Keith and Nadine Pierce Lecture featuring Harmon Siegel | The House that Tried to Be Haunted: Louise Nevelson and the Movies
June 15, 2025
2:00–3:00 PM
Location: CMA
A woman trapped in a haunted house, plagued by visions, tormented by her mysterious husband and the domestic objects around her. From these plot elements, Hollywood built an industry of Gothic melodramas, movies that gripped popular culture in wartime America, allegorizing salient anxieties around gender roles and national identity. In films such as Gaslight and Rebecca, audiences could see their fears realized and work through them.
Into this world of haunted houses stepped Louise Nevelson, whose dark sculptures encased the walls of her home like a creeping black wallpaper. Drawing on the Gothic plot of domestic entrapment, Nevelson accomplished two things. First, she criticized the exclusion of female artists from mainstream American modernism, portraying herself as a witch haunting its margins. Second, she imagined possibilities for integrating the kinds of mass-cultural phenomena that her peers disavowed into modern art, asking how sculpture could elicit cinematic effects.
This program is free with registration.
Register
Into this world of haunted houses stepped Louise Nevelson, whose dark sculptures encased the walls of her home like a creeping black wallpaper. Drawing on the Gothic plot of domestic entrapment, Nevelson accomplished two things. First, she criticized the exclusion of female artists from mainstream American modernism, portraying herself as a witch haunting its margins. Second, she imagined possibilities for integrating the kinds of mass-cultural phenomena that her peers disavowed into modern art, asking how sculpture could elicit cinematic effects.
This program is free with registration.
Register
