Contact
Wakefield EstateMary M. B. Wakefield Charitable Trust
6173330924
wakefieldestate@dogwoodlanefarm.org
Artweek Milton & The Wakefield Estate
proudly present:
Audubon's Royal Octavo:
The Democratization of Natural History
Drawing from the Wakefield Estate's own octavo edition of Audubon's work, Audubon researcher Jess Clay will discuss the creation and distribution of John James Audubon's Birds of America, and its subsequent impact on the United States and 19th-century natural history.
By understanding Audubon's life and artistic process alongside the personal underpinnings and political implications of the octavo edition, a new conception of the artist and his world emerges - one in which the man comes of age alongside his nation, and sets in motion a host of historical events and movements to come.
A graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Clay's interest in John James Audubon and ornithology has taken him from rare book libraries to the Costa Rican rain forest. During a fellowship at Harvard's Houghton Library, he conducted extensive research into the life and works of Audubon. His work at Houghton centered around Audubon's literary and artistic engagements with Romanticism, and included the curation of a public exhibition, "Sublime and Manifest: The American Romanticism of John James Audubon." In his senior thesis, Words of America: John James Audubon and the American Exceptionalism of Ornithological Biography, Mr. Clay explored Audubon's oeuvre as a nationalist performance and as an early work of American artistic exceptionalism. Born and raised in Texas, Mr. Clay currently resides in Boston."
$10/members; $20/non-members.
Following the May 1 lecture, the Wakefield Estate will host a public exhibition of its own octavo edition of John James Audubon's Royal Octavo, a set of hand-colored lithographs from the 1840s recently discovered at the estate.
The exhibition will be held Thursday, May 2 - Saturday, May 4, 11:00 am-3:00 pm daily at the Wakefield Estate, 1465 Brush Hill Road, Milton, MA. $5 suggested donation.
For directions, click here. For more information, call 617-333-0924 x22 or visit our website: https://wakefieldtrust.org.