“Summoning Pearl Harbor”

How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead? In this meditation on the past, art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event-Pearl Harbor-and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life.

Alexander Nemerov is the author of many books on American art, most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as "one of the richest books ever to come my way-deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender"; and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named by Vogue one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. The novelist Ali Smith praised Summoning Pearl Harbor (David Zwirner, 2017), the book on which tonight's lecture is based, as a "liberating meditation."

This talk will be held in room A266 Bay 10 on the second floor of Smith Warehouse. Free and open to the public.