The Art of Henry Ossawa Tanner

This is an illustrated lecture I gave at The Field School in Chicago in May 2019. In the lecture, I do two things. I provide a general orientation to art appreciation, giving nine tips for “How to Look at Art.” This is a nine-point art appreciation lecture I’ve given a lot over the years, which I like to custom-fit to local museum collections. It’s especially helpful if I can illustrate each tip with a painting that we can go see together, and it especially pops if we then go to the museum and see those paintings.

But second, this lecture is also an introduction to the life and work of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), the first African-American painter to become internationally famous. The Field School has some Tanner images on their walls and devotes special attention to his legacy (plus the Art Institute of Chicago holds one major Tanner painting).

So I do both of those things, but blended together, using Tanner’s art to illustrate the art appreciation tips. This is a nice video which they’ve edited to include higher-quality close-ups of the images I’m projecting. If you want to see the images even better, here is the Prezi I used. If you want just the art-appreciation tips without visual illustrations, here’s a post about them (minus tip 9 about worldviews).