Johnson to Present Lecture in Conjunction with "Four Freedoms" Exhibition

Melissa Johnson of Illinois State University's School of Art will speak on "Visual Culture and American Modernism in the 1930s and 1940s: Figuration and Abstraction" at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 6, on the main floor of Milner.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Johnson's lecture is part of a lecture series presented by Milner Library in conjunction with the ongoing poster exhibition, "Thoughts on Democracy," reinterpreting Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" posters, continuing through May 7 on the main floor of Milner.  The exhibit, sponsored by the American Democracy Project and Milner Library, also is free and open to the public.

Conceived by the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University in Miami Beach, Fla., "Thoughts on Democracy" brought together 60 renowned contemporary artists and designers to present original works inspired by Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" posters.

Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings were first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, and were later issued by the government as posters for a U.S. war bond drive.  The paintings illustrated the ideals expressed in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's impassioned "Four Freedoms" speech to Congress in 1941, in which he envisioned a "world founded upon four essential human freedoms"-Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

"Thoughts on Democracy" was part of The Wolfsonian's "Celebrating America" series of four exhibitions on view in 2008 and 2009 that examined and celebrated the social, political and personal American experience from the 1930s to the present.  The Wolfsonian was prompted to create the exhibition after receive a gift of the "Four Freedoms" posters.