Photograph by Ken Heyman. Courtesy of the photographer. All rights reserved.
Friday, February 27, 4:00 – 6:00 PM ET
Einstein Auditorium, Barney Building
34 Stuyvesant Street, New York, NY, 10003
RSVP Here
Join us for “I Only Want to Paint Screening and Conversation on Tom Wesselmann,” a Preserving Legacies Colloquium at NYU Steinhardt, with Susan Davidson (author of Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude), Jeffrey Sturges (Director of Exhibitions, The Estate of Tom Wesselmann) and Huffa Frobes-Cross (Tom Wesselmann Catalogue Raisonné Project Manager, WPI). Following a screening of Klaus Benden’s documentary I Only Want to Paint, we will consider examples from the more extensive cache of audio footage recorded during the filming to discuss Wesselmann’s processes, his artistic influences, and legacy.
For those unable to attend the colloquium in person, we invite you to join us virtually for the conversation portion following the documentary screening at 4:45 pm ET. Zoom registration for virtual attendance is available here.
Jeffrey Sturges is the director of exhibitions for the Estate of Tom Wesselmann. He was hired by Wesselmann in 1989 as a studio assistant and has worked closely with the Wesselmann family since the artist’s death in 2004. Sturges has played a central role in overseeing the artist’s major public exhibitions, including the first North American retrospective touring exhibition, as well as the recent survey Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann and… at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2024.
Susan Davidson is an independent curator and scholar specializing in Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, with particular expertise in Robert Rauschenberg’s work. She served as Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2002-2017), where she organized exhibitions including Jackson Pollock: Exploring Alchemy and Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective. Previously, she was Collections Curator at The Menil Collection, Houston (1985-2002). Davidson holds advanced degrees in art history from the Courtauld Institute, London, and George Washington University.
Huffa Frobes-Cross is the project manager of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s Tom Wesselmann and Florine Stettheimer Digital Catalogue Raisonnés. They helped develop the WPI’s digital corpus model, and have spoken widely on digital catalogues raisonnés methods and practices. Frobes-Cross received a PhD from Columbia University in 2016, and has studied art history and philosophy at DePaul University, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Bard College.
I Only Want to Paint [2:46:41], a lengthy cache of documentary footage, was filmed for the documentary of the same title, and captures life in Tom Wesselmann’s studio in 1998. It straddles a fine line between documentary, oral history, and diary. In it, a skeleton filmmaking crew spends days in Wesselmann’s studio, watching attentively as Wesselmann and his studio staff make decisions over color, collage materials, and scale.