Join Lauren Palmor, associate curator of American art, for a lecture exploring some of the mid-20th-century American painters whose profound engagement with art history reshaped the trajectory of American art. Wayne Thiebaud and his contemporaries — on both sides of the ideological divide between abstraction and figuration — drew inspiration from the past to forge new artistic vocabularies. This lecture situates Thiebaud’s reinterpretations and appropriations within the larger, turbulent landscape of an era when tradition and innovation converged in the development of a new language for American art.

Livestream link coming soon.

About the speaker

Lauren Palmor, PhD, is associate curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she most recently organized American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art (2024) and served as coordinating curator of the San Francisco presentations of Ansel Adams in Our Time (2023) and Alice Neel: People Come First (2022). She is the author of American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art (2024) and Bouquets of Art: A Flower Dictionary from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2022). She enjoys working collaboratively to design new ways of sharing and experiencing American art with museum audiences.

Admission info

Free program. Doors open 30 minutes before the start of the program. Seating is limited, unassigned, and first come, first served. Admission to this program does not include admission to the special exhibition or other galleries in the museum. 

Read more about mid-century American painting and art history in our Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art catalogue.

Contact info

Public Programs
publicprograms@famsf.org
415.750.7694