Cross Cultural Interchange and Aspirations od Universality: The Peacock Room in 1908

Taking the Freer Gallery’s exhibition The Peacock Room Comes to America as a jumping-off point, this webinar recording explores ways in which James McNeill Whistler’s famed interior became a space filled with complex narratives of multidirectional aesthetic interchange. Exhibition curator Lee Glazer provides an overview of the installation and discusses how Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit industrialist and collector who purchased the room in 1904, used it as an aesthetic laboratory to test his cosmopolitan philosophy of collecting and display. A “lightning round” of presentations focusing on the global circulation of artistic objects and international patterns of patronage and critical discourse follows. The program includes Q and A and discussion between the audience and presenters - Lee Glazer Associate curator of American Art Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art|Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Arabella Teniswood-Harvey University of Tasmania Whistler in Australia: Cross-Cultural Connections; Patricia de Montfort University of Glasgow ‘Bought by an American’: The Peacock Room Heads West; Ayako Ono Shinshu University