“The past is never dead. It is not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
“The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us – viewer and maker – in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury of loss.” – Kara Walker, on her drawing The moral arc of history …(2010)
Writing in his essay collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961), James Baldwin reflects:The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.
Dennis Geronimus is professor and former chair of the Department of Art History at New York University. A graduate of Williams College, he earned his PhD from the University of Oxford. His research interests include artistic crosscurrents between Italy and Northern Europe, as well as between Africa and the Mediterranean; artists’ engagement with the natural world; mythological narrative and other forms of storytelling; and pictorial wit and humor. He is the author of Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (Yale University Press, 2006). In 2015, Dennis co-curated with Gretchen Hirschauer the first-ever exhibition on Piero at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, selected as one of the best exhibitions of the year by the Wall Street Journal. More recently, he has written on the interconnections between Michelangelo, Jacopo da Pontormo, and Vittoria Colonna – and collaborated, in 2021, with Nicholas Hall in New York on Grey Matters, an exhibition conceived around the theme of monochromy and inspired by the rediscovery of Pontormo’s Adam and Evegrisaille. He is currently at work on a monograph titled Jacopo da Pontormo: Overcoming Nature. His scholarship has been supported by The Met, the Clark Art Institute, the Renaissance Society of America, the Warburg Institute, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice – and the NIKI.



