Fort Worth, TX, October 11, 2005—Author and independent curator Jane Livingston will present a lecture entitled Some Thoughts on the American West at the End of the Twentieth Century on Saturday, October 22 at 10:30 a.m. in the auditorium at the Amon Carter Museum. Second in a two-part series of Anne Burnett Tandy Distinguished Lectures on American Art, this program is presented in conjunction with the special 20th-anniversary exhibition of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon, on view at the Carter until January 8, 2006. The lecture is free.

Livingston has curated several critically acclaimed exhibitions, including the 1994 Avedon retrospective Evidence: 1944–1994 that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was also a contributing essayist to the catalogue that accompanied that exhibition. From 1975 to 1989, Livingston was chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she organized exhibitions of the work of photographers Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1979) and Lee Miller (1989). She also organized The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, which was shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1998. She is currently working as an editor for a Richard Diebenkorn catalogue raisonné project.

In her lecture, Livingston will explore the variety of ways that the American West has recently been depicted by photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Allan Dutton and then relate their work to Avedon’s In the American West photographs. She will also address the conflicting reactions that audiences have had to the portraits in this exhibition.

The original exhibition of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon opened in 1985 at the Amon Carter Museum to both great praise and intense criticism. Assertive, controversial, and graphically striking, the portraits in the exhibition generated extensive and at times heated discussion about the nature of portraiture, photography and the true identity of the American West. Avedon’s oversize portraits of working-class westerners have become icons in photographic history, and the project stands as a definitive expression of the power of photographic art.

Seating for the free October 22 lecture is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 10 a.m.

The Star-Telegram is the official print sponsor of the Amon Carter Museum.