the History, Sundance, and Discovery channels. She lectures across the USA for the prestigious speakers’ bureau Cassidy & Fishman and is a frequent guest speaker at NYC’s premiere cultural center the 92nd Street Y, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution in DC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and American Museum of Natural History among others. She recently moderated a panel for the Tribeca Film Festival on food in film.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  How We Got Here

  September 8, 2016

  The Park Avenue Armory has seen a parade of presidents and candidates come through its doors, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush. But who will be next? In the case of the 2016 election, what’s past is prologue. As Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off for the presidency, history continues to shape the issues facing voters and candidates alike. Political commentator David Gergen will explore how political, social, and economic history—both in the American and global context—have shaped 2016 and what it means for Election Day on November 8th.

  David Gergen is a professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, positions he has held for more than a decade. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. Starting with the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in 1984, he has been a regular commentator on public affairs for some 30 years. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He wrote about those experiences in his New York Times bestseller, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 2001). He is an honors graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, and has been awarded 27 honorary degrees.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”

  November 9, 2016

  Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure—a riddle—a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people—including his own family—in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Professor Annette Gordon-Reed will discuss the many shifting “selves” of Jefferson: father, husband, slave owner, diplomat, politician, and cosmopolitan. This character study will analyze that changing image of Thomas Jefferson—from the 1940s, when the Jefferson Memorial was first built, up until this moment when the Broadway musical Hamilton is helping to shape attitudes about him today.

  Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, and a Professor of History at Harvard University. Her new book Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf) was published in April 2016. Ms. Gordon-Reed received the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009). She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1998) and Andrew Johnson (2011).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Rightful Heritage

  November 18, 2016

  Franklin Roosevelt’s extraordinary legacy as our 32nd president encompassed shepherding the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War and engineering the New Deal programs that endure to this day. But in this lecture, historian and author Douglas Brinkley will discuss how FDR’s lasting contribution to our country extends further—across the entire continent in fact—through his passionate and resolute efforts to preserve and conserve our natural resources. Although Theodore Roosevelt is generally considered America’s great conservation president, FDR was at the forefront of the national debate about the future of America’s land and was the founder of the Civilian Conservation Corps. He went on to designate dozens of State Park systems such as the Great Smokies, the Everglades, Joshua Tree, the Olympics, Big Bend, Channel Islands, and Mammoth Cave. Mr. Brinkley will give us a fresh look at the life and legacy of one of our most beloved presidents.

  Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, the CNN Presidential Historian and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” New York Times bestseller Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America is his most recent book (2016). Six of his previous books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year including Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years 1952-71 (1992), Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (1992), The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House (1998), Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress (2004), The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007), and The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010)

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  A Crystal Palace Soiree

  November 29, 2016

  Professor Tim Barringer along with special musical guests will explore one of the wonders of the Victorian age: the Crystal Palace, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Visited by six million people, the exhibition was the most spectacular ever mounted with exotic and innovative objects from all over the world. The Unites States was a key exhibitor, sending pioneering machines (such as Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper), manufactured goods, and artworks. Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan McCullough will reconstruct a period-style performance, allowing them to give new life to the many songs, ballads, and piano pieces that celebrated the wonders of the exhibition, some of which have not been performed for more than a century. Professor Barringer will then look at the legacy of the Great Exhibition, including the New York Crystal Palace of 1853 (which took place at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue), and subsequent Expositions and Worlds’ Fairs.

  Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012), Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005), and Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock. He co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. Additionally, Barringer is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avante-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow, and Tokyo 2013) and curator of Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills, an exhibition of landscape painting from the National Museum of Wales, which is touring four U.S. museums till the end of 2016.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Casey Stengel

  September 28, 2017

  As the 2017 World Series draws near, join baseball expert Marty Appel as he discusses New York baseball and his new book on the legendary Hall of Famer Casey Stengel—the only man to wear the uniforms of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets. For more than five decades, he was the quirky, hilarious, and beloved face of baseball in America. As a legendary manager, he formed indelible, complicated relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin and he revolutionized the role of manager while winning a spectacular 10 pennants and 7 world championships. Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees in the early 20th century and builder of Yankee Stadium was a member of the 7th Regiment and the connections from this East Side Armory to the Bronx run deep. For this lecture, archival items related to baseball will be on display.

  Marty Appel started his career in baseball at age 19 when he has hired by the Yankees to answer Mickey Mantle’s fan mail back in 1968. He went on to become the youngest public relations director in baseball history. As the man responsible for Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, he worked closely with Stengel in the 1970s. Appel is considered one of the nation’s leading historians on the Yankees, and has written 24 books including Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss (Bloomsbury, 2014), considered the definitive history of the team. A lifelong New Yorker, he has won an Emmy Award for his production of Yankee baseball and is a regular commentator on sports news. His new book Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (2017) is the first major biography of Stengel in more than 30 years.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Henry James

  October 5, 2017

  Henry James famously compared The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to an enormous, million-windowed house, a building that opened on to any number of possible scenes. But what about the actual houses that figured in his work—the places where he wrote or the ones he took as models in which he set his characters that so compellingly captured the Gilded Age?  This lecture examines three different houses that figure in James’s novel: Hardwick, the country house in the south of England on which he based Gardencourt, in which the novel begins; the Florentine villa that served as the model for the house of the novel’s villain, Gilbert Osmond; and James’s own Lamb House, on the English coast, where he revised the novel in the early years of the 20th century.

  Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985, and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Earlier books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990). He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a National Book Critics Circle award. Gorra’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the TLS, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. His current work in progress is William Faulkner’s Civil War.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  November 15, 2017

  There is no woman more interconnected with the history of the 7th Regiment Armory than Eleanor Roosevelt, whose father was a prominent member during her childhood and whose uncle was a role model to the Gilded Age men of the National Guard. She hosted events at the Armory to raise money for unemployed women during the Great Depression, attended dance festivals in the drill hall, and donated funds for the Armory’s maintenance when money was tight. Professor Wiesen Cook’s extensive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt has been praised as the essential portrait of a woman who towers over the 20th century. The third and final volume (Viking, 2016) takes us through World War II, FDR’s death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. These years—the war years—made Eleanor Roosevelt the woman she became: leader, visionary, guiding light.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt Volume I was a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and both volumes (I and II) were New York Times bestsellers. Her other publications include The Declassified Eisenhower and Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution. She was a featured speaker in the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Edith Wharton and France at War

  November 28, 2017

  One hundred years ago this fall, the men of the 7th Regiment left New York to train for combat before leaving for the trenches of France. Included in their ranks were two members of the Rhinelander family, cousins to Edith Wharton, along with Van Rensaellers, Livingstons, and Roosevelts—a who’s who of young men of New York’s Gilded Age. Wharton thought it the duty of young men to serve in the war and celebrated their sacrifices in her writings. Hermione Lee, Wharton’s most noted biographer, will describe the great American novelist’s feelings for France, the amazing story of her activities on behalf of her adopted country during the First World War, and her complex relationship with America at the time.

  Hermione Lee is the President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, and a biographer, critic, and Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and one of The New York Times 10 best books of 2014). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has reviewed regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Review of Books. She was Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006.

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  Interrogations of Form

  Looking Back | Looking Forward

  February 17, 2018

  Artists, thinkers, activists, academics, and community leaders gather for a symposium of conversations, performances, and open studios exploring artistic, social, and political perspectives on the extraordinary world-changing events of 1968, the fifty years that followed, and the promise of the next fifty years. Artistic interventions and multi-disciplinary conversations across visual and performing arts, activism, literature, film, and poetry will take place in the historic period rooms—including the Board of Officers Room, Veterans Room, and second-floor Company Rooms.

  Presented in Collaboration with The Aspen Institute Arts Program & ArtChangeUS

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  Interrogations of Form

  Sunday Salon: Film

  April 15, 2018

  Acclaimed Australian immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth hosts an afternoon salon exploring the power of emerging interactive technologies and gestural interfaces, including virtual reality, to reveal fragile human states of grace and connect people with the natural world. View Wallworth’s Emmy-winning VR film Collisions (Commission & World Premiere, World Economic Forum, 2016) and the multi-channel HD video Still Walking Country, as well as a presentation and Q&A with the artist in the historic Veterans Room.

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  Interrogations of Form

  Confrontational Comedy

  May 11, 2018

  Aparna Nancherla (Late Night with Seth Meyers, Master of None) headlines an evening of comedy sets and a conversation highlighting the power of humor to confront stereotypes and engage audiences around uncomfortable topics. Joining her are comedians Jordan Carlos (Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Broad City, The Colbert Report), Jena Friedman (former field producer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and writer for Late Show with David Letterman) and Jes Tom (who regularly shares stages with artists of myriad styles, mediums, and points of view). The evening is hosted by Warrington Hudlin (Founding President, Black Filmmaker Foundation, producer of House Party and Boomerang).

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  Interrogations of Form

  Sunday Salon: Literature

  September 23, 2018

  Armory Artist-in-Residence and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hosts fellow playwrights and collaborators in an intimate afternoon of conversation, readings and performances featuring both rising talents and luminaries, all of whom are actively exploring and testing the boundaries of the literary art form.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Walt Whitman, the Civil War, and New York's Seventh Regiment

  September 25, 2018

  America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, whose bicentennial birthday arrives in 2019, was the quintessential 19th-century New Yorker. Our understanding of his work is enriched through knowing the people, politics, arts, science, and philosophy of his times as described in Professor David Reynolds’s award-winning Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Whitman had many connections to the New York’s Seventh Regiment and witnessed many of the militia’s impressive parades and marches, from the 1824 greeting of the Marquis de Lafayette to the military escort of President Lincoln’s coffin through the city forty-one years later. Such pageantry enlivened Whitman’s poetry and prose. He hobnobbed with figures associated with the Seventh Regiment, including artist Thomas Nast, poet Fitz-James O’Brien, and author Theodore Winthrop. The heroism of New York’s soldiers in the Civil War inspired him and contributed to his view of the war as the central event in American history.

  David S. Reynolds is the Distinguished Professor of American literature and U.S. History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include John Brown, Abolitionist (winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize), Beneath the American Renaissance (winner of the Christian Gauss Award), Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America, A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, and Lincoln’s Selected Writings: A Norton Critical Edition. Professor Reynolds is a regular book reviewer for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Sargent's Women

  October 11, 2018

  John Singer Sargent’s high-society portraits defined the Gilded Age. Stanford White helped launch the artist’s career in America, spreading the word among his firm’s rich clients that a portrait by Sargent would be the perfect decoration for their massive mansions. Extremely prolific, Sargent insisted that his portraits were not psychological studies that he merely painted what he saw. Yet with some of his young women he seemed to have an uncanny ability to divine their internal landscapes. New York Times best-selling author Donna Lucey will speak about four of those women, whose lives she chronicles in her book Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas. These women all inhabited a rarefied world of large fortunes and strict conventions, yet managed to do something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules. Basing her research on original letters and diaries, Lucey uncovers lives out of an Edith Wharton novel. What emerges are stories of forbidden love, family conflict, ambition, desire, and triumph.

  Donna M. Lucey is the author of Sargent’s Women, The New York Times best-selling Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, the award-winning Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, as well as other books, articles, and a feature-length screenplay. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants and was a 2017 writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. Ms. Lucey also serves as media editor at Virginia Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Unexpected President

  November 5, 2018

  Chester Arthur, our nation’s 21st president, went from a promising start as a young lawyer in Manhattan to being known as a crooked crony of the New York Republican political machine. As Quartermaster General for the New York State Militia during the Civil War and as a socially ambitious businessman, he interacted with the members of the Seventh Regiment repeatedly throughout his career. With the assassination of President Garfield, Arthur found himself in the Executive Mansion in September 1881 (which he would later hire the same artists who worked at our Armory to redecorate). He was truly a Gilded Age president for the nation but little is known about him today due to his distrust of the press and his destruction of his private papers before his death. Author Scott Greenberger will introduce us to this New York president and describe how from the moment Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades. He surprised everyone—and gained many enemies—when he swept house and took on corruption, civil rights for African Americans, and the issues of land for Native Americans.

  Scott S. Greenberger is the executive editor of Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he guides a team of veteran journalists who report on state politics and policy in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Before joining Pew, Greenberger was a staff writer at The Boston Globe, where he covered education, served as City Hall bureau chief, and was the primary policy reporter in the Globe‘s State House bureau. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and GQ. He is the co-author, with former Sen. Tom Daschle, of The New York Times best-seller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.

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  Wade Thompson Drill Hall

  The First United Lenape Nations Pow Wow & Standing Ground Symposium

  November 18, 2018

  Join us for the first large-scale Lenape Pow Wow on Manhattan Island, transpiring on land that once belonged to the Lenape and marking the first congregation of dispersed Lenape elders in the area since their forced migrations in the early 1700s. The Pow Wow has been a traditional gathering by Native Americans for centuries as a way to congregate, celebrate, and share cultural traditions and heritage. Presented in partnership with members of the Lenape community, this event provides an opportunity for members of the Lenape to gather, while also inviting the New York City community to learn about the Lenape’s historical and cultural ties to New York in a fun and interactive day of presentations.

  The Pow Wow features a dance competition for hundreds of dancers of all ages, competing in traditional Native American dress and regalia, with musical accompaniment by drumming and singing groups Red Blanket, Young Blood, and Silver Cloud. In addition, there will be featured performances by Kalpulli Huehuetlahtolli Aztec/Mexica Dance, Inuit Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq, and Taino Dancers from the Kasibahagua Taino Cultural Society showcasing the varied traditions of their respective cultures, as well as opportunities to purchase authentic Native jewelry, crafts, clothing, and food from numerous vendors and artisans.

  The Standing Ground Symposium will provide an opportunity to meet Lenape elders as well as hear the perspectives of academics and community leaders regarding key issues facing the Native American community, including internationally renowned activists for indigenous people Winona LaDuke and Roberto Mukaro Borrero, and author Steve Newcomb. The Symposium also includes performances and activities for the whole family including Native flute players and theater groups exploring mythic traditions and stories that the community has passed down through generations, screenings of films that explore the complexities of Native life and made by Native filmmakers, and a display of bespoke creations by Native fashion designers.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  “Ever Since the Town Went Dry”

  November 26, 2018

  In the 1910s, at the height of the Progressive Era, a national movement to prohibit the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol swept the United States. Prohibition, its supporters promised, would end the abuse of alcohol, curb the corrupt influence of the distilling and brewing industries, and usher in a new era of prosperity and “clean living.” But in American cities like New York, with large immigrant populations and deeply entrenched saloon cultures, the call for Prohibition was met with skepticism and resentment. Urban opposition to the dry movement was strong, and the “wet” sentiment in cities remained a substantial obstacle to the passage of a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. The United States’ entry into World War 1 in 1917, however, changed everything. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on wartime patriotism, the dry movement used the war to paint its opponents as traitors who would support the German war effort, squander national resources, and undermine the war effort for the sake of a drink. For a time, it worked. The dry movement used World War I to push successfully for the passage of Prohibition. Once enacted, however, chaos ensued. As WWI ended and the 1920s arrived, New Yorkers entered the dry era determined to defy “the noble experiment.”

  Michael A. Lerner is the principal of Bard High School Early College, a partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education. He is the author of Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (2007) and served as a consultant on the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition (2011). He lectures frequently on Prohibition and New York City history. He holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University and a B.A. in History from Columbia University.

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  Wade Thompson Drill Hall

  Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination

  October 11, 2019 - October 12, 2019

  Theaster Gates, a charismatic figure in the contemporary art world, with a practice situated both within and without gallery walls, vacillating between aesthetics, urban planning, and activism, hosts his renowned Black Artists Retreat for the first time outside of Chicago.

  For this year’s retreat, Gates, an Armory Artist-in-Residence, welcomes black artists and allies from Chicago, New York, and beyond for a weekend of communion, celebration, and multi-disciplinary exploration of this year’s theme: sonic imagination.

  Retreat guests will be invited to actively think about the role of sound in the human experience and in art-making: the capacity to dream, feel, motivate and activate through sound, to think through and love through sound, to incant, incite or invoke using the invisible energy of wind and body to materialize form that moves us.

  Through presentations, formal and informal conversations, side-bars, sharings, tributes, screenings, and meditations, the Retreat will explore how artists, performers, curators, historians and other leading thinkers in the fields of art production, cultural production, music, film and video, sound engineering, and the adjacent technical crafts of sound production, play, pray, worship, commune, entertain, interrupt, celebrate, heal, mourn and invite unity.

  This gathering also celebrates the completion of the replacement of the wooden flooring of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which includes recycled pine planks milled by Gates’s workforce and repurposed from his Chicago urban manufacturing renewal project, Dorchester Industries, amongst other sources.

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  Interrogations of Form

  100 Years | 100 Women Symposium

  February 15, 2020

  Don’t miss a day of talks and performances by noted artists, thinkers and cultural leaders as they explore the complex legacy of the 19th Amendment 100 years after its ratification. Participants include photographer and scholar Deborah Willis, actor-activists Kathleen Turner and Tantoo Cardinal, spoken word performer Caridad De La Luz “La Bruja”, vocalist Martha Redbone, visual artist Renee Cox, performance artist Karen Finley, and community organizer De’Ara Balenger and many others.

  This Symposium launches 100 Years | 100 Women, an initiative of Park Avenue Armory, with lead partner National Black Theatre, and nine major cultural institutions including, The Apollo Theater, The Juilliard School, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, The Laundromat Project, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, National Sawdust, New York University (Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts; Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity and Strategic Innovation; and Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture), and Urban Bush Women, who will collectively commission one hundred artists who self-identify as women to respond to this significant anniversary.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Presidents Versus the Press

  September 29, 2020

  Seldom has our free press faced so great a threat as we see today, and yet, the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama all found ways to address the public directly, sidestepping traditional media channels. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson were all fixated on how they were represented by the press. FDR, JFK, and Clinton all found themselves with reasons to hope their personal lives would remain out-of-bounds. Nixon added journalists to his enemies lists and LBJ captured and threatened writers, editors, publishers, and broadcasters. The current relationship between the White House and the Press may be breaking the mold in many ways, but it is not without historical precedent. Join acclaimed scholar and Lincoln Prize winner Harold Holzer as he chronicles the eternal battle between the core institutions that define the republic, revealing that the essence of this confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.

  Harold Holzer is the recipient of the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize. One of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, Holzer was appointed chairman of the US Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission by President Bill Clinton and awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. He currently serves as Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  In with the “New Movement”

  October 20, 2020

  What was it like to be an artist living and working in New York in the transformative years following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1870 incorporation? Through the lens of The Met’s early years and its developing collection of American art, this lecture will examine how established artists and founding trustees such as Frederic E. Church, Eastman Johnson, and John Quincy Adams Ward intersected with “New Movement” progressives like William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. From savvy exhibition and acquisition strategies at The Met to the creation of alternative organizations, clubs, and schools, this younger generation of painters and sculptors established a vibrant cosmopolitan and modern art world that laid the groundwork for today’s cultural capital.

  Thayer Tolles is the Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A sculpture specialist, she served as editor and co-author of a two-volume catalogue of the Metropolitan’s historic American sculpture collection (1999, 2001), and has lectured and published extensively on 19th- and early 20th-century topics. Among her exhibitions are Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925 (2013–15), both accompanied by publications. Most recently she co-authored the chapter “Creating a National Narrative” in the accompanying catalogue for the exhibition Making The Met, 1870–2020, on view through January 3, 2021.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Providing a Platform for Women Painters

  November 10, 2020

  One of the most prominent monthly periodicals of the Gilded Age, Scribner’s Monthly/The Century was recognized for its extensive coverage of the arts in America. Its senior editor Richard Watson Gilder understood the expanding public desire for all things cultural, and devoted substantial space in its pages to the flourishing art scene, reporting on current exhibitions, collections, and artistic associations. Many of the ideas found in its featured articles and editorials were a result of Gilder’s close relationships with this “modern” art world, connections that resulted from his marriage to Helena de Kay. An important catalyst in the formation of such vital New York institutions as the Arts Students League and the Society of American Artists, De Kay held weekly evening gatherings in their home, creating a stimulating environment for young artists, including a number of prominent women painters. Aware of their important contributions and talents, the periodical hired women as illustrators, featured women painters working at home and abroad in articles, and also published reviews by female critics. Examining the vital role that the Gilders and the periodical played in supporting, developing and publicizing emerging female painters, illustrators, and critics, the lecture will explore the role of Scribner’s/The Century as a progressive mouthpiece for women artists in a burgeoning American art world.

  Page Knox is an adjunct professor in the Art History Department of Columbia University, where she received her PhD in 2012. She teaches Art Humanities and summer courses on American Art and Trans-Atlantic Exchange during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Knox also works in a variety of capacities at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: she gives public gallery talks and lectures in special exhibitions and the permanent collection; teaches classes at the museum; and, more recently, leads groups for Travel With The Met. Knox’s dissertation, “Scribner’s Monthly 1870–1881: Illustrating a New American Art World,” explored the significant expansion of illustration in print media during the 1870s, using Scribner’s Monthly as a lens to examine how the medium changed the general aesthetic in American art in the late 19th century. She continues to publish and lecture at conferences on the subject and is a contributing author for a recently released text book on the history of illustration.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Playing with the Varsity

  December 1, 2020

  Gould Memorial Library, the last surviving major public building designed by Stanford White, emerged from a collaboration between a visionary educator, a generous donor, and two artists who, 15 years earlier, created the Veteran’s Room at the Armory. Collaborations in architecture can be fraught, and while the result was a great work of architecture, the design and construction of the library was no exception. The story begins in 1895 when New York University moved from Washington Square to University Heights and extends to the present, where today Gould forms the centerpiece of the landmark campus of Bronx Community College. Sam White’s lecture will trace a process that was rarely linear, occasionally messy, and begins with a cameo appearance of Gould Memorial Library on the silver screen.

  Samuel G. White is a founder and consulting partner at PBDW Architects, a New York firm focusing on designs that introduce new interventions to historic settings. The firm’s work ranges from the restoration of Park Avenue Armory, the Palace Theatre, and Astor Courts to the reconfiguration of the New-York Historical Society, additions for Saint David’s School and Packer Collegiate Institute, and new designs for Learning Spring Elementary School, and the Moise Safra Center.

  White is the author of The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, Nice House, and Stanford White in Detail, which was published in late October. He is co-author with Elizabeth White of McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks and Stanford White Architect. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, an Academician of the National Academy of Design, and a former adjunct associate professor of Fine Arts at New York University. White is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Age of Innocence at 100 Years

  December 15, 2020

  This year marks the centennial anniversary of Edith Wharton’s great novel, The Age of Innocence. This lavishly illustrated lecture will explore Edith Wharton’s New York, both the New York of the 1870s that is portrayed in The Age of Innocence, and the New York of Edith Wharton’s life, from her birth as Edith Newbold Jones in a building still standing at 14 West 23rd Street in 1862 to her move to Paris in the first decade of the new century. We will see how much of the world of The Age of Innocence can still be seen in the streets of New York (surprisingly, a lot more than you’d think). We’ll also look at the New York world she knew and wrote about in many works besides The Age of Innocence (such as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country), and in so doing cut a broad swath through 40 years of New York’s cultural history and social geography to see a city that is in some ways very remote from our own, and in remarkable ways very familiar to us more than a century later.

  Francis Morrone is an architectural historian, writer, and the author of 13 books, including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013) and, with Henry Hope Reed, The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (W.W. Norton, 2011), as well as architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and to Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, Landmarks Lion Award of the Historic Districts Council, and New York University’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and was named by Travel + Leisure magazine as one of the “Thirteen Best Tour Guides in the World.”

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  Interrogations of Form

  100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series

  April 30, 2021 - August 27, 2021

  Join the Park Avenue Armory and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a 100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series, which will engage the project’s participants in a set of informal lunch-time chats. Starting on Friday, April 30, project partners will host two conversations every month through the end of August. Each moderated conversation features a discussion amongst a diverse, multidisciplinary group of participants that explores specific topics that resonate with the Project and are responsive to the complexities and turbulence of the pandemic era.

  Participants in the Conversation Series were invited by Park Avenue Armory and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the nine other New York City cultural institutions that form the Project Partner group, including: Apollo Theater; The Juilliard School; La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club; The Laundromat Project; Museum of the Moving Image; National Black Theatre; National Sawdust; New York University (Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts; Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation; and Institute of African American Affairs and Center for Black Visual Culture); and Urban Bush Women.

  All episodes in the 100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series will be archived on the 100 Years | 100 Women Project Archive website. Information about partner institutions and participants, access to YouTube Livestream links, and archived videos of the conversations will be accessible through the digital archive.

  All Conversations begin with a Native Welcome recorded by Henu Josephine Tarrant (Ho-Chunk/Hopi/Rappahannock) and end with Our Sisters, Daughters and Mothers, a Southeastern Woodlands contemporary Women’s Honor Song, created and recorded by Martha Redbone (Cherokee/Choctaw/African American descent).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Seventh at Sea

  September 21, 2021

  Historian and author Gareth Russell, author of The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era (2019), is known for examining the personal lives and experiences of the Titanic’s more notable passengers to immerse his audience in the story of one of history’s greatest disasters.  In this lecture, he focuses on two men who were closely related to the Armory’s Seventh Regiment—Archibald Gracie IV, a veteran member of the Regiment and part of an old New York family, and Frank Millet, a notable artist whose work at the Armory in 1880 has been recently restored. Within a week of setting sail, they were caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Using previously unpublished sources and artifacts, Russell immerses his audience in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history.

  Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright who was educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. His 2019 book, The Ship of Dreams, was named a Book of the Year by The London Times and a Best History Book of 2019 by The Daily Telegraph. Previous works include Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII (2017), A History of the English Monarchy from Boadicea to Elizabeth I (2015), and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors (2014).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Daughters of Yalta

  October 19, 2021

  ensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. For all that is known about “The Big Three” and their time spent deliberating the fate of postwar Germany and much of the world, too often overlooked is the parallel history of three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days. Anna Roosevelt, Kathleen Harriman (the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union) and Sarah Churchill, through an intricate web of politics, clashing loyalties, and secret power brokering, each in her own turn played an intrinsic role in a conference that would shape the rest of history as we know it.

  Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago. She graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in history and in 2014 received her MPhil in modern European history from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices. After graduating, Katz worked in finance in New York City before returning to history and writing. She is pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Barbizon

  November 16, 2021

  Built in 1927, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the “modern woman” hoping for a career in the arts. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman seeking fame and fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and, over the years, its almost 700 tiny rooms with matching floral curtains and bedspreads housed, among many others, Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, and Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, and Meg Wolitzer. Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School its students, and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Before the hotel’s residents were household names, they were young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase and a dream. An Armory neighborhood landmark, the Barbizon offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations. It gave women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased; it was the hotel that set them free. No place had existed like it before or has since.

  Paulina Bren is an award-winning writer and historian who teaches at Vassar College. She attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, later receiving a MA in international studies from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from New York University. Her most recent book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2021), is a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has received international press coverage, with reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian’s Sunday Observer, and The London Times, among others. In addition, Bren is a well-known scholar of everyday life and communism behind the Iron Curtain, starting with her groundbreaking book, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell UP, 2010), which cast the first line in what is now a new field of study.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Hero of Two Worlds

  December 7, 2021

  Few in history can match the breadth and depth of the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought as one with righteous revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. As an idealistic and courageous teenager serving in the American Revolution, he used his considerable wealth and savvy to help the Americans defeat the British. He then returned home and was a principal player in the French Revolution. And, in his final act, at 70 years old, he was instrumental in the dramatic overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty during the Revolution of 1830. Lafayette was a particular admirer of the old Seventh Regiment, which served as his honor guard in 1824, forging a bond between our regiment and France that remained long into the 20th century. Join author and podcaster Mike Duncan as he describes how Lafayette remained unshakably committed through an era of upheaval to his principles of liberty and democracy, his resolve never wavering.

  Mike Duncan is one of the most popular history podcasters in the world and author of The New York Times bestselling book, The Storm Before the Storm. His award-winning series, The History of Rome, remains a legendary landmark in the history of podcasting. Duncan’s ongoing series, Revolutions, explores the great political revolutions that have driven the course of modern history.

  For more information about Mike Duncan’s new book, Hero of Two Worlds, visit publicaffairsbooks.com.

  The Marquis de Lafayette (copy of the portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court in the Musee National, Versailles, France). Presented to the Seventh Regiment on April 12, 1934 by the Republic of France. Photo Credit: 7th Regiment Archives, NYSMM

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  2021 Season

  Land of Broken Dreams

  December 9, 2021 - December 11, 2021

  Accompanying Carrie Mae Weems’ monumental exhibition, The Shape of Things, Land of Broken Dreams is a large-scale, multidisciplinary convening and concert series that will activate the Armory with a wide range of conversations, presentations, and performances featuring artists, poets, singers, dancers, thinkers, and scholars sharing work and exploring some of the most urgent issues facing society today.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Salon: Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation

  February 20, 2022

  This Sunday Salon offers an opportunity to engage with the vision of Rashaad Newsome‘s Assembly by bringing the artist in dialogue with his collaborators and others engaged in the freedom fight for personal and collective liberation. Through roundtable discussions and a performance showcase, paired with an opportunity to experience Newsome’s world-building taken to new heights in the Drill Hall, this salon will invite attendees to take a quantum leap into Black visual complexity and spirit.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Salon/Performance: Queer Hip Hop Cypher

  May 15, 2022

  Join us for an exploration of the queer origins and aesthetics of hip hop through discussion, film, performance, and food. The event includes a Black healing portal curated by Astraea award-winning duo Krudxs Cubensi, a session with Soul Fire Farm on BIPOC vegan foodways and their connection to community-centered activism, and a panel discussion centering on the queer underground hip hop scene led by Hip Hop Heresies author and scholar Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls.

  CLAGS (The Center for LGBTQ Studies) award-winning hip hop musician and dharma teacher Shanté Paradigm Smalls leads an enlightening roundtable discussion focusing on the ways that hip hop culture in film, visual art, and music in New York City from the 1970s to today offers queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality, and how this might affect the future of hip hop. Panelists include Creative Capital grant-winner and Priestess of Twerk Nia Witherspoon, Afro-Latina MC, artist, and activist Ms.Boogie; Chair of New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Dr. Jason King; and educator, poet, youth advocate, and hip hop artist tim’m west.

  Krudxs Cubensi headlines Black Healing Portal II: Más allá del tiempo / Beyond Time, a queer Afro-Cuban hip hop cypher featuring dance, drumming, projections, procession, and community offerings that links Afro-Yoruba spiritual practices to modern rapping and explores race, religion, gender, class, and sexuality. This immersive session features a presentation by Librada González Fernández of Archivo CubaneCuir, Afro-Cuban dancer Yesenia Selier and batá drummers, poet and Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Café Caridad “La Bruja” De La Luz, and the music and art of Krudxs Cubensi. Group members Odaymar Cuesta and Oli Prendes adhere to vegan lifestyles and politics, and the event includes a riveting keynote address delivered by Soul Fire Farm’s Co-Founder and Farm Manager Leah Penniman that underscores the importance of BIPOC food sovereignty, food justice, and ancestral connection between food and land, as well as a reading by Soul Fire Farm Director of Education and poet Naima Penniman.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Archer Aymes Retrospective: A Juneteenth Exhibition

  June 19, 2022

  Explore the legacy of emancipation through an immersive art installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux with Tavia Nyong’o and Dianne Smith of newly discovered works by Archer Aymes, the elusive subject of Rux’s Obie-award winning play Talk, which had its premiere at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. The retrospective includes a light and sound installation that reconstructs Aymes’ experimental film Mother and Son—based on his novel of the same name and cultural artifacts that may have helped Aymes construct its story. Also on display is an accompanying altar of lost and found objects from an impossible archive of images, objects, and sounds Aymes collected in his attempt to explore the never-ending racial injustice that continues to shape the lives of its victims into the 21st century.

  The event also features a concert performance by mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl from the operatic repertoire of Puccini, Weill, and Bernstein that touches upon various themes, from Aymes’ rumored closeness to Nina Simone to the desolation of family separation.

  This event is one component of a three-part series curated by Carl Hancock Rux in commemoration of Juneteenth, in collaboration with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center as part of the Festival of New York.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Skillshare

  August 21, 2022

  Join a range of Armory artists and partners for an enlightening and interactive afternoon of open studios, workshops, activations, and discussion for people of all ages to explore dance, poetry, music, and more.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  BLOOM

  September 10, 2022

  Speculums have shown up in archaeological digs as far back as 79 AD amidst the dust of Pompeii. However, the apparatus most women experience today in vaginal exams is credited to the physician James Marion Sims, sometimes called the “father of American gynecology,” a moniker earned on the backs of experiments conducted on enslaved women. Rooted in both research and object-making, legendary artist Nao Bustamante creates a cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of this medical tool and its use in the history of the pelvic examination.

  Joined by musician and performance artist Geo Wyex, interdisciplinary artist Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, and composer and reiki master Pamela Martínez, Bustamante creates a performance that is part séance, part pageant to make way for a new era of examination of the device as well as its patriarchal inventors. And while the desired result is an invitation to think about ways to make the tool less unpleasant for the millions of patients who encounter it each year, the work also boldly focuses on the speculum’s impact on timely issues of women’s health practices.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Tin Pan Alley and American Musical Comedy

  September 22, 2022

  Musical director Robert Lamont and singer-actress Gabrielle Lee celebrate the history and music of New York’s Tin Pan Alley with a fascinating look at the music publishing district’s relationship to musical theater and a performance of songs that illustrate the development of American musical comedy from 1890 to 1910. Lee and Lamont perform several works that were published on 28th Street and discuss the musical shows that introduced them to American audiences. The program focuses on important composers, songwriters, and performers who made major contributions to building the American show music industry during these two decades that constitute the golden age of Tin Pan Alley. Two songs from The Seventh Regiment Songbook that were published on Tin Pan Alley are also be performed. This event is presented in cooperation with the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project.

  Robert Lamont is a musical director, composer, and educator who has worked on and off Broadway as well as regionally with such artists as Carol Burnett, Jerry Orbach, Marc Anthony, and Duncan Sheik. A veteran public-school educator, he was Curriculum Development Co-Chair for the New York City Department of Education’s current Blueprint for Teaching Music. He is a board member of the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project.

  Gabrielle Lee is equally at home in theater, television, film, and concert performance with the NY Pops, among others. She has taken leading roles in Broadway and European tours, Off-Broadway, regionally, and more. Lee has performed as a backing vocalist with such artists as Aloe Blacc, Steely Dan, Natalie Cole, and Harry Belafonte. Also at home with the popular music and American Songbook performed in her shows, her globally successful one-woman show, Blackbirds, celebrates performers such as Florence Mills, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge—and the songwriters who gave them wings. She was a featured performer on Tin Pan Alley Day 2021.

  The Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project promotes appreciation for the historic beginning of American Popular Music and the modern music business on and around West 28th Street in New York City. Through telling the stories of the songwriters, music publishers, and songs that formed the sound and industry of American Popular Music in the first half of the 20th Century, the project connects people with the power of music as an essential element of New York City and American cultural history.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Symposium: Art at Water's Edge

  October 9, 2022

  Artists, activists, and designers engage the meeting of land with water. Facing climate change and rising sea levels, this event links New York with communities across the nation and globe that sit at water’s edge. This afternoon activation is inspired by acclaimed director Peter Sellars’ call to “listen to the oceans,” and by director and scholar May Joseph‘s call for cosmopolitan citizenship in “fluid New York.” From the work of Indigenous water protectors who challenge extractive futures to urban planners responding to waterfront access, Art at Water’s Edge will offer an intergenerational forum for the imagination in action.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Design on Display

  October 17, 2022

  The department store redefined the shopping experience in New York at the turn of the 20th century. This transformation was the work of architects, window dressers, shopfitters, and interior decorators who made the department store a significant site for design production and innovation. Display became central to the economic aims and artistic pursuits of leading retail outlets including Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, Abraham & Straus, Wanamaker’s, and Siegel Cooper. Architects multiplied show windows, shopfitters customized casework, window dressers built ambitious arrangements, and decorators created immersive interiors. Stores’ success thrived on speed and change. Techniques and technologies of attraction developed to keep pace with consumer taste and demand. Exploring behind-the-scenes in window display workrooms, shop fitting factory floors, and architects’ and designers’ studios, this illustrated talk by curator Emily M. Orr highlights the department store’s dynamic role in design history.

  Emily M. Orr is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. She holds a PhD in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her primary areas of scholarship include industrial design, retail history, and the modern interior. She is the author of Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor and author of E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising (Rizzoli Electa/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2020).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Modern Gothic

  December 7, 2022

  Over the course of their nearly 20-year partnership, immigrant cabinetmakers Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) and Joseph Cabus (1824–1898) developed one of New York’s leading furniture and decorating firms, capturing national attention with their inventive Modern Gothic designs. They melded British and Continental design sources to create a wide range of forward-looking forms that appealed to equally adventurous clientele. Based upon the recent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, curators Barbara Veith and Medill H. Harvey share new scholarship and fresh insight into the firm and its contributions to American design history. The talk takes place in the Veterans Room by Louis C. Tiffany, Associated Artists and is followed by a visit to the Company K Room by Kimbel & Cabus.

  Barbara Veith joined the Brooklyn Museum in 2018 as Curatorial Research Assistant to Dr. Barry R. Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, to help organize the Modern Gothic exhibition and the accompanying publication; she is honored to have completed it in his memory as Guest Curator and Co-Author with Medill H. Harvey. She has continued at the museum as a research associate of Decorative Arts. From 2010 to 2017, Veith was adjunct faculty at the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons MA Program in the History of Design. She guest-curated Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company (2011–13), an exhibition that originated at the University Museums, University of Richmond, Virginia. From 1999 to 2009, she was a research associate in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and contributed to exhibitions including Women China Decorators in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001) and Louis Comfort Tiffany at Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate (2005). From 1989 to 1996 she worked at Christie’s.

  Medill H. Harvey is the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She oversees the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork, as well as mid-19th-century furniture. Harvey joined the staff of the American Wing to direct research for the exhibition Art and The Empire City (2000). She is Co-Author of Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013) and a contributing author for American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). She contributed to The Met’s 2009 and 2011 reinstallations of the American silver and jewelry collections and the exhibition Silversmiths to the Nation (2007). Her most recent publication is Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. (2021), written to accompany an exhibition that will be mounted at The Met in 2024.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Symposium: Sound & Color

  January 14, 2023 - January 15, 2023

  Join a state-of-the-art conversation about how race matters in creative design for live performance in our current moment of creative, technological, and cultural unrest. Hosted by lighting designer Jane Cox, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, set designer Mimi Lien, and sound designer and composer Mikaal Sulaiman, this interdisciplinary forum allows artists, intellectuals, and designers to explore lighting, sound, costume, and set design, as well as augmented reality, as sites of innovation, magic, and transformation.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Salon: Juke Joint

  March 31, 2023 - April 1, 2023

  Join us for a two-day event spotlighting the history of the juke joint in Black American social history and its legacy in music and culture. Emerging during a time when Black Americans were barred from and unsafe in white establishments, juke joints offered a gathering place and secular cultural arena while building community around versatile and innovative Black musicians that ultimately serving as the fertile ground for the birth and spread of blues and rock and roll. Today, the juke joint is not only a location, but a cultural symbol that continues to inspire artists across media.

  Poet, writer, performer, and activist Pamela Sneed (Funeral Diva) celebrates the role of women and femme artists in the evolution and cultivation of blues and rock with her band through a tribute cabaret to the legendary female blues artist Big Mama Thornton on Friday evening. The first artist to record “Hound Dog” and composer of “Ball and Chain” later made famous by Janis Joplin, Big Mama Thornton got her start performing on the concert circuit in the segregated South and went on to become a Black feminist blues icon.

  On Saturday afternoon, singer-songwriter and playwright Stew (Passing Strange, Notes of a Native Song) premieres a new cabaret piece inspired by the symbiotic relationship with audience and performer that developed in the juke joint and is displayed in the call-and-response nature of Black music. Featuring new songs and texts drawn from his experiences as a Black artist in the punk clubs of his youth, on Broadway, and now in Ivy league universities, this happening puts the audience in the role of collaborator to the storyteller and explores the effect of race and class dynamic on that relationship.

  Following this performance, Stew and Sneed discuss the significance and legacy of the Juke Joint and how the rebel spirit of Black and female innovators lives on today at the intersection of political commentary, music, and cabaret culture in a conversation introduced by Curator of Public Programming Tavia Nyong’o.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Hapo Na Zamani

  May 20, 2023

  Led by Black artists, activists, and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts Movement helped to shape the ideologies of Black identity, political beliefs, and African American culture at that time and with impact that can still be felt today. Hapo Na Zamani reimagines a happening from that era for today, combining elements of painting, spoken word, music, movement, wonder, and surprise to blur the boundaries between life and art and invite attendees to not only witness but become a part of the art in action.

  Hosted by Carl Hancock Rux with musical direction by Vernon Reid, the evening centers around a set of concerts by the Grammy Award-winning musician and a band of renegade musicians from Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber inspired by the greats of the Black Arts Movement and honoring the musical legacy of the late writer and intellectual Greg Tate. Before and after seated performance times, audiences are invited to engage with screenings of interdisciplinary artist Stefanie Batten Bland‘s film Kolonial, as well as other activations and installations featuring Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson, Nona Hendryx, Somi, Wunmi, Carrie Mae Weems, Dianne Smith, and other surprise guests.

  Co-presented with Harlem Stage as part of their Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference, bringing elements of the past and present together to reflect, examine, and point to the full experience and legacy of this cultural movement.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Salon: Hidden Conversations

  June 18, 2023

  In commemoration of Juneteenth, Park Avenue Armory partners with National Black Theatre (NBT) to uplift the work and impact of NBT founder Dr. Barbara Ann Teer as well as the ways she and many others serve as hidden architects of culture to help empower society, drive innovation, and foster community and social impact.

  Harlem Soapbox leads audiences on a journey into the music of the 1960’s and the Black Arts movement with a sonic mash-up of some of the songs that helped to power and inspire the social movements of that time. Archivist and filmmaker Steven Fullwood explores the crafting of the AfroFuture and National Black Theatre’s contribution to the theatrical and cultural canon with queen of funk Nona Hendryx and NBT CEO Sade Lythcott. And a second panel explores poet, playwright, and essayist June Jordan’s legacy and impact on architecture as it relates to the lives of Black families and communities as well as architectural, cultural, and civic renewal through built space with artist and cultural strategist Ebony Noelle Golden, writer and manager of McArthur Binion’s studio Camille Bacon, and poet Mahogany L. Browne.

  Additional activations offer a glimpse into new exhibitions and works in progress from National Black Theatre studio artists, including experimental theater maker nicHi douglas, dancer and writer Jerron Herman, director and producer Awoye Timpo, and original compositions by sound designers/composers Aaron Marcellus, Mikaal Sulaiman, Holland Andrews, JOJO ABOT, and Justin Hicks shared in a botanical meditative space. This happening also includes a live silent disco with DJ Stormin’ Norman; a selection of original films curated and commissioned by National Black Theatre, and a Trans Liberation pageant led and created by Qween Jean, costume designer and founder of Black Trans Liberation.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Corpus Delicti

  October 7, 2023

  At a moment of maximum anxiety and backlash over the fundamental human rights to autonomy, expressivity, modification, and self-transformation of the body, this convening of artists, activists, and intellectuals imagines and enacts transgender art and music as a vehicle for dialogue across differences.

  This afternoon happening features a series of panel discussions exploring topics including an examination of trans life through the lens of time, and multigenerational voices telling their stories and exploring the creative projects that have been born out of trans life. Participants include: celebrated transgender trailblazer Kate Bornstein (any pronouns); visual and performance artist Cassils (they/them); GLITSINC Founder and Executive Director Ceyenne Doroshow (pronounced Kai-Ann, lady/she); internationally celebrated author, activist, and public speaker and Co-Founder Trans Student Educational Resources Eli Erlick (she/her); Faltas author and founder of Trans Equity Consulting Cecilia Gentili (she/her); psychoanalyst and internationally recognized expert on gender identity Griffin Hansbury (he/him); Abram J. Lewis (any pronouns), Co-Founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project; genderless dragon Tiamat Legion Medusa (it/its); interdisciplinary artist Carlos Motta (he/him); trans Latina writer, artist, and organizer XCSN (Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu) (she/her); trans health consultant and artist D’hana Perry (they/he); traveling artist and activist Early Shinada (they/them); academic and founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies Sandy Stone (she/her); Dao X. Tran (she/her), editor and Interim Co-Executive Director of oral history nonprofit Voices of Witness, that work to advance human rights; multidisciplinary artist Dorian Wood (she/they); Sierra Leonean-American vocalist, composer, and sound artist ricky sallay zoker aka YATTA (they/them); among others.

  Additional on-site activations include media and reading rooms, and a sound installation created by Aviva Silverman on behalf of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a grass-roots, volunteer-based archive of over 200 interviews of trans New Yorkers. This thought-provoking salon serves as a hub of activity celebrating transgender liberation through intergenerational kinship—sharing stories of survival, joy, and the legacies of counter-cultural movement building.

  Presented in conjunction with Mutant;Destrudo, the Armory’s new commission by the multifaceted artist and creator Arca that continues her practice of addressing themes of psychosexuality, science fiction, and gender identity.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  American Everyman: Winslow Homer

  November 6, 2023

  Biographer William R. Cross gives a lively account of artist Winslow Homer’s varied and important life, taken from the text of Cross’ book Winslow Homer: American Passage. Homer was the visual art counterpart to contemporaries in American literature such as Mark Twain, and rubbed elbows with consummate New Yorkers such as his friend General Francis Channing Barlow, whom he depicted in the profound Prisoners from the Front.

  Homer was witness not only to the rhythms of sea, storm, tide, and season but also to the times in which he lived. Those times included the US Civil War, colonial tyranny, invention, and industrialization, and the challenge of achieving a just and equitable society in the Gilded Age. Homer’s astonishing breadth of subject, media, and perspective reflects his restless mind and innovative hand. His legacy comprises few answers but a broad range of enduring, entrancing questions.

  Join us to see afresh the man behind the art, a major American figure hidden in plain sight.

  William R. Cross is the author of Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which The Washington Post calls “an exemplary biography” and The New Yorker named one of the best books of the year. He has spoken widely in Europe and the United States, from the Cleveland Museum of Art to the National Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, he curated Homer at the Beach, A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869-1880, a nationally acclaimed exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum that revealed Homer’s formation as a marine artist. Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, he is a graduate of Yale College, magna cum laude, and of the Harvard Business School.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

  November 14, 2023

  Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” John Adams thought his cousin “the most sagacious politician” of all. With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

  Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams packaged and amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool in an innovative arsenal to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

  In The Revolutionary, author Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. She is joined in conversation by Michael Gately to discuss the life of Samuel Adams and the process of writing this and other biographies.

  Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government.

  Michael Gately is Assistant Director of the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and Executive Director of BIO, the international organization of biographers. He is currently writing a book about Woodrow Wilson and cycling in the 1890s.

   

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  The Rough Rider and the Professor

  November 21, 2023

  Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem's book The Rough Rider and the Professor chronicles the extraordinary 35-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

  Theodore Roosevelt was a uniquely gifted figure. A man of great intellect and physicality, the New York patrician captured the imagination of the American people with his engaging personality and determination to give all citizens regardless of race, color, or creed the opportunity to achieve the American dream. While Roosevelt employed his abilities to rise from unknown New York legislator to become the youngest man ever to assume the presidency in 1901, that rapid success would not have occurred without the assistance of the powerful New Englander, Henry Cabot Lodge. Eight years older than Roosevelt, from a prominent Massachusetts family, Lodge was one of the most calculating, combative politicians of his age. From 1884 to 1919 Lodge and Roosevelt encouraged one another to mine the greatness that lay within each of them. Despite their political disagreements, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge remained devoted friends until the Rough Rider took his final breath on January 6, 1919.

  Laurence Jurdem, PhD, is currently an Adjunct Professor of History at Fairfield University and Fordham College’s Lincoln Center campus. Jurdem is also the author of Paving the Way for Reagan: The Influence of Conservative Media on U.S. Foreign Policy. A frequent writer on American politics, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Seasons of Dance

  December 3, 2023

  With diversity moving into the mainstream and modern dance at a crossroads, pioneering artistic directors, choreographers, and dancers gather to explore the intersection between creative vision and cultural context in the art form. Among this series of demonstrations and interactive conversations, Thomas F. DeFrantz moderates a consideration of the living legacy of Pina Bausch and a celebration of the diversity of contemporary dance flourishing in Africa today. He is joined by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airuado, dancers from the company of The Rite of Spring, and others.

  Presented in conjunction with the Armory’s presentation of The Rite of Spring/common ground[s], showcasing Pina Bausch’s seminal work as danced by a specially assembled company of 36 dancers from 14 African countries and a new companion piece by Germaine Acogny, the founder of the Senegalese company École des Sables, and Malou Ariaudo, who performed leading roles in many of Bausch’s early works as a member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Zoe Anderson Norris

  December 4, 2023

  Zoe Anderson Norris (1860–1914), although little remembered today, was a foremother of modern-day social-justice advocates and confessional bloggers baring souls in print. In millions of published words of fiction and journalism—including in her own bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914)—she documented desperate immigrant poverty from her “literary sanctum” on East 15th Street and called for the world to heed and help.

  Zoe (as everyone knew her) sometimes worked undercover, exposing issues that continue to resonate. She pleaded for government reforms while documenting corrupt policemen hassling immigrant street peddlers, overflowing trash cans spreading typhoid in mucky streets, sex workers pleading for help escaping from traffickers, charities splurging on their own expense accounts, and abusive men going unpunished. A Kentucky-born longtime Manhattanite, known as a “Queen of Bohemia,” Zoe also founded the Ragged Edge Klub, which met for weekly dinners combining activism and dancing. She handed out aristocratic titles to Ragged Edgers, such as Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx and Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken. A few days after completing the last issue of The East Side, which described her recent dream that she would die soon, she suffered fatal heart failure—and her prediction made headlines in newspapers nationwide.

  Eve M. Kahn, former weekly Antiques columnist for The New York Times, gives a progress report on her Zoe Anderson Norris biography. The talk also covers how Kahn amassed a comprehensive collection of Norris’ work and related ephemera, including the only complete run of The East Side known to survive in private hands and souvenir postcards and even dinnerware from the Ragged Edge Klub’s favorite restaurants. The collection was exhibited in spring 2023 at the Grolier Club in midtown, earning acclaim from publications including The New Yorker.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Richard Kennedy

  April 12, 2024

  The Radical Practice of Black Curation: A Symposium, a two-day gathering held at Princeton University and Park Avenue Armory, assembles a wide-ranging group of curators and art professionals of color—including Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem), Adrienne Edwards (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Bonaventure Ndikung (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)—to engage the past, present, and future of Black curation in the contemporary art world.

  The past two decades have witnessed the success of a wide range of Black artists, whose work has been celebrated through their recognition by prestigious awards, at influential festivals, and through exhibitions and acquisitions at leading art institutions across the globe. But these successes have been enabled by a parallel development within art institutions themselves: the ascent of a visionary group of Black curators and curators of color who have supplanted the role of traditional curatorial gatekeepers and expanded the capacity of arts institutions to recognize the work of an increasingly diverse group of artists.

  As a capstone of this event, multidisciplinary artist Richard Kennedy presents a musical encapsulation of the African diaspora in the Armory’s historic rooms. Titled Guttural (Conducted Contact), this new work opens a portal of participatory gathering as truth emerges through song, dance, and a series of wordless conversations.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Antagonisms: A Gathering

  June 1, 2024

  How do we process conflicts and friction amongst close allies? And in discussion and debate, are antagonism and disagreement crucial to creating revolutionary transformation? These questions serve as the starting point for this gathering of artists, performers, scholars, and theorists in an evocative examination of the poetics of disagreement.

  Led by playwright and poet Claudia Rankine, this symposium is punctuated with performances, panels, investigations of group dynamics, as well as imagined conversations between revolutionary thinkers. Participants include renowned postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, acclaimed cultural historian Saidiya V. Hartman, and choreographer Shamel Pitts | TRIBE.
  

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Day For Night

  September 8, 2024

  While many see clubbing as a murky night out in a sweaty nightclub, an abandoned warehouse, or at an open-air rave with no connection to more wholesome things that happen during the day, club culture has long been an important incubator of cultural movements and continues to provide spaces for connection, creativity, and personal expression.

  This afternoon salon brings together scholars, writers, artists, and nightlife makers to enlighten nightlife as an art form, and discover the ways social and performative dance have intertwined in recent years. Participants include indomitable force in the worlds of drag, music, fashion, and nightlife Kevin Aviance (he/him); drag icon, artist-scholar, DJ, and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University madison moore (he/they); scholar-practitioner of dance performance Ariel Osterweis (she/they) whose teaching practice includes the exploration of clubbing; and artist, performer, and event planner at The Spectrum BK Gage Spex (they/he/she); with others to be confirmed.

  Presented in conjunction with R.O.S.E., the Armory’s new commission by Sharon Eyal, Gai Behar, Caius Pawson of Young, and DJ Ben UFO that sits at the intersection of arts and nightlife.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Fifth Avenue

  September 24, 2024

  Once called America’s “Street of Dreams,” Fifth Avenue has gone through a myriad of architectural and societal transformations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Join Mosette Broderick on a journey through the avenue’s history, from its appearances on the Commissioners’ map of 1807 and the proposed grid plan of 1811, to chronicling how the speculative brownstone rowhouses that lined the avenue above Washington Square gave way to grand mansions designed by European-influenced architects and decorators as the center of the city marched northward. By the end of the 19th century, Fifth Avenue was synonymous with a lavish fashionable life catering to the wealthy. And then, as quickly as it was built, it was destroyed; the New York house was replaced by more modern architecture as the evolving city shifted again.

  Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University, is also the Director of the London MA Program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Canto De Todes / Song for All

  October 19, 2024

  Singer and performance artist Dorian Wood (she/they) exhibits a 12-hour composition and installation inspired by a lyric written by the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra. Divided into three movements, this durational work features two hour-long chamber pieces separated by a 10-hour pre-recorded, multi-channel composition mixing a genre-defying canon of folk, pop, and experimental music of Central and Latin America. Redeveloped and re-envisioned in harmony with the Armory’s historic period rooms and specifically honoring the craftspeople that constructed the building at its inception, this Armory commission spotlights timely issues of migration and emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change.

  The performance will be accompanied by: a film program about Audre Lorde curated by Michael Gillespie; a multi-channel work featuring the contributions of 10 filmmakers, writers, and orators from throughout the Americas including Génesis Mancheren Ab’äj, Óscar Moisés Díaz, Kenia Guillen, Leslie Arely Martinez, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, and Frisly Soberanis, curated by the film and literary collective Tierra Narrative; and a series of panels in collaboration with the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

  Performers for the chamber pieces include cellists Ethan Philbrick and Adrián Gonzalez Cortes and guitarist Alexander Noice, among others. Participants in panels to be announced.

  Canto de Todes / Song for All is a keynote performance of ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, an in-person conference from October 17–19 by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Bookshop

  November 13, 2024

  Scholar of American and urban history Evan Friss guides audiences through a chronicle of the bookshop in New York and across the country, illuminating how these vital institutions have shaped American life. Drawing on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers, Friss offers an engaging look at this institution over time, from Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore to local gems like The Strand and Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, national conglomerates like Barnes & Noble, the rise of e-tailers like Amazon Books, and more. Friss shares stories of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries.

  Evan Friss is a Professor of History at James Madison University. Publications include The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore; The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s; and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Nineteen Reservoirs

  December 18, 2024

  As New York City incorporated, welcomed new inhabitants, and cemented itself as a center of American industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it faced an existential problem: how to sustain its ever-increasing need for water. The solution: a network of reservoirs and aqueducts built across more than one million acres in upstate New York from 1907 to 1967. This feat of engineering allowed New York City to blossom into the metropolis we know today, but also demolished, submerged, and profoundly altered twenty-six villages across the Hudson Valley and their ecosystem. Join Guggenheim fellowship recipient Lucy Sante as she examines the triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences of these decisions on New York City’s divided public—urban and rural, rich and poor, human and animal.

  Lucy Sante‘s book Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City was published by The Experiment in 2022, and recently released in paperback in February 2024. Awards include a Cullman fellowship, Whiting Writer’s Award, Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Grammy for album notes.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  A Dream You Dream Together

  February 15, 2025 - February 16, 2025

  Explore the multidisciplinary career of trailblazing artist Yoko Ono and her enduring legacy of arts activism for peace and creativity in this two-day symposium, presented in tandem with Wish Tree. This convening assembles a host of scholars, artists, writers, and activists for a series of panels and performances that explore and highlight Ono’s message and highlight Ono’s influence and impact on the art world and the world at-large.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Lenapehoking

  May 30, 2025

  Marking the 400th anniversary of the start of construction of New Amsterdam on what is now lower Manhattan, this evocative evening of chamber music and storytelling considers the myth of Manhattan’s purchase while celebrating the enduring presence of Lenape and other Indigenous nations.

  Featuring captivating compositions by Brent Michael Davids, the program includes works such as “Touching Leaves Woman,” “The Last of James Fenimore Cooper,” and the world premiere of “Ode to Joe.” This memorable musical journey, incorporating unique Native American instruments as well as a string quartet and chorus of singers, engages audiences with Indigenous cultural expressions to envision decolonial futures through the power of music and narrative.

  Co-presented with Lenape Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes Lenape culture and arts in Lenapehoking

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Black Theater Advance

  September 6, 2025

  Building on a multi-year initiative to catalyze growth and permanence for Black theaters across the nation, this dynamic salon tackles the issues facing us all in reimagining the future of American theater as a space for bold artistic expression and social change. Through conversations, activations, and manifestos, the event manifests the vision and voices of Black theater makers, with innovative approaches to storytelling, amplifying diverse voices, community engagement, and institutional transformation.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  New York's Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers

  September 25, 2025

  Although the last decade of the Gilded Age is called "The Gay Nineties," the joy and festivities of this time were generally reserved for the wealthy. If you were a common working stiff—or worse, a common working "stiffette"—life was not so happy. Most New Yorkers played by the rules of the game, but others invented their own, successfully gaming the system to their advantage. Join social and architectural historian John Tauranac in this lecture as he profiles those scoundrels, scalawags, and scrappers.

  John Tauranac is the author of New York Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers: The City in the Last Decade of the Gilded Age (Lyons Press, 2025), as well as several other volumes on New York City's social and architectural history. Tauranac has been teaching New York's architectural history for over 30 years at NYU's School of Professional Studies.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Caftan

  September 28, 2025

  A journalist, stylist, creative director, author, and editor-at-large of Vogue, André Leon Talley left an indelible mark on the fashion industry with a boundary-breaking career and style setting caftans, emphasizing bold, culturally diverse aesthetics and being a possibility model for Black creatives who wanted to work in the fashion and media industries. Inspired by this legendary fashionista, his iconic caftans, and his role in the world of fashion, this vibrant, multifaceted program explores fashion’s role in self-expression, freedom, and diasporic encounter.

  The day includes panel discussions with industry historians, designers, educators, and community activists that examine the role of fashion as a tool for resistance, cultural preservation, and cross-cultural dialogue. Participants include: outgoing president of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) Joyce F. Brown; award-winning author and CUNY Graduate Center Professor of History Tanisha C. Ford; Artist and Founder of The Institute of Black Imagination Dario Calmese; curator of the Met Costume Institute’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition Monica Miller, and journalist, award-winning editor, cultural curator, and Founder of Native Son Emil Wilbekin.

  In addition to an afternoon of conversation, a curated display of garments honoring André Leon Talley’s legacy will be on view.

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Politics and Memory

  November 17, 2025

  Following the Civil War, New York City built more monuments to the Union cause supported by public funds than any other city—Brooklyn Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument outside Prospect Park, the New York Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park, and more throughout today’s five boroughs. From simple standing soldiers to grand triumphal arches and temples, these monuments incited political and artistic conflict that shaped the nation’s tradition of commemorative iconography. Join author and professor Akela Reason as she illuminates the complex intersection of art, politics, and memory within these works while highlighting the ever-changing ways different constituencies have engaged with them.

  Akela Reason is a scholar of American visual and materials culture at the University of Georgia. Her latest book is titled Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York (Yale University Press, 2025).

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  Malkin Lecture Series

  Finding Frederick Law Olmsted in Cotton's Kingdom

  December 1, 2025

  In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a thirty-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. This journey through the so-called Cotton Kingdom would become a centerpiece of his methods and legacy as a landscape architect and influence the landscapes across America that he shaped. As a Black woman born and raised in the South and a practitioner in the profession of landscape architecture that Olmsted founded, Sara Zewde follows Olmsted’s path in search of how his journey inspired in him the radical idea that public parks could redress society’s ills at the height of slavery in America and the implications for landscape architecture today.
  Sara Zewde is the Founding Principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. She also serves as Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

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  Making Space at the Armory

  Artist Talk: Philip Venables & Ted Huffman

  December 4, 2025

  The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions creators Philip Venables and Ted Huffman are joined in conversation with comedian, musician, and writer Morgan Bassichis and original book illustrator Ned Asta.