Talk Provides Insight to Newark Museum's Founding
Director's Views on Labor and Culture
(Mahwah) - Romancing Labor: John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum" will be presented by Carol Duncan in the Sharp Theater on the campus of Ramapo College of New Jersey on Wednesday, May 5 at 4 p.m. The public is invited to attend. Duncan is a professor of art history at the College.
John Cotton Dana was a nationally known figure in the early 20th century, famous as an unconventional and outspoken reformer of American public libraries. In 1902, he went to work in Newark as director of the public library. A few years later, he became the founding director of the Newark Museum. Duncan's talk is about Dana's efforts to create an entirely new kind of museum, a progressive institution that would draw in and educate Newark's working class. Duncan explains Dana's views about labor and how the Newark Museum represented them, subjects that in the industrialized modern world posed ideological difficulties for reformers like him.
Duncan received the New Jersey Prize in Humanities in 1993. She is the author of Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums and The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History.
Romancing Labor: John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum" is presented as a program in the College's AIS Colloquium Series. It is sponsored by the School of American and International Studies, the School of Contemporary Arts, and the Berrie Center. The Sharp Theater is located in the Berrie Center. For more information about the program, call 201.684.7416.
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