The Fairfield University Art Museum will present a lecture on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 5 p.m. featuring Kelley H. Di Dio, PhD, Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont.
The lecture, titled “Sculpting the Past: Art, Identity, and Commemoration,” will discusses the issues around public commemoration of the past, with a particular focus on the Southern United States. The event will take place in the Dogwood Room in the Barone Campus Center at Fairfield University and is free and open to the public.
Register at fairfield.edu/museum/calendar
Dr. Di Dio’s talk forms part of the Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureships in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation, and is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s fall 2025 exhibition Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy, organized by The New York Historical (Bellarmine Hall Galleries, September 19-December 20, 2025). The lecture is the fourth and final in a series of speakers for the exhibition, which has included exhibition curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, PhD (Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy Opening Night Lecture), Marisa Lerer, PhD (“Latinx Monuments in the United States”), and Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, PhD (“Grappling with Heritage”).
Dr. Di Dio is Executive Director of the School of the Arts, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont, where she won the George Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award in 2023 and the Kroepsch Marice Teaching Award in 2016. In addition to over two dozen essays and articles, she has published Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (2011); Leone and Pompeo Leoni: Art and Fame, co-author with Rosario Coppel and Margarita Estella (2013); Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain with Rosario Coppel Aréizaga (2013, paperback 2024); editor, Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy (2015 and paperback 2021); Co-editor, with Tommaso Mozzati, Artistic Circulations between Early Modern Spain and Italy (2020); Friends with Benefits: Artists and Friendship in the Early Modern Period, co-edited with Ilaria Andreoli (2025, in press); and Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy (Brepols, 2025).
About the Exhibition
Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy (organized by The New York Historical) explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed.
For more information, visit fairfield.edu/museum/monuments
Additional Upcoming Exhibition Programming
Art in Focus: Stafford Mantle Northcote, Tong Yin Yee Shung Gun, Chinese Laundry, 1899, oil on canvas
Thursday, November 6, noon
Bellarmine Hall Galleries, Bellarmine Hall
Join Curator of Education Michelle DiMarzo for an informal discussion of this work from the exhibition Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy: Stafford Mantle Northcote, Tong Yin Yee Shung Gun, Chinese Laundry, 1899, oil on canvas. The New York Historical, Gift of George A. Zabriskie, 1946.255. Register at fairfield.edu/museum/calendar.
Virtual Art in Focus: Stafford Mantle Northcote, Tong Yin Yee Shung Gun, Chinese Laundry, 1899, oil on canvas
Thursday, November 6, 1 p.m.
Online
Join Curator of Education Michelle DiMarzo for an informal virtual discussion of this work from the exhibition Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy: Stafford Mantle Northcote, Tong Yin Yee Shung Gun, Chinese Laundry, 1899, oil on canvas. The New York Historical, Gift of George A. Zabriskie, 1946.255.
Register at fairfield.edu/museum/calendar
