The Twelve: Art Exhibition

In the spring of 1911, Rockwell Kent organized An Independent Exhibition of the Paintings and Drawings of Twelve Men. Kent’s exhibition was a pointed response to his mentor Robert Henri’s Independent Artists show of 1910 and Henri’s landmark exhibition of The Eight at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908. This discussion of alternative exhibition strategies will illuminate the conflicted nature of American modernism in the first decades of the 20th century.

This is a special program presented free of charge by the Sansom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports numerous causes. Since 2001, the foundation has held a series of scholarly lectures to celebrate and commemorate the leadership of the late C. Richard Hilker, its past president.

Charles Brock is Associate Curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He organized the widely acclaimed George Bellows retrospective for the National Gallery of Art in 2012 and curated the 2006 exhibition Charles Sheeler: Across Media. In 2014 he co-authored the catalogue Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In with Nancy Anderson