A special conversation with panelists Kathleen A. Foster and Anne Classen Knutson about notable artists Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson and their depictions of women in their art. Moderated by Nantucket Historical Association Chief Curator & Obed Macy Research Chair Michael R. Harrison at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.

Kathleen A. Foster is The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). With degrees from Wellesley College (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.), she has held curatorial posts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Indiana University Art Museum, and taught at Williams College, Temple University, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she currently serves as an adjunct professor in the History of Art. She has published work on topics in American art from the late 18th century to the present, with a special focus on the work of Thomas Eakins, including the prize-winning Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (1997), two essays in the PMA’s Thomas Eakins (2001), the reconstruction of Eakins’s own drawing manual (2005), and the recent An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (2012). Other publication and exhibition projects include Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals; Thomas Chambers (1808-1869), American Marine and Landscape Artist; Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line,” and studies of Edwin Austin Abbey, Edwin Dickinson, Daniel Garber, John La Farge, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Andrew Wyeth. Her most recent project at the PMA was the exhibition and book, American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent (2017), with its affiliated research website. She is currently leading the Museum’s team in the reinstallation of the American collections: the Early American Galleries (1650-1850) opened in the spring of 2021, with the second-floor galleries (1850-1950) in planning stages. She is part of the team preparing the exhibition and catalogue, Mary Cassatt at Work, opening at the PMA in April 2024.

Anne Classen Knutson received her B.A. at Duke University and her M.A. in art history at the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in American art history from the University of Pittsburgh. While in Pittsburgh, she had two children and taught art history and design history at Carnegie Mellon University. She has curated three major travelling exhibitions and authored their accompanying catalogues:

In 1999, Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People (This exhibition opened at the High Museum of Art in 1999 and traveled to seven museums finishing at the Guggenheim in New York City).
In 2005, Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic which opened at the High Museum in 2005 and then traveled to The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In 2016, World War I and American Art which opened at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the fall of 2016 and travelled to the New York Historical Society and The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, TN.
Since 2019, Anne has been a consulting curator for the Nantucket Historical Association and has curated three American art exhibitions for them.

She is developing a new American art exhibition on Black and White women in the work of Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson which will be her fourth travelling exhibition and one that will come to Nantucket in 2025.
Anne has invited a convening of ten senior American art curators and historians to travel to the NHA this June to advise and consult as she creates her Homer/ Johnson exhibition.

Michael R. Harrison has held curatorial positions at the National Building Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and the Glasgow Museum of Transport. He is the author of numerous books and articles, as well as nearly seventy historical reports on maritime, architectural, and engineering topics for U.S. National Park Service’s Heritage Documentation Programs. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a master’s degree in museum studies from the George Washington University.