Catharine M. Rogers Distinguished Lecture | "Place and Painting on Monhegan Island," by Kimia Shahi, Princeton University

Join Kimia Shahi for a lecture focusing on the impact Monhegan Island, a small rocky island ten miles off the coast of Maine, had on American art. Shahi will discuss the ways its rugged topography and natural landscape inspired National Academy of Design (NAD) artist Robert Henri and his New York-based students and future NAD academicians George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. Shahi will also explore the island's effect on artist Reuben Tam, a Hawaiian-born painter who forged deep connections to place, memory, and his artistic predecessors while living and working on Monhegan in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

Kimia Shahi is a PhD candidate in the department of Art & Archeology at Princeton University, with particular interest in landscape, geography, and art's intersections with science, philosophy, and ecology. Her dissertation, Margin, Surface, Depth: Picturing the Contours of the Marine in Nineteenth-Century America, investigates how seacoasts emerged as sites for innovative approaches to image-making in the world of artists.