The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College continues its summer lecture series based on the theme, “Women in the Southwest,” with a presentation from Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: Creating Southwest Modernism, on Wednesday, Aug. 8, at 1:30 p.m. in the Center’s Lyceum Room #120.

Mabel Dodge Luhan: patron, muse, writer, and cultural catalyst extraordinaire, played a dominant role in shaping an American Modernism with a singular northern New Mexican flavor, one that embraced the physical and cultural landscapes and honored the cultures and traditions of Pueblos and Hispanos, to whom these Moderns looked as the basis for forging a multi-ethnic nationalism and original American art forms.

Lois Rudnick is Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published and lectured extensively about the artist and writer communities of New Mexico, the complex and contested issues of Anglo patronage, and American Modernism. Her most recent book, Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West accompanied a travelling exhibition with the same title, in 2016-2017. She is currently writing a biography of Taos Pueblo artist Eva Mirabal and her family. Mirabal was the first Native American to publish a comic strip, G. I. Gertie, which she did while serving as a WAC during World War II.

This lecture is free to the public. Parking on campus is free during summer months. The Center of Southwest Studies, now in its fifty-fourth year, provides an active program of free public lectures and events year-round at its museum, research library, and archives facility on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. For more information, please contact the Center’s business office at 970-247-7456 or visit http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu