Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1927, Nicolai Fechin, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. Courtesy of American Museum for Western Art — The Anschutz Collection, Denver, Colorado. Photo by William J. O’ConnorMPL News:
Dr. Lois Rudnick will speak at Mesa Public Library at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 10 as part of the Library’s monthly Authors Speak program.
Her talk is entitled “Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company- American Moderns and the West.” Her talk will enhance the enjoyment of an exhibition with the same title opens today at the Albuquerque Museum, which Dr. Rudnick co-curated with MaLin Wilson-Powell.
Lois Rudnick is Professor Emerita in American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, who has published widely on the art, history, and artist communities of the Southwest. She is the preeminent scholar on Mabel Dodge Luhan, with eight books published on Luhan and her circle.
Her books include Utopian Vistas, Mabel Dodge Luhan: new woman, new worlds, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism, all of which are available at the Library. The Library also has several of the books that are edited by Rudnick, including Red Earth: poems of New Mexico by the poet Alice Corbin Henderson.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was an internationally-known writer, salon hostess and patron of the arts, whose mission in life was to find a new way of living in the world. She invited many of the greatest names in 20 th Century arts and letters to her homes, first in Italy, then in Greenwich Village, then in Taos, where she lived from 1919 until her death in 1962. Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robinson Jeffers, Martha Graham and many others were invited to spend time at Luhan’s home in Taos.
Rudnick promises a lively lecture about Luhan’s life. When asked how her fascination with Luhan began, she answered “that will be a great question for the Q & A on Nov. 10!”
The exhibit “Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company- American Moderns and the West” opens at the Albuquerque Museum of Art runs through Jan. 22, 2017. More than 150 pieces of work from the Museum’s collection and from private collections have been assembled to represent the artists who were encouraged by Mabel Dodge Luhan. The exhibit is greatly expanded from the one that showed at Taos’ Harwood Museum this summer.
The Authors Speak Series is a monthly event featuring local and regional authors speaking about their writing on a variety of subjects such as local and state history, travel, outdoor activities, fiction, Native American history and culture, poetry and more.
The series is funded by the Friends of the Los Alamos County Library System. The talks are free and are generally at 7 p.m. on the fourth Thursday of each month, followed by the opportunity to meet the authors and enjoy refreshments. Because the fourth Thursday of November falls on Thanksgiving Day, the talk will be held Nov. 10.
For more information about Library events, go to www.losalamoslibrary.org or call 505.662.8253.
For more information about the Albuquerque Museum, go to www.albuquerquemuseum.org/ or call 505.243.7255.
