Lecture: Facts and Monuments

Artists have long created painted and sculptural monuments to shape ideas of collective history. In this lecture, entitled "Facts and Monuments," Leah Dickerman, director of editorial and content strategy at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, explores some of the strategies modern artists have used in designing monuments, each reflecting different political values. Among the examples she will discuss are Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1920), Ivan Shadr's Monument to Lenin (1927), Diego Rivera's Frozen Assets (1931), Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1941), and the Monument to Robert E. Lee by Henry Shrady and Leo Lentelli (1924).

Leah Dickerman has been director of editorial and content strategy at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 2017. Previously she served as a curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, most recently as the museum’s first Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, a post endowed in 2015. Her exhibitions have offered important new perspectives on modern art with innovative presentations and rich layered content extending beyond the galleries to publications, digital initiatives, public conversations, and live performances. Projects organized or co-organized by Dickerman include Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017); One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North (2015); Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (2012); Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011); and Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (2005). She previously served as acting head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, and has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of Delaware. She holds a doctorate in art history and archaeology from Columbia University.

Free and open to the public.