2024-25 Lectures and Events
Lectures are free for Art League members, $10 for KIA members, $12 public, $3 students.
Non-members can pay at the door.
September 18, 2024
Richard Phillips: Strokes of Freedom
7:00 pm Lecture | KIA Auditorium
Reception following lecture
Special note: Mr. Phillips’ talk is rescheduled for Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 10 am. For those who were at the Richard Phillips presentation or heard about his health emergency, we want you to know that he is OK. Thanks to Richard for coming back to sign art. Thank you to KIA staff for their support and amazing response.
Detroit artist Richard Phillips started painting while in prison with a mail order watercolor set: landscapes, portraits of famous people, jazz musicians, and more, eventually creating over 400 paintings.
Arrested in 1971 for a murder he didn’t commit, Phillips was in prison for 46 years. Creating art enabled him to persist and deal with the injustice of his situation. “I didn’t actually think I’d ever be free again. This art is what I did to stay sane,” Phillips said. “I could get off into one of my paintings and just be in there for hours.” Today, collectors and viewers alike appreciate the beauty he created throughout those long decades.
October 9, 2024
Patrick Bringley: All the Beauty in the World
7:00 pm | KIA Auditorium
View Recorded Presentation
Discover the hidden secrets of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from MET guard and best-selling author Patrick Bringley. All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.
Following the death of his brother, Bringley left his job at The New Yorker for “the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew”, a job that promised room to grieve and reflect. As NPR said “… All the Beauty in the World reminds us of the importance of learning not ‘about art, but from it.’ This is art appreciation at a profound level.”
November 13, 2024
Dr. Brian Stewart: Art as Adaptation: San Graphic Traditions in Evolutionary Perspective
10:00 am | KIA Auditorium
View Recorded Presentation
Southern Africa is home to some of the world’s oldest and richest graphic art traditions. Over the past 50 years, insights from the region have transformed our understanding of rock art worldwide and even changed the paradigm of our species’ evolution, shifting our behavioral origins from Europe to Africa and more than doubling their antiquity. Now, improvements in dating southern African rock art provide the opportunity to link ancient paintings made on the walls of caves with archaeology excavated from their floors. In so doing, we are able, for the first time, to breathe spirituality into an otherwise largely utilitarian and diet-centered record of daily life. This presentation offers an overview of these insights and discusses their importance for viewing art as part of the adaptive repertoire underpinning Homo sapiens’ evolutionary success.
Brian A. Stewart is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is also Curator of African Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. His research explores the deep-time selective contexts and cultural responses that led to the evolution of our species’ profound adaptive flexibility. His primary focuses is the archaeology of hunter-gatherers in southern Africa, where he investigates and compares human engagements with highland and desert environments.
March 12, 2025
Dr. Abbas Daneshvari, Art Historian & Scholar: American and European Art in the Crucible of Postmodernism
10:00 am | KIA Auditorium
Reception following Lecture
Explore the cultural transformations anticipated and reflected in the arts of Europe and the United States from the Surrealists to the Postmodernists.
Professor Abbas Daneshvari is the former Chair of the Department of Art and Professor of Art History at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Amazingly Original: Contemporary Iranian Art at Crossroads as well as numerous publications on various aspects of Islamic art’s iconography.
April 9, 2025
Mary Brodbeck Woodblock Printmaker: Influences and Evolution
10:00 am | KIA Auditorium
Reception following Lecture
Mary Brodbeck worked as an Industrial Designer in the West Michigan furniture industry for a dozen years – many of her designs hold US patents – before shifting to image-making in the 1990s. In her Art League presentation, Mary will reveal why she left the corporate environment to pursue an art career, who and what influenced her along the way, how she evolved into specializing in Japanese printmaking techniques, and where she is now.
Mary Brodbeck received a BFA in Industrial Design from Michigan State University (1982) and an MFA in Printmaking from Western Michigan University (1999). As part of her graduate studies at WMU, she was awarded a Japanese government-sponsored BUNKA-Cho Fellowship to study in Tokyo with mentor Yoshisuke Funasaka.
Mary’s nature-inspired woodblock prints, often depicting the Great Lakes watershed region, are found in collections at institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and the Muskegon Museum of Art. She produced an award-winning documentary (Becoming Made, 2014), received over a dozen national awards for her woodblock prints, and has conducted more than 40 workshops nationally and internationally. Currently, she and her mentor have a traveling exhibition in the KRESA program, which serves public schools throughout Kalamazoo County.
Mary’s work is represented at Watanabe Color Prints in Tokyo, the oldest print gallery in Japan.
May 14, 2025
Dr. Margaret M. Miles: Plundered Art– Who Gets to Keep It?
7:00 pm Lecture | KIA Auditorium
Reception following lecture
Is it still possible for a museum to buy ancient art ethically? What about “Old Master” paintings that somehow are available after WWII?
Lovers of museums need to be aware of where art comes from, how, and when it got there. A prominent case today is the location of the Parthenon marbles: should they be in London or Athens, with the rest of the temple? In this illustrated talk, we look at how ideas about repatriation, restitution, and proper ownership of art got started: the earliest assumption was that spoils of war always go to the victor, and taking defeated peoples’ property, as well as the people themselves, was the norm in antiquity—and the norm until quite recently. But already in Greek and Roman contexts, we know of notable exceptions and new, sophisticated and principled ideas about ownership of art. The Roman orator Cicero was able to steer Roman government to more ethical ideals. His speeches in turn were inspirational for the beginnings of international law on cultural property. These ideas were then put into action after Waterloo, when about half of the art Napoleon had looted across Europe was returned: actions that have echoes in current debate over restitutions from Nazi-era plunder, and over the Parthenon marbles.
Margaret M. Miles is an archaeologist and the Edward A. Dickson Emerita Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She served a six-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classical Studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (2008-2014). Her publications include a study of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (Hesperia 1989), Agora Excavations XXXI: The City Eleusinion (Princeton, 1998), Art as Plunder: the Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge, 2008), and three edited volumes: Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited (Berkeley 2011), Autopsy in Athens. Recent Archaeological Research in Athens and Attica (2015), and Blackwell’s Companion to Greek Architecture (2016). Recently she and her team conducted fieldwork on a Greek temple in the Elymian sanctuary at Contrada Mango (Segesta, Sicily), for a new reconstruction of the early Classical temple.
Programming note: The originally scheduled talk by artist Erica Lord will be rescheduled.