Overview & Events

Gallery Talk: ARTISTICA! Where Hollywood Meets Art History
Saturday, July 18, 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Known for her photography across politics, music, and the arts, Bonnie Lautenberg creates a lively visual history lesson by pairing iconic works of art with film stills from the same year. 

As you look, you begin to see art and film side by side in a new way, noticing how images “speak” to one another across media. Her process is intuitive—sometimes she starts with a painting and searches for a cinematic counterpart; sometimes a film image leads her to an artwork. Lautenberg began this series in 2017 and continues to expand it, including new work created especially for this exhibition at American University Museum.

As you move through the exhibition, you’ll encounter pairings that span decades of film and art. René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928) meets a still from The Mysterious Lady, starring Greta Garbo and Conrad Nagel. The Golden Age of Hollywood appears in a pairing of the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story with a painting by Stuart Davis, once owned by Lautenberg’s parents. Singin’ in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, joins a work by Yayoi Kusama, noting a shared texture between Kusama’s surface and the brick and rainfall in the still. In another instance, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl meets Tom Wesselmann’s American Nude No. 99, where a subtle echo, a cigarette, links the two images.

Across these works, Lautenberg places two powerful visual languages on a single plane. The result is open-ended: a field of formal, emotional, and historical connections that invites each viewer to look, compare, and draw their own conclusions.