Description

Enjoy a look into Cecilia Beaux’s Green Alley Days with Sylvia Yount inspired by the special exhibition Women Artists on Cape Ann 1870-1970. This talk explores Cecilia Beaux’s Eastern Point residency at her beloved Green Alley, where she spent working summers between 1906 and 1942. At her seaside retreat, the artist’s professional and personal circles merged, with commissioned portraits and distinctive World War I productions sharing studio space with intimate depictions of family members, especially favorite models Ernesta and Henry Drinker. 

Sylvia Yount [pronounced “Yunt”] is the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the administrative and curatorial oversight of the department of historical works by African American, Asian American, Euro-American, Latin American, and Native American artists, from the colonial period to the early-twentieth century. Before moving to the Met, she served as Chief Curator and the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art and department head at the High Museum of Art. She began her curatorial career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America’s oldest art school and museum. In addition to completing pivotal collection reinstallations at her former institutions, Yount has organized major exhibitions, with accompanying catalogues, on Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, historical Native American art, Cecilia Beaux, Maxfield Parrish, and American modernism, among other topics focused on women and artists of color in regional and national contexts. Currently, she is leading an American Wing reinstallation to mark the department’s centennial in fall 2024. She continues to lecture and publish widely on American art and culture as well as on issues of curatorial responsibility and museum practice.