Thomas Hart Benton and His Students

Andrew Thompson is an art scholar, private dealer and an artist. He has been an active member of the professional art community for 25 years specializing in turn of the century American paintings. Thompson studied Fine Art and Art History at Kenyon College and worked at the Owen Gallery in New York for a decade curating numerous exhibitions including Thomas Hart Benton, American Modernism, American Impressionism and The Eight. Since 2008, he has been a private dealer and advisor and has continued independent curatorial work. Thompson is the co-author of the forthcoming Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonne with Dr. Henry Adams and is a member of the Catalogue’s expert committee. He has worked extensively in Benton scholarship and has lectured at the Scarab Club in Detroit and Initiatives in Art and Culture in New York. Most recently he curated an exhibition bringing together parts of Benton’s early mural commission Phantasy Series for the first time in over 70 years. Thompson is also an artist and has a working studio in Brooklyn and the Adirondacks.

Choghakate Kazarian is an art historian and curator specialized in modern and contemporary art. She holds a Master’s degree in art history from the Ecole du Louvre (Paris), a Master’s degree in philosophy from La Sorbonne (Paris) and a PhD in art history from The Courtauld Institute of Art (London). She was curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and taught at the Ecole du Louvre. She has curated exhibitions on artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Karel Appel, and Henry Darger. Her latest exhibitions include Immersion. The Origins: 1949–1969 at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (Switzerland), Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé at The Jewish Museum (New York), and New Matter: The Sergei Djavadian Collection of Armenian Abstraction at the National Gallery of Armenia. She recently wrote an essay about Jackson Pollock’s relationship to Thomas Hart Benton and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Henry Adams is a graduate of Harvard College and received his M.A. and PH.D from Yale, where he received the Frances Blanshard Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in art history. He is the author of over 450 publications exploring American art from the 17^th century to the present day, including four books about Thomas Hart Benton. The painter Andrew Wyeth described his book Eakins Revealed as “without doubt, the most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist.”

Randall (Randy) Griffey is the Head Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and oversees all aspects of the museum’s curatorial program including research, exhibitions, acquisitions, and collections. He is leading the major reinstallation and reinterpretation for all three floors of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection galleries. Prior to the Smithsonian, he was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he substantially increased the representation of women and artists of color.

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