Programs

The Center organizes scholarly meetings that embrace multiple ways of engaging in art’s histories, encompassing all media, time periods, and geographies. Every year, we cultivate intangible practices such as community building, scholarly responsiveness, and transmission of knowledge and skills across generations. 


Programs range in size and duration from lectures and panel discussions to multiday gatherings. Held primarily at the National Gallery of Art, many of our programs are also live streamed and recorded, thus expanding our reach and connecting audiences across the United States and around the world. A list of past programs are featured in our annual reports.

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A castle-like compound surrounded by trees with mountains in the background.

Dawn over the Alhambra, c. 2014, Creative Commons License

Dawn over the Alhambra, c. 2014, Creative Commons License

May 1, 2025 :  Black, White, and All the Reds In Between

Abbey Stockstill is associate professor of Islamic art and architecture at Southern Methodist University and currently Paul Mellon Senior Fellow (2024–2025).

Registration required
A female torso from the neck to the shoulders and knees is carved from white marble in this freestanding sculpture. The body is square toward us in this photograph. The neck is jagged where the head has broken off, and the arms are missing below the shoulders. The leg on our right is broken off above the knee and the other below the knee. Firm, round breasts are above a soft belly and smooth groin. Some areas of the surface are smooth and others are rough, and the marble has darkened to tan in places. The sculpture is supported by a metal rod on our right, and the work rests on a square base. The wall behind is light gray.

April 25, 2025 :  On Beauty and the Divine in Ancient Greece

In this conversation, Center fellows Mary Beard and Hugo Shakeshaft explore the place of beauty in ancient Greece. 

A light-skinned man, woman, boy, and girl, and a brown-skinned man sit and stand around a table spread with papers and a map in this horizontal portrait. The light-skinned man sits on a red upholstered chair at the table to our left, and his body faces our right in profile. His legs are crossed, and he rests his right elbow, closer to us, on the back of the chair. He has a sloping, rounded nose, dark eyes, jowls along his jawline, and his closed mouth juts forward. His left arm rests on an open pamphlet on the table next to a sword with a delicate silver hilt. To our left, the young boy stands also looks to our right in profile, next to the older man's chair. The boy wears a dusky rose-pink suit with a white lacy collar. With his right hand, he pulls back a dark green cloth covering a globe on a wooden stand along the left edge of the canvas. The woman sits at the right side of the table, across from the man. She has dark eyes, full cheeks, a double chin, and her pale lips are closed. She wears a voluminous ivory satin gown and petticoat with a black lace shawl, and an ivory cap with a satin bow covers her gray hair. She points to a spot on a map on the table with a closed fan held in her right hand. The young girl, wearing a gauzy white dress with a pine-green sash at the waist, stands on the far side of the table near the woman, holding the curling edges of the map. Behind the women, the brown-skinned man wears a rust-orange and gray uniform, and stands with one hand tucked into his vest in the shadows at the edge of the composition. His features are indistinct but he faces our left in profile. The room has a gold-and-yellow checkerboard floor, and a red cloth drapes from columns frame the scene to each side. It is unclear whether a river view at the back of the room is seen through an open window or door, or if it is a large painting behind the people.

March 9–30, 2025 :  Mellon Lectures

The 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Mabel O. Wilson.

March 8, 2025 :  Updating Art History: Women in the Artists’ Academy in Rome

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in collaboration with the National Gallery Library.

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November 17, 2024 :  Blood Joining Blood: The Immersive in Caravaggio’s Malta

In the 28th annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art, Keith Sciberras of the University of Malta delves into Caravaggio’s use of complex spatial relationships and audience immersion, supported by Sciberras’s decades of site experience and archival research.

April 28–May 19, 2024 :  Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me

Award-winning actress, playwright, and professor Anna Deavere Smith explores performance as a way of knowing in this four-part series delivered for the 73rd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

December 2, 2023 :  Latinx Art and the Intimacy of Dislocation

A presentation on the cultural and political identities of Latinx art, presented by Roberto Tejada of the University of Houston, for the 2023 Wyeth Lecture in American Art

Two dark-skinned women stand facing each other on a dirt path that runs beside a body of water in this horizontal painting. One woman faces us and balances a flat tray loaded with white cloths on her head. Her left hand, on our right, holds the tray steady. The apron or loose, long skirt of her off-white dress is bunched up around her hips, but the fabric still falls to her ankles. A dark green, red, and brown scarf covering her head is tied in a knot by one ear, and the ends fall in front of that shoulder. The other woman stands in front of the first, to our left with her back to us. She wears an aquamarine-blue dress and garnet-red scarf tied around her head. A brown basket hangs from her left arm. The path angles from the lower right corner and cuts into the distance to our left. It is lined with brown and green bushes and grasses. An expanse of dirt to our right reaches to the shoreline, which curves like a C into the distance. Dabs of brown and dark pink suggest several more people standing or stooping in the surf in the distance. Shallowly sloping rust-brown hill cut into the water, spanning left two-thirds of the width of the composition along the horizon. The sky in the top half of the composition is a clear, milky white. The artist signed and dated the lower left corner, “C.Pizarro. Paris 1856.”

November 8, 2024 :  Impressionism Beyond Paris: A Global Perspective

Watch a Zoom recording of this program that examines the impact of Impressionism beyond the French capital, held in conjunction with the exhibition Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment.

Series

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A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

The Mellon Lectures feature speakers from various fields who engage in probing reflections about how and why the arts matter.

Sydney J. Freedberg Lectures on Italian Art

The Freedberg Lectures feature distinguished scholars presenting innovative research in the fields of Italian art.

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Programs

This yearly program encourages an appreciation for the complexity and creativity of the art of the United States.

Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art

The Center partners with the department of art history and archaeology at the University of Maryland to present this annual symposium for graduate students in the region.

Fellows’ Presentations

During their residencies, fellows are invited to present research talks, followed by discussions with the Center community and attendees.
 

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The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts is the National Gallery’s research institute. 

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