Unlocking the Parthenon
An art historian by training, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is currently Assistant Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. She holds a BA from Harvard, three master’s Degrees, and a PhD from Columbia, and has taught classes on art at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, where she was one of the top-ranked instructors of the introduction to art history, “Art Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Art.” A regular critic for Artforum, her writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Art in America and Art Journal, and in catalogs published by museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Overview
Over 2,000 years ago, the Athenians erected the Parthenon as a temple to the goddess Athena. By the 19th century, it had become an icon of the achievements of classical Greece, and a key reference for neo-classical art and architecture; its influence is still seen all around us. In this talk, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan explains the beauty of both the building itself and its sculptural decoration, including the hotly-contested “Elgin Marbles.”