Museum of Art

3:30-4:30pm Keynote Address with Whitney Museum Curator Barbara Haskell; 

4:30-6pm Museum Open House & Reception

Join Whitney Museum Curator Barbara Haskell as she explores the vital role of the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project—and its home at Bates College Museum of Art—in furthering the enduring significance of Lewiston-born artist Marsden Hartley. Discover why Hartley’s groundbreaking work remains deeply resonant and essential today.

Barbara Haskell has been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art since 1975. She is a recognized expert on early twentieth century American art, and author of over thirty publications. Among the landmark thematic exhibitions she has curated are BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958–1964 (1984), The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950 (1999), and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 (2020). In addition, she has curated retrospectives and authored scholarly monographs on a range of early-twentieth-century and post-war American artists, including H. C. Westermann (1978), Marsden Hartley (1980), Milton Avery (1982), Ralston Crawford (1985), Charles Demuth (1987), Red Grooms (1987), Donald Judd (1988), Burgoyne Diller (1990), Agnes Martin (1992), Joseph Stella (1994),  Edward Steichen (2000), Elie Nadelman (2003), Oscar Bluemner (2005), Georgia O’Keeffe (2009), Lyonel Feininger (2011), Robert Indiana (2013), Stuart Davis (2016), and Grant Wood (2018). She was twice awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize awarded to catalogues of distinction in the arts from the Fenimore Art Museum, for the monograph Charles Demuth in 1987 and the catalogue Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 in 2024. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and was the 2024 recipient of the Frederic Church Award for extraordinary curatorial contributions to American art and culture from The Olana Partnership.