This is the first of four lectures in America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom, the 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Mabel O. Wilson of Columbia University.

Wilson explores the vision of statesman, architect, and planter Thomas Jefferson in designing Virginia’s new statehouse, a neoclassical building based on a Roman temple to symbolize and enable the power of “the people” to govern. She argues that by analyzing Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which includes an aesthetic and intellectual appraisal of works by enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley and was written during the same period he designed the capitol, we can better understand the complex relationship between democratic ideals and racial difference that shaped the nation’s new civic architecture.

The series continues on:
Sunday, March 16, 2:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 23, 2:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 30, 2:00 p.m.