"A True Poet in Paint": Arthur F. Mathews and the California Decorative Mythography

Thursday, September 8  |  7-8pm  |  $15 Non Members, $10 Members

The histories of epic poetry and pastoral landscape painting converge in this lecture on California artist Arthur Frank Mathews (1860-1945) and his career as a leading painter, writer, and art educator in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century. The lecture focuses on Mathews's interest in mythology and considers what may have informed his "California Decorative" visions of California as Arcadia.  

Mary Okin is a scholar of American art specializing in the social history of California painting and the rise of women artists during the Gilded Age. Her master's thesis at San Jose State University, "Uncovering 'New Man' Feminism: Arthur F. Mathews at the San Francisco School of Design, 1890-1896," engages in the first feminist reading of Mathews and his contributions to the rise of women artists in California. After presenting at the New Museum Los Gatos, Mary will be continuing her study of American art at UC Santa Barbara, where she will join a new cohort of doctoral students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture this fall. In her scholarship, Mary aims to complicate our understanding of the development of California painting in a regional, national, and international context, and to explore California's inherited and distinct aesthetic and cultural traditions.

Funding for this program provided by: Silicon Valley Creates and The Borgenicht Foundation.