Monday, December 7th | Boger Hall Room 112 | 4:30 p.m.
“Africa and Asia in Soviet Lithuanian Children’s Visual Culture”
Karina Simonson | Assistant Professor, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Karina Simonson
The talk examines how Africa and Asia were represented in Soviet-era Lithuanian visual culture for children, exploring themes of internationalism, ideology, and cross-cultural imagination.
About the Speaker:
An interdisciplinary art historian, Dr. Karina Simonson works at the intersection of Jewish and African studies, exploring cultural connections between the Baltics and the Global South, South African Jewish history and photography, representations of Africa in Soviet and Eastern European visual culture, histories of African diasporas in Eastern Europe, and questions of academic positionality and cultural appropriation.
She holds an MFA from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in Art History and Criticism from the Lithuanian Academy of Arts. She has held research fellowships at Harvard and Princeton universities, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Vilnius Academy of Arts. She has also taught and conducted research internationally, including in Europe, Brazil, South Africa and Mauritius. In spring 2026, she was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University.
Thursday, April 1st | Boger Hall Room 112 | 4:30 p.m.
“The Sexuality of Modernism"
Jonathan David Katz | Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, University of Pennsylvania
This talk explores how a small cadre of largely queer artists, collectors, patrons, writers and curators, linked by one very young museum director, Arthur Everett (Chick) Austin Jr., created the most important early beachhead for Modernism in America in an especially unlikely place, Hartford, CT. At the center of the Venn diagram of the Wadsworth in these years, Austin, modernism, and same-sex eroticism were all so closely intertwined that, despite their enormous differences, they could actually stand as synonyms for one another. And that is the point of this talk, that same sex desire provoked two key developments in the history of modernity. First, it linked together disparate circles or groupings of founding modernist figures, despite their often radically different aesthetic sensibilities and, secondarily, modernity not only promised them a formal and aesthetic reordering, but a concomitant social and even political restructuring as well—a utopian prospect keyed to their then-sanctioned sexuality.
Thursday, April 8th | Boger Hall Room 112 | 4:30 p.m.
“Biogenic Building Sections”
Paul Lewis ’88 | Principal, FAIA, LTL Architects | Professor, Princeton University School of Architecture
All Straw House (image provided by Paul Lewis / photo taken by Michael Moran)
Paul Lewis '88
This lecture presents a visually compelling argument for rethinking the material basis of architecture in a time of environmental crisis. This shift is argued to be a paradigmatic change from the inherited assumptions of modernism. Asserting that the most viable means to radically reduce embodied carbon in new buildings is to use plant and earth-based materials, the lecture demonstrates how this approach can catalyze new types of houses that reduce or sequester carbon, engage regenerative life cycles, and create healthier spaces for living. Interlaced into the talk are reuse and biogenic projects designed by LTL Architects. In particular, the lecture will explicate seven small houses, including the recently completed All Straw House, that use biogenic material assemblies as a catalyst for new tectonics and building form.