42fb8d4902d44fdc87846e866748abb1     THe Art of Resistance-Painting by Candlelight in Mao's China

Local alumni author Shelley Drake Hawks, Ph.D. will discuss the how underground Chinese ink painters survived and produced artwork during the Cultural Revolution.

China's ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) upended the art world in a wrong-headed push to sweep away all artistic conventions.  Chinese ink painters, many of them esteemed professors at art academies, suffered great physical harm and their traditional bird-and-flower and landscape painting faced near extinction. In her book, The Art of Resistance: Painting by Candlelight in Mao's China, Shelley Drake Hawks, Ph.D. tells the story of six persecuted Chinese ink painters who spiritually upheld the soul of art in this soulless time by continuing to paint in their underground world. The author spent twenty years conducting interviews and researching rare materials to uncover the artists' stories as well as their art.  She received both the Millard Meiss Publication Award from the College Art Association and the Best Art Book of 2019 from the International Convention of Asia Scholars, University of Leiden, Netherlands.

Shelley Drake Hawks, Ph.D. is an Adjunct professor in the Humanities at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where she teaches art history and ethics.  She obtained her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, earned her master's degree in Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard University and her doctorate at Brown University in Chinese history and art. Before her teaching career, she coordinated a large exhibition of oil paintings from China in 1987 and worked in the Asiatic Department of the Museum of Fine arts from 1987-1989.

Thursday June 24 7 pm to 8 pm

Members free, non members $5.

A zoom event.  The link will be sent the morning of the event.

The author interviewed artists in China in 1995, 2004 and 2016.  A four part film, The Lotus and the Red Star, features the author's 2016 interviews with Chinese painters.  Watch it free of charge at the website below.

http://arthistorypi.org/books/art-of-resistance

For those interesting in obtaining a copy of the book signed by Dr. Hawks, please contact Shelley directly at Shelley_Hawks@msn.com. The book is available at the discounted price of $40 plus $5 for postage.