They are both featured in The Cowboy’s Brown Bag series
Lunchtime program highlights diverse aspects of the American West
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum invites the public to bring their lunch and join in the Brown Bag Lunch series Thursdays in March from Noon – 1:00 p.m. featuring a wide variety of experts discussing topics related to the Museum’s exciting 2020 exhibition lineup.
“The Brown Bag Lunch Series are such a unique lunch-time activity for visitors to engage with experts to discuss various aspects of the American West as it relates to the Museum’s current exhibitions,” said Museum Director of Education & Special Projects Gretchen Jeane. “The series digs deeper into specific topics offering both entertainment and education for attendees.”
The series kicks off March 5 with, Andy Warhol Did Western Art? presented by Seth Hopkins, Executive Director at the Booth Western Art Museum. Hopkins who has spent over a decade exploring Andy Warhol’s love of the West will share with visitors the range of Western imagery Warhol produced and the inspiration behind the creation the exhibition Warhol and the West.
On March 12, Drew Johnson, Curator of Photography and Visual Culture at the Oakland Museum of California, offers Lange: Artist or Activist? He will explore Lange’s ability to use her photography to sway people’s minds and spur them into action. Johnson and his team worked to take Oakland Museum of California’s acquisition of the largest collection of Dorothea Lange photography in the world, more than 25,000 negatives and 6,000 prints donated by Lange’s husband Paul Taylor in 1965 and turn it into a single exhibition, Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing.
The March 19 Author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Anne Whiston Spirn, will present a Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. Spirn will examine the work of great American photographer Dorothea Lange. The images in focus will be those taken of the American West in 1939 which include images of squatter camps, hard-pressed farmers and stark landscapes. Spirn will also explore Lange’s stories behind her work, which ranges from simple statements to more elaborate notes and biographical sketches – bringing her subjects and their struggles to life, often in their own words.
The final lunch, on March 26 will be Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender: Reconsidering Dorothea Lange’s Icon of Maternity by Sally Stein, Professor Emerita of Art History & Film and Media Studies at University of California, Irvine. Stein will revisit the photographic career of Dorothea Lange by offering a new perspective on the making of “Migrant Mother,” Lange’s most famous Depression-era image, and it’s changing reception over the last eight decades. Stein is also the author of the essay “Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body,” published in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life.
Guests are encouraged to bring their lunch or purchase one at The Museum Grill. Reservations are not required and admission is free to the program. For more information about this series and related programming, visit nationalcowboymuseum.org or call (405) 478-2250 x 250.