The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has selected Mabel O. Wilson to deliver the 74th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts this month on “America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom.”
Wilson, the Nancy and George Rupp Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is the chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. Wilson is one of the leading voices in critical studies of architecture and has pioneered a way to articulate scholarship, practice, and activism in engaging with architecture’s power and responsibilities. In doing so, her work — from books to monuments to exhibitions — has been enormously influential.
Wilson will deliver a series of four lectures over the span of four Sundays in March at the National Gallery of Art. The lectures will also be livestreamed. Links to each livestream are available on the gallery’s website.
According to organizers, Wilson will present “key themes and examines buildings, works of art, and other historical documents through the interplay of race and the construction of national identity. She brings together historical research on the United States’ early civic architecture, including Richmond’s Virginia State Capitol, the White House, and the design of Washington, DC. Her talks explore the complex dichotomy between the founding ideals of these institutions and the reality of their construction.”
