UofL’s fine arts department sponsors the Frederic Lindley Morgan architectural history lectures, named for the late Louisville building designer. The first talk March 29 will be by Dianne Harris, who is teaching at UofL this semester as the Morgan visiting professor in architectural history.
Here are the free, public talks and locations:
March 29: “Case Study Utopia?: Toward a Photographic Urbanism,” 6 p.m., Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library.
Harris’ talk will examine architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s famous photo of the Pierre Koenig-designed modernist house “Case Study #22” overlooking Los Angeles. She is expected to discuss what such photos reveal about urban historical processes and the roles of race and class in the postwar housing market and in mid-century U.S. cities.
Besides her visiting professorship at UofL, Harris is director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and professor of landscape architecture, architecture, art history and history at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The president of the Society for Architectural Historians, Harris is the author of several books, including a forthcoming one on U.S. postwar houses and gardens from 1945 to 1960.
April 9: “The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey through a Vanishing America,” 2:30 p.m., Gallery X, Schneider Hall.
Eric Sandweiss, Indiana University’s Carmony chair in history, will talk about the amateur photographer Cushman, whose vast collection of images of midcentury American landscapes and a wide variety of subjects is considered the largest known body of early color photos by a single photographer. Sandweiss’ book by the same title was published this spring; the Cushman collection is at Indiana University Archives.
