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Picturing Wonderland with Abelardo Morell
October 28, 2023 , 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT
11:00 AM Pacific/ 2:00 PM Eastern/ 7:00 PM UK
Watch Picturing Wonderland on YouTube.
Join us for Picturing Wonderland, with esteemed artist Abelardo Morell in conversation with Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
“In 1998, I made a series of photographs illustrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I designed my images to be situated within a landscape made of books because it struck me that Carroll had linked Wonderland to the idea of discovering imagination by digging deep into the pages of a book… While this photographic work is unavoidably steered and shaded by the eeriness of our present times, it is largely a product of invention, imagination and freedom – things needed to make something new out of the old.”
Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He was professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston from 1983 to 2010. His many publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1998) by Dutton Children’s Books. His many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. His work has been collected and shown in countless galleries, institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art and The Victoria & Albert Museum.
Diane Waggoner is curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, where she has curated numerous exhibitions, including The PreRaphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875 and East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography. She holds a PhD in art history from Yale University. In 2020, she published Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood with Princeton University Press. She currently serves on the board of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
