Art Historian and Author Jody Patterson

Doors open at 5:30 PM. Space is limited.
Reception to follow. Cash bar.

The Nasher Museum welcomes Jody Patterson, an art historian and author at Ohio State University, where she is Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Chair of Art History and Chair of Graduate Studies. She will deliver the Annual Semans Lecture. The title of her talk is “Roy Lichtenstein: A Bigger Picture.”

Lichtenstein came of age as an artist during an era when many of the legacies of the previous generation still resonated within the art world, Patterson notes. The American art world of the 1930s continued to influence debates around the form, content and audience for painting until well after World War II—even as American culture underwent profound transformations. In his early work, Lichtenstein grappled with abstraction versus representation and fine art versus mass culture.

In her talk, Patterson focuses on Lichtenstein’s interest in muralism, a lesser-known aspect of his work. She explores how the artist used mass cultural imagery in monumental works of art designed for a broad, popular audience.

Patterson earned a doctorate degree from University College London. She was a Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the inaugural Teaching Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. She has taught internationally at the Slade School of Fine Art, Ecole normale supérieure and, most recently, the University of Plymouth, England. Patterson’s research focuses on 20th century American art, particularly the relations between art and politics. Her book, Modernism for the Masses: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York, was published in 2020 by Yale University Press. She is also working on a second book-length project, What About Modern Art and Democracy?

The Annual Semans Lecture was established in 1996 in honor of the late Dr. James H. Semans and Mary D.B.T. Semans. Past speakers include curators Massumeh Farhad, Matthew Gale and Candice Hopkins; museum directors Thelma Golden and Thomas Krens; scholar Henry Petroski; art historian Deborah Willis, Ph.D.; artists Art Spiegelman and Fred Wilson; and architect Rafael Viñoly.