Events and Talks
Dr. VanDiver regularly delivers public lectures and contributes to exhibition programming (including audio guide content and catalogue essays). For more information about her public speaking and availability for engagements please visit the contact page on this website.
UPCOMING
April 5, 2024
“Hallowed Halls and Walls: the Legacy of Howard University’s Department of Art,” Opening Keynote for Porter Colloquium, Howard University/Phillips Collection. For more info: click here.
April 11, 2024
“States of Emergency: Ephemera and Ephemerality in African American Art, 1965-2020,” University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Art History Lecture. For more info: click here.
PAST
January 2024
Conversation with LaToya M. Hobbs in conjunction with opening of Carving a New Tradition: The Art of LaToya M. Hobbs curated by Dr. VanDiver, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN. For more info click here.
November 2023
Holbrook Lecture, Curator/Scholar Roundtable in conjunction with Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, Georgia Museum of Art
September 2023
Professor VanDiver in conversation with Khalil Roberts Irving and Devin Morris in conjunction with Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN [more information]
April 2023
Bettman Lecture, Columbia University
June 2023
Conference Keynote: The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945
January 2023
New Directions in Art History Lecture, Harvard University
June 2022
Barnet Scholar Lecture, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
May 2022
St. Louis Art Museum Friends of African American Art Event
April 2022
Discussion with Jamaal Sheets on Alma Thomas and the legacy of HBCUs, Frist Art Museum
March 2022
Faculty Speaker for Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, Vanderbilt University
June 2021
Discussant, “Navigating Your Own Space: Artistic Identity and Social Interactions in the Artist’s Practice,” Uncovered Spaces: An Exhibition of Women and LBGTQIA+ artists, International Museum of Art and Science/Center for Latin American Arts at University of Texas-Rio Grande, McAllen, Texas
October 2021
“Close Reading, Far Reading: Using Text Analysis in Research and Scholarship,” Vanderbilt University Digital Commons and Center for the Digital Humanities.
September 2021
John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, National Gallery of Art
“My Art Speaks for Both My People: an Introduction to Elizabeth Catlett’s Artistic Activism,” College of the Holy Cross
April 2021
Kollar Lecture in American Art, University of Washington
Invited Lecture for Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas
February 2021
“Color in the Classroom: African American Artist-Educators,” Chair and Discussant, College Art Association Annual Conference
An African American Artist Abroad: Loïs Mailou Jones and Black Paris,” for the Fondation Giacommetti, École des Modernités
January 2021
“Women and Art Practice,” PSU Press Presents Panel
December 2020
Episode 52: Rebecca VanDiver on Loïs Mailou Jones,” Great Women Artists Podcast with Katy Hessel [Listen Here]
October 2020
“Marking the Middle: Loïs Mailou Jones’ Mid Century Portrait Practice,” Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Richardson Symposium
Loïs Mailou Jones and David C. Driskell: Intersecting Legacies, a conversation with Adrienne Childs, curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition for the Phillips Collection
March 2020
Turbulent States: Strategies of Crisis Mediation in David Driskell’s Of Thee I Weep and Soul X (1968), Art by African Americans Symposium, Lunder Institute for the Study of American Art, Colby College
Pre-2020 Events
October 2019: From the Black Feminist Matrix: Artistic and Biological Reproduction in Elizabeth Catlett’s Late Career Prints, “My art Speaks for Both My Peoples:” A Symposium on Elizabeth Catlett, the University of Delaware [ more information]
May 2019: Papers of Protest: Print in the Civil Rights Movement, The Worlds of Print, the Early Modern Center University of California at Santa Barbara [more information]
November 2018: Black, White, and Re(ad) All Over: Artistic Representations of Black Struggle and Resistance from Katrina to Ferguson, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA
October 2017: “African Americans and WWI,” panelist, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN