Tuesdays, September 2, 9 & 16, 2025
7:30 PM

Whose face do we see in a portrait? Is it a likeness, character study, or the truth? Today, portraits can be enhanced through multiple software effects and AI. What evidence do we have for portraits from antiquity around the Mediterranean region—exploring portraits of historical individuals from Mesopotamia and Egypt, Greece, and the Roman world? In this series we will consider artistic challenges in creating a portrait of someone who died centuries earlier or who was known only by distant reputation. Ranging from the third millennium BCE through the second century CE, sculpture, coinage, and paintings will bring us full circle from deep antiquity to the astonishingly vivid Fayum portraits discovered in an area of ancient Egypt following Greek and then Roman occupation.

Monday, March 31, April 7, 14 & 21, 2025
7:30 PM

The international art movement known as Art Nouveau flourished from the early 1890s to 1914. Rejecting historical references and traditional geometric forms, it featured florid vegetation, sinuous lines, and asymmetry. Although the design approach encompassed all visual art forms, it was most prevalent in architecture and the decorative arts. Furniture, mirrors, metalwork, art glass, carved plaster, and intricate paneling all featured the signature “whiplash” lines of Art Nouveau. Originating in Brussels, and highlighted in the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (better known in English as the 1900 Paris Exposition), the style is strongly associated with the wealthy and fashionable.

Thursdays, January 23 & 30; February 6 & 13, 2025
7:30 PM

In this four-part lecture series Dr. Katherine Schwab will explore topics that help us discover a deeper understanding of the people and times in Ancient Greece. Using hairstyles, coinage, athletics, and jewelry, she will highlight objects to consider how a society over two millennia ago thought about adornment, objects, and activities that are quite familiar to us in our own lives today.

Thursdays, November 14 & 21, 2024
7:30 PM

On October 15, 1924, André Breton published his first Surrealist Manifesto in Paris which gave birth to the surrealist movement. These two lectures celebrate the centennial of surrealism. Surrealist artists and writers were inspired by Sigmund Freud’s dream analysis and the exploration of the subconscious mind. They tried to express themselves without any restrictions of reason, moral, or aesthetic considerations. Surrealists under the leadership of Breton marked a transition from the anarchist Dada movement to the proposition of a superior alternative in Surrealism.

Wednesdays, October 16, 23 & 30; November 6, 2024
7:30 PM

These lectures are designed to highlight San Diego’s contribution to the field. Not only did San Diego’s modernism have its own roots in the work of Gill, but it also had an unusual set of circumstances in the post-war period, when an enormous amount of construction took place without the constraints of an established city fabric. San Diego attracted a very talented, yet modest, group of  architects who spent their whole career working here and left a legacy upon which others have built. Each lecture features the work and characteristics of certain architects who played a significant part in that story, highlighting those qualities by example of an architectural project.

Thursdays, September 5, 12, 19 & 26 & October 3, 2024
7:30 PM

It is not an overstatement to refer to 17th century Dutch art as the Golden Age, for it is one of the most glorious eras in Western art. In the space of just three to four generations, tiny Holland bursts forth with genius—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many other brilliant, inventive artists. In addition, the Golden Age is uniquely innovative: true landscape painting is conceived; still life paintings acquire new, expressive language; Europe’s very first genre art is created; and portraiture is enlarged by canvases that define and expand the depiction of our humanity. Join us for this dip into one of the most productive periods in art history on five Thursdays this fall: September 5, 12, 19, and 26, and October 3.Tickets are available for the series or individual lectures.

Thursdays, February 15, 22 & 29, 2024
7:30 PM

Dreams and Enchantment is a three-week lecture series designed to transport us beyond upcoming elections, international challenges, and foreign tragedies to an otherworldly realm of noble knights, richly caparisoned steeds, and gleaming white castles—in short, to 15th century Burgundy, and the last glow—the brilliant culmination—of late medieval art.

Thursdays, October 5, 12, 19 & 26; November 2, 2023
7:30 PM

Seven Decades of Contemporary Art Trends, 1945 to the Present features an art historical overview of the most important art movements from mid-20th century to the present, recognizing geopolitical events reflected in the artwork.

Mondays, April 24; May 1, 8 & 15, 2023
7:30 PM

Realism was dead. Born in Florentine workshops in the early 1400s, realism enjoyed a long run, dominating European art for four centuries. By the mid-1860s it had degenerated into a weary superficiality. This inspired a group of young, creative, yet disgruntled artists to create a new artistic language, and to propound radical theories and techniques. They did so, knowing they would be ridiculed, and worse, ignored. 

Tuesdays, October 25; November 1, 8 & 15, 2022
7:30 PM

When we go to a museum to admire art, we usually don’t ask ourselves: How did these works get there? Who acquired them? Where did they come from? In this lecture series we will explore four exquisite art collections, located in beautiful European locations, shaped by tenacious collectors. Their taste, budget, and power determined the art they assembled. Sometimes historical circumstances led to acquisition of undervalued paintings—or purchases directly from the artists. We will look at the collections in the context of history, selections of art, personal stories of the collectors, location, and architecture in which they are housed.

Tuesdays, September 20, 27; October 4, 11 & 18, 2022
7:30 PM

Join music, art, literary, and dance historian Victoria Martino in a five-week lecture series, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Diaghilev by rediscovering and redefining the scope of his immeasurable influence on modern culture.

‎

Who was Sergei Diaghilev? What did he do? Condemned by his own country as the ultimate exemplar of bourgeois decadence and depravity, he was excised from Soviet cultural history. Yet, in the international world of art, music, dance, and theater, he was revered, even idolized, as the greatest impresario of all time. Creator, critic, curator, Diaghilev played all these roles, defining for many the very meaning of contemporary art in the 20th century. In his role as founder and director of the legendary Ballets Russes, Diaghilev commissioned and patronized a veritable lexicon of artists, choreographers, composers, dancers, and designers: from Matisse to Picasso, Fokine to Massine, Debussy to Stravinsky, Nijinsky to Pavlova, Bakst to Chanel.

Tuesdays, February 8, 15, 22, March 1 & 8, 2022
6:30 PM

Join art historian Victoria Martino, as she honors the legendary “father of modernism,” Piet Mondrian, in a five-week lecture series, commemorating the 150th birthday of the artist.

Heir to the venerated Dutch landscape tradition, Mondrian became a pioneer of abstract art, and a leading exponent of the Dutch avant-garde movement, De Stijl (The Style). His lifelong search for absolute purity of form, color, and line reflected his deeply held spiritual belief in a balanced and harmonious universe.

This five-week lecture series will trace Mondrian's dramatic development through a veritable lexicon of art movements: from his early representational landscapes, through Fauvism, pointillism, post-impressionism, neo-impressionism, luminism, and cubism, to the final breakthrough of his unique personal style, which has become synonymous with twentieth-century modernism.

In-person:

Thursdays, November 4, 11, 18, 2021
7:30 PM

Over the many years (oh, alright, many, many years) I’ve had the privilege to stand behind a podium to share my passion for art with you, I’ve heard frustration—where, you wonder, do these specific talks nestle in Western art? Your frustration was appropriate: art cannot be extracted from the culture that produces and nurtures it. Art is an artifact of a total history. But instead of a larger historic context, you were rather inelegantly plopped down in one isolated historic era or lonely school of art.

Essentially, what you’ve requested is a timeline, Greeks to Picasso. So, let’s get to it! Let’s boil down two thousand, five hundred years in three hours—but very responsibly, of course. It’s been great fun to put this together, and I thank you.

Included will be an added fillip, a closer look at the two seminal eras, the “hinge moments” that halted the smooth-running course of that flow―halted, and redirected art into new, unpredictable directions. What in the world could cause such historic dislocation, such total reordering of inevitability? What, indeed. I call these hinge moments the “Great Disruption,” and the “Lesser Great Disruption.” What where they, and when? Your clues lie in this three-week series. ―Linda Blair

Tuesdays, October 19 & 26; November 2, 9 & 16, 2021
7:30 PM

Ideally, we wouldn’t need lectures about women artists, or artists of color, or artists from different cultures and sexual orientations. They would be just artists of excellence. But until this ideal is reached, there is value in focusing on select women artists of the Impressionist, German Expressionist, and Abstract Expressionist movements, as well as African American and indigenous artists from the Americas and Aboriginal Australia, who were often overshadowed by their male or white counterparts. Feye’s previous lecture series on women artists included those from Latin America and Asia; in this series she focuses are on European, American, African American, and indigenous women.

Tuesdays, May 11–June 8, 2021
6:30 PM

Join art historian Victoria Martino in a fascinating five-week art history lecture series, celebrating the centenary of Beuys’ birth (May 12, 1921).

ONLINE

Join us for a three-part lecture series on British Art that will be jointly presented by Hugh Davies and Derrick Cartwright.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

Join art historian Victoria Martino for a fascinating five-week lecture series, celebrating the 550th birthday of the most important artist of the Northern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer. Arguably the greatest German artist of all time, Dürer's oeuvre includes more than 1,000 drawings, 100 engravings and etchings, nearly 250 woodcuts, 100 paintings, and 40 watercolors. This extraordinarily prolific artist was also an influential theorist, producing three treatises in nine volumes on subjects of Measurement, Human Proportion, and Fortification. Renowned throughout Europe before he reached the age of 20, due to the widespread sales of his celebrated woodcuts, this polymath was universally compared to Apelles, Phidias, and Zeuxis, the greatest artists of classical antiquity.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

It is most certainly not an overstatement to refer to 17th century Dutch art as a “Golden Age.” In the space of just three generations, tiny Holland burst forth with genius—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals. and many other brilliant, innovative artists. What caused such a glittering galaxy of truly great painters? What unique historical imperatives account for this singular phenomenon, this artistic anomaly that has no parallel in the European experience?

More info / Get tickets →