Guest Lecture with Keith Davis, Senior Curator of Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Keith Davis, senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, will present an illustrated lecture related to the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art’s current photography exhibition, The Hill Becomes the Valley. The lecture will be at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 28, in Stauffacher Theatre on the State Fair Community College Sedalia campus.

The exhibit features a collection of landscape photography that was given to the Daum by P. John Owen, a native of Sedalia, in memory of his parents P. Cecil and Marceille F. Owen, also Sedalia natives. The event is free and open to the public.

Davis will explore significant themes in the Hill Becomes the Valley, including an overview of 20^th century landscape photography and the influence of photographers like Ansel Adams on subsequent generations of photographers. The exhibit features 69 photographs by 25 photographers and primarily portrays the inspirational beauty of the American West and Southwest. The collection contains two prints by Adams, including his well-known Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite of 1960.

Davis is one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of photography. In addition to his position as senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Davis also serves as an advisor to the Hall Family Foundation. He received a master’s degree in 1979 in art history from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. After a research internship at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 1978-79, he became Curator of the Fine Art Collections, Hallmark Cards, Inc. Upon the gift to the museum of the Hallmark Photographic Collection, in December 2005, Davis became the Nelson-Atkins’s founding curator of photography.

Since 1979, he has curated some 80 exhibitions, many of which have been toured to leading museums across the United States and, internationally, from Sydney, Australia, to Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition to teaching and lecturing widely on the history of photography, he is the author of nearly 20 catalogues and books, including An American Century of Photography, From Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999); The Origins of American Photography, From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-885 (HFF/NAMA/Yale, 2007); and The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Work, New York 1949-50(HFF/NAMA/Yale, 2009). His various awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-87) for his work on the Civil-War era photographer George N. Barnard. He was honored to be featured in James Stourton’s Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945 (Scala, 2007).

Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free. For more information, call (660) 530-5888 or visit www.daummuseum.org.