Q&A with Kathleen Motes Bennewitz and Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, moderated by Farris Wahbeh

Wednesday, Jul. 31 2024, 7:00

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• Kathleen Motes Bennewitz earned art history degrees from Princeton University and the University of Delaware. After curatorial positions at the Amon Carter Museum and Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, and in education at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she served as Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Greenwich Historical Society (the historic site of the Cos Cob art colony) and Fairfield Museum and History Center. She has curated exhibits on American art and artists over her career and, in Connecticut at the Lockwood-Matthews Mansion Museum, Norwalk Historical Society, Westport Historical Society, Westport Library, and as Town of Westport Curator with the Westport Public Art Collections. She and her husband Scott have twin adult daughters.
• Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, described as an “ebullient art historian by The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in an article about the “Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years” exhibition that she curated in 2011, is an independent scholar. She has expertise in 20th century American art, specializing in the art of Edward Hopper, his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper, and their two-artist marriage. In addition to the “Prelude” exhibition, at the Edward Hopper Museum and Study Center, housed in Edward Hopper’s boyhood home in Nyack, New York she curated “My Dear Mr. Hopper: The Story Starts Here” in 2013, and “Josephine Nivison Hopper: Edward’s Muse” in 2022. She has published articles on Marguerite Thompson Zorach and Josephine Nivison Hopper in the Woman’s Art Journal, in 2002 and 2004, and an essay on “William Glackens’ Still Lifes,” in the 2014 William Glackens exhibition catalog that accompanied a retrospective exhibition.
• Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources and Collection Management at the Whitney Museum of American Art, works within the field of cultural informatics to enhance access to art and archival collections. At the Whitney, he oversees the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, the Permanent Collection Documentation Office, which maintains the cataloguing and content standards relating to works of art in the Whitney’s permanent collection, as well as Visual Resources. Wahbeh also spearheaded, along with the Conservation Department, the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI), a focused project on the digital preservation and archival documentation of time-based media works of art. Wahbeh has gained experience from a wide range of institutions, including Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Creative Audio Archive, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

  This event is presented in partnership with The Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center.