Credit: Kiyoshi Saito (Japanese, b.1907, d.1997), All Cats are Grey at Night (Two Cats), Circa 1952, Woodblock print, 24 x 18 inches, City of Davenport Art Collection, © City of Davenport.
Thursday, October 23, 6 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
A dazzling, visually rich celebration of fascinating felines and the artists who love them, the Figge Art Museum exhibition Cats! can currently be viewed in the Davenport venue's third-floor gallery, and on October 23, a Scholar Talk on both the exhibit and the animal will be presented by Dr. Amy Freund and Dr. Michael Yonan, co-authors of the Journal18 article “Cats: The Soft Underbelly of the Enlightenment."
Beloved by many humans for their mischievous nature, companionship, and beauty, cats have been featured prominently in the visual art of various cultures – whether transformed into Ancient Egyptian deities or as the subject of internet memes – and they continue to act as artistic muses. The Cats! exhibition explores artwork featuring felines in a range of mediums, including printmaking, sculpture, paintings, and video, with a special section focusing on their wild counterparts. Visitors will be encouraged to participate in interactive elements showing how our furry (and sometimes non-furry) friends continue to inspire us.
Dr. Amy Freund received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her teaching career in the Southern Methodist University art history department in 2005 as a Haakon Predoctoral Fellow. She subsequently held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Before joining the SMU faculty in 2014, she was an assistant professor at Texas Christian University. Freund is a specialist in 18th-century European art. Her first book, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France, examines the ways in which sitters and artists used portraiture to reformulate personal and political identity during the French Revolution. Articles related to this project have been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Art Bulletin, and in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914. Her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art, analyzes the representation of the hunt in late 17th- and 18th-century France. Research from this project has been published in Art History, Journal18, and several edited volumes.
Dr. Michael Yonan is a scholar of early modern European art, with special interest in the arts of eighteenth-century Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia. He is also interested broadly in the decorative arts, rococo design, material culture theory, and art historical methodology and historiography. He has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. In 2019, he was visiting guest professor at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Recently, he participated in the research project Powerful Presences: The Sculptural Portrait, organized by the University of Copenhagen and Thorvaldsens Museum, Denmark. For Bloomsbury Academic Press he edits the book series The Material Culture of Art and Design.
The Scholar Talk on Cats! with Dr. Amy Freund and Dr. Michael Yonan will take place on October 23, with the Figge Bar open at 5 p.m. and food available (cards only) and the program beginning at 6 p.m. The exhibit itself will be on display through January 4, participation in the Thursday-evening event is free, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7832 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
