Dennis Anderson Memorial Lecture by Michael Brenson - Discovery, Wonder, Healing: David Smith and the Magical Image

Dennis Anderson Memorial Lecture by Michael Brenson - Discovery, Wonder, Healing: David Smith and the Magical Image

October 8, 2026 — 6:30 pm–8:00 pm

Free with museum admission; a public reception will follow the lecture.

David Smith (1906–1965) welded together images that are impossible to forget. He thought deeply about sculpture and change, sculpture and memory, sculpture and play, and art and society, imagining sculpture as its own material field in which, as much as with painting, viewers could always see more, find more, learn more.

Smith's astonishing sculpture stream helped to define the transformational potential of sculpture. Focusing on Australia and Hudson River Landscape, the most canonical of the 1951 drawings in space, Smith biographer Michael Brenson explores Smith’s transformational energy and imagination. By connecting them to Smith’s belief in the magical image, Brenson reveals why Smith’s sculpture remains inexhaustible sixty years after his death.

Dennis R. Anderson (1947–2025) was a noted art historian, curator, educator, and champion of public art. After serving as a curator at the Albany Institute of History & Art, he became Director of Curatorial and Tour Services for the New York State Office of General Services, overseeing the art and historic collections of the Governor’s Executive Mansion, Empire State Plaza, State Capitol, and state-owned buildings across New York. A leading scholar of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s public art patronage, Anderson worked closely with artists and their families to document the Empire State Plaza Art Collection and oversaw publication of The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Art Collection. His extensive research on Rockefeller and public art was donated to the New York State Archives for future scholarship.

The Dennis Anderson Memorial Lecture is generously supported by Steven Mann. Additional support provided by Tammis Groft and Barbara and Gary Maggio.

View works by David Smith in the Empire State Plaza Art Collection.

Michael Brenson is an art critic and art historian. He received a Ph.D. in art history from Johns Hopkins University in 1975 and was an art critic for The New York Times from 1982 to 1991. He has been a curator (P.S. 1 and the Sculpture Center), teacher (Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, where for almost twenty years he was a member of its sculpture faculty), and consultant (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and the Rockefeller Foundation). He organized and moderated conferences at New York’s Jewish Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Sculpture Center, and National Academy Museum. He is a Getty Scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and Clark Fellow and the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. His publications include Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America; Acts of Engagement: Writing on Art, Criticism and Institutions: 1993–2002; and David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor. He is the Artistic Director of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation.