School of Art Welcomes Glenn Adamson to Visiting Lecture Series

Provided by Glenn Adamson

Glenn Adamson

The School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is delighted to welcome Glenn Adamson, curator, writer and historian, based in New York, to the Visiting Lecture Series. All are invited to his lecture at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, at Hillside Auditorium 202. 

Adamson's lecture, Open and Shut: The Art of Lenore Tawney and Toshiko Takaezu, will speak about these two artists currently featured in an exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Takaezu & Tawney: An Artist is a Poet. The exhibition debuts 12 new acquisitions to the Crystal Bridges collection that tell the story of a remarkable friendship between the two artists. 

Adamson has previously been director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, New York and head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. He is currently the artistic director for Design Doha, a new biennial festival for Qatar (forthcoming in 2024), editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation and curator-at-large for LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York.  

His areas of interest span various fields, including design history, modern craft and contemporary art. He has successfully pursued these interests in his career and brought them together in meaningful ways.  

When he was director of the Museum of Arts and Design, he placed crafts at the forefront and curated various exhibitions on this subject, including Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, he was co-leader of the V&A/RCA Course in the History of Design, which has shaped scholarship about material culture.  

Adamson has also written extensively about contemporary art. The book he co-edited with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials, from the Studio to Crowd-Sourcing, examines the issue of "production values" in contemporary art and described by Adamson that like a lot of his work this treats art, craft and design as overlapping areas of concern rather than distinct, mutually exclusive categories. 

His current curatorial projects include Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, England, Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu at the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York (forthcoming in 2024 and touring thereafter).  

All are invited to join Glenn Adamson's lecture at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 9 at Hillside Auditorium, 202.