Past Events

  • 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.

  • Artists Studio

    Krency Garcia (El Prodigio)

    March 3, 2020

    Dominican accordionist El Prodigio brings his syncopated merengue playing to the Armory in an explosion of sound and joy. He and fellow band members introduce us to the multiple styles of merengue playing found in the Dominican Republic. El Prodigio, known for his contemporary and improvisational compositions, will travel through some of the rich musical styles of accordion merengue from the “güira” and the “tambura” and to the “perico ripiao.” Joined by his ensemble band, El Prodigio delivers an updated contemporary sound with harmonic and rhythmic colors resulting in an updating of this infectious musical form.

    Park Avenue Armory lanzará su serie 2020 Artists Studio con un programa del acordeonista dominicano El Prodigio, quien presentará una pluralidad de estilos de música merengue típica de República Dominicana en dos funciones, a las 7 p.m. en la histórica sala Veterans Room. El Prodigio, famoso por sus composiciones modernas y técnicas de improvisación, hará un recorrido por algunos de los ritmos musicales más sabrosos del merengue de acordeón, desde la “güira” y la “tambura” hasta el “perico ripiao”. Junto a su grupo musical, El Prodigio ofrece melodías contemporáneas y modernas, llenas de colores armónicos y rítmicos, que se traducen en una nueva cara de este estilo musical tan pegadizo.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”