Please join us at the Scarab Club to welcome our new Executive Director, MaryAnn Wilkinson. Well known in the local arts community, she plans to bring new balance between the contemporary and historic and aspects of our 100-year-old artists' club. Since January 2012, she was the Exhibition Director at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Prior to her work at the University, she built a curatorial career over more than 25 years at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she was head of the Modern and Contemporary Art department and Curator of European Modern Art. At the DIA, she specialized in European and American modern painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, while also documenting and exhibiting the work of local, national, and international contemporary artists.
After the cocktail reception, MaryAnn will present an informal lecture: Behind the Pink Cellophane Curtain: The Fantasies of Florine Stettheimer. Florine Stettheimer socialized within the same milieu as her contemporary, fellow artist and museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, becoming a fixture among the New York avant-garde. She studied in New York and Paris and her lesser known early work recalls the realist traditions of the Ashcan School. Yet, she is best known for the vibrant and exuberant palette of the fantasies that she begins to lay down on canvas after 1916. Behind the Pink Cellophane Curtain: The Fantasy World of Florine Stettheimer will explore not only the imagined often autobiographical worlds found in her canvases, but also the studio she created, where to a good extent, she brought that world to life.