ST. MARY'S CITY, Md. (Dec. 5, 2008)—Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator for the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), will give a lecture as part of the Artist Talks Series on Monday, Dec. 8, at 8:30 p.m. in the Library, Room 321, at St. Mary's College of Maryland (SMCM). The Artist Talks Series is sponsored by the art and art history department at SMCM. This lecture is free and open to the public.
Mecklenburg has been a curator of painting and sculpture at SAAM since 1979. Her research interests include 20th-century American, New Deal, contemporary and Latino art. As a curator at SAAM, Mecklenburg has organized more than 20 exhibitions. She co-organized "Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and their New York" (1995), whose accompanying catalogue won the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award from the College Art Association, an annual award that recognizes an outstanding work of museum scholarship. Other projects include directing the interactive video, "American Abstraction, 1930- 1945: The Artists Speak," that received the American Film and Video Association's Blue Ribbon award in 1991. She has published on the art of George Bellows, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Robert Indiana and early American modernists. Mecklenburg received a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin and holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Maryland at College Park.