Ms. Emily Schiller will give a public lecture at the Norman Rockwell Museum on Saturday April 6, 2013 at 5:30 pm. Ms. Schiller is a 2012 recipient of a Rockwell Center Dissertation Fellowship, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation. Her dissertation, titled “Unsettled Masses: Transportation in American Art During the 1930s and 1940s,” is focused on artistic representations of mass transit during the Great Depression and World War II. It specifically looks at how passengers appear on subways, elevated railways, buses, and commuter trains in American illustration and art. While researching the areas of American art, African American art, and history of photography, she noticed that journeys are a recurring subject in art history. “Whether it is arriving in the ‘New World’ by ship, westward expansion by Conestoga wagon, or connecting the coasts through the railroad—centuries of American art contain people in the midst of travel.”

Don Freeman