Professor to share history of Florida’s landscape artists
Keri Watson, associate professor of art history at the University of Central Florida, will speak on Tuesday, Feb. 18 at 2 p.m. ET at the library’s Tuesdays at Two program.
Her lecture, titled “Picturing Paradise: From James Audubon to the Florida Highwaymen,” will highlight how Florida’s landscape has inspired artists for centuries. The state provided aesthetic vision to early artists Titian Ramsay Peale and John James Audubon who came to the state in search of native flora and fauna. They were followed by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, Winslow Homer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, who were lured by its natural beauty and warm climate – and left a rich legacy of art history behind.
Watson earned a PhD from Florida State University in 2010. She is a co-executive editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and a speaker for the Florida Humanities Council. She teaches upper level courses in 19th and 20th-century and American art, as well as special topics courses on The Art of Walt Disney, Southern Folk Arts, and African American Art.
Her research is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Association of State Colleges and Universities, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The lecture, free and open to the public, will be held at the Corinne Costin Gibson Memorial Public Library at 100 Library Drive in Port St. Joe. It is made possible with support from the Friends of the Gulf County Public Libraries. Refreshments provided by local bakeries will be served prior to the event. For more information, call (850) 229-8879 or visit www.nwrls.com
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.