American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams with Sarah Greenough

For 50 years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, discusses American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams. This program will explore works from not only the artist’s most important projects but also lesser-known ones that depict suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and stores, as well as rivers, skies, the prairie, and the ocean.

*Doors open at 5 pm with cash bar. Event hosted in the Nightingale Sky Room.

Debra and Dennis Scholl Distinguished Speaker Series

Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Prior to coming to the Gallery, Greenough received her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico where she studied with the noted photographic historian Beaumont Newhall. In 1978 she was awarded a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Gallery where she has worked ever since. In 1990 she became the founding curator of the department of photographs and has been responsible for establishing and growing the National Gallery’s collection of photographs, which now numbers more than 21,000 works made between 1839 and the present. She also established the program for photography at the National Gallery, which now presents two to three photography exhibitions per year in the museum’s dedicated photography galleries, as well as many smaller installations.