Inaugural Susman Luminary Lecture with Harry Cooper

The Clyfford Still Museum is proud to inaugurate the Dr. Morris Susman Luminary Lecture, a new annual series featuring artists, intellectuals, and museum leaders whose work exemplifies Still’s creativity and renegade spirit.

For this inaugural lecture, Harry Cooper, Bunny Mellon Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, invites us to reconsider what it means to encounter Still’s paintings. Through close looking and Still’s own words, Cooper explores the museum as a place of refuge—not an escape from the world, but a space where art offers another mode of encounter. Together, we’ll consider how Still’s paintings invite us into an experience that is at once deeply personal and profoundly connected to the world beyond the gallery.