JUN 9 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
The Afterlife of Hilma af Klint
Jodi Hauptman & Julia Voss
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What happens when an artist becomes a global phenomenon? In the past decade the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint has risen to international fame. Her works have been exhibited in museums from Stockholm, Berlin, São Paulo and New York to Sydney and Tokyo. Beginning May 11, The Museum of Modern Art will present the exhibition Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, featuring a portfolio of drawings shown for the very first time. What drives the 21st century enthusiasm for Hilma af Klint’s work? What are the future prospects? What factors shape an artist’s afterlife? Join Jodi Hauptman and Julia Voss in discussing af Klint's legacy.
Jodi Hauptman is The Richard Roth Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. She is opening this May at MoMA and on view through September: Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, with a focus on the artist’s engagement with the natural world. Her many exhibitions include Cézanne Drawing (2021), Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (2020), Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty (2016), Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), and Georges Seurat: The Drawings (2007). Hauptman has lectured widely on modern and contemporary art and has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and scholarly journals, on such subjects as Sophie Taueber-Arp, Medardo Rosso, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Léopold Survage. Her publications have been recognized by the Association of American Publishers, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. An advocate for collaborations between curators and conservators, Hauptman received the College Art Association/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (2019). A class of 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, she holds an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University.
Julia Voss is the author of "Hilma af Klint. A Biography", published in English by Chicago University Press. It was a bestseller and short-listed for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (non-fiction) in 2020. She co-curated "Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future" at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2024. She is currently a research associate in the Department of the President at Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and honorary professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Art History at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Among other awards she received a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin in 2016/7 and the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose by the German Academy for Language and Literature in 2009.