Class dates: Thursdays, March 26, April 16, 30, May 7, 14 (5 weeks)
Class time: 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
Location: Assumption, Kennedy 119
Mary Cassatt and Faith Ringgold are American artists who created in France, exactly one hundred years apart, visual stories of women in Paris that were revolutionary in their subject matter, material and technique. Cassatt in her color prints, The Ten , and Ringgold in her story quilts, The French Collection , created stories of women living and working in Paris that captured in new ways the lives of women. Cassatt created in her elegant prints women and mothers who were carrying out everyday tasks such as bathing, letter writing, and riding the omnibus in 1890s Paris, subject matter not found in prints of her time. A century later in the 1990s, Ringgold would imagine a fictitious young African American woman artist living and working among the leading artists and literacy figures of 1920s Paris in her story quilts, stories impossible in the early 20 th century. Cassatt and Ringgold created works that transformed the arts of printmaking and painting that continue to excite audiences today for their stories, their beauty and their technical mastery.
Optional Reading : Mary Cassatt: A Life , Nancy Mowll Mathews, Yale University Press, New Haven 1998 #13 978-0-300-07754-4; Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints, Nancy Mowll Mathew & Barbara Stern Shapiro, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1989 #0-913697-06-0
Instructor: Martha McKenna is University Professor Emerita at Lesley University where she taught courses in the arts, creativity and aesthetic education. While a visiting scholar at the American University of Paris she pursued research on American artists in Paris, including Mary Cassatt and Faith Ringgold. An article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education captures this research, entitled “Narrative Inquiry as an Approach to Aesthetic Experience: Life Stories in Perceiving and Responding to Works of Art.” Dr. McKenna holds a doctorate in Music, the Arts, and Humanities from Teachers College, Columbia University.
