Carnegie Mellon University
April 08, 2022

Join us for the next presentation by Friday Forum!

Check here regularly to see the schedule for the upcoming Friday Forum offerings!

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The John Kane Paradox: The Value and Dignity of Labor and Who Decides What Art Is with Louise Lippincott, Co-Author on April 29th!

Friday, April 29th, 2022 at 1pm
on ZOOM

American Workman presents a comprehensive and fresh reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane’s life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, Louise Lippincott will explore how these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world. A rough-and-tumble blue-collar man prone to brawling and drinking, Kane also sought out beauty in the industrial world he inhabited. This Kane paradox—brawny and tough, sensitive and creative—was at the heart of much of the public’s interest in Kane as a person.

Louise Lippincott is a historian and former curator specializing in American and European art from the Enlightenment to the modern era. She focuses on artists outside the mainstream, and the historical contexts that give meaning to their work. As curator of fine arts at Carnegie Museum of Art, she managed the largest John Kane collection in the United States. Previously she occupied curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.