The Creative Mind Humanities Lecture Series is back for its 33rd year at Amarillo College, and this time the focus is The Golden Age of Spain.

Midday and evening lectures at AC – entirely free and open to the public – are slated on Feb. 18, Feb. 25 and March 3, featuring the expertise of guest lecturers from Miami of Ohio, Texas A&M and Johns Hopkins universities.

The daytime lectures are at 12:30 p.m. in the Concert Hall Theater, and the evening lectures are at 7:30 p.m. in the Bud Joyner Auditorium, Downtown Campus. Here’s what’s in store:

Feb. 18—Dr. Andrew Casper, Miami of Ohio
Day: El Greco Before Spain    
Evening: El Greco and Cultural Identity

Prof. Casper’s first lecture explores El Greco’s early work as he negotiated the rich and complex cultures of his native Crete, with its lasting Byzantine artistic legacy, and those of Venice and Rome during the Italian Renaissance. In his evening lecture, he extends these themes into consideration of El Greco’s status a painter in foreign places, where his Greek identity could be highlighted for professional gain.

Feb. 25—Dr. Hilaire Kallendorf, Texas A&M
Day: Cervantes, Philosopher
Evening: The Paradox of Marginal Autobiography

Prof. Kellendorf examines the works of novelist Miguel de Cervantes as they connect to three distinct philosophical schools or movements: skepticism, cynicism and sophistry, and, through comparisons to Plato and Descartes, she will address the innovative and original aspects of his thinking. Her second lecture focuses on what constitutes the genre of autobiography in the Renaissance period by an examination of how scribes, through Inquisitorial scrutiny, literally rewrote the histories of the largely illiterate – heroes, heretics and hermaphrodites – who struggled to make their own voices heard.

March 3—Dr. Richard Kagan, Johns Hopkins
Day: The Spanish Craze: America & Texas Discover the Arts & Cultures of the Hispanic World
Evening: The Cult of El Greco: Critics, Collectors & Connoisseurs

Prof. Kagan examines how the ‘craze’ for Spain paradoxically manifested itself in U.S. art, architecture, literature, fashion and design at the close of the 19th century, even as Spain and the U.S. went to war. His evening lecture focuses on the start of the 20th century, at which time museums and collectors throughout the U.S. demonstrated a new, virtually unprecedented interest in the art of Golden Age Spain, with particular emphasis on the discovery of El Greco as an artist of genius and how “Grecomania” swiftly spread across the country. 

In conjunction with AC’s Lecture Series, the Amarillo Public Library is featuring an exhibit now through March 10 titled “El Greco of Toledo and Spanish Culture in the Golden Age.”

For more information about the 2016 Creative Mind Humanities Lecture Series at Amarillo College, please contact Kristin Edford at 806-371-5205, or visit actx.edu/humanities.

February 17, 2016