Millson Lecture
GRETCHEN TAYLOR MILLSON DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
This annual lecture series was established in 2011 by John Millson, a former mathematics professor at UCLA (1980-90), in loving memory of his wife Gretchen Taylor Millson. Each year the Department invites a distinguished woman artist or art historian to give a lecture in Gretchen’s honor, who was especially interested in the overlap of feminism and art.
Gretchen Taylor Millson was born in Los Angeles on June 20, 1938 and graduated from UCLA in 1961 with a B.A. in Art. Known in the art world as Gretchen Glicksman, she worked at a number of distinguished arts institutions during her career, including the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), the International Exhibition Program of the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), and the University Art Museum in Berkeley. With urging from Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, she opened Womanspace in 1973, the first gallery in Los Angeles entirely devoted to art by women.
Honorees
2023
Hollis Clayson
Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Northwestern University
R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, 2022-23, The Huntington Library
“The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower”
2022
Mary Kelly
Judge Widney Professor
Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California
“The Practical Past: Situating feminism’s intergenerational legacy in project-based works from 1973 to the present”
2019
Mary Miller
Director
J. Paul Getty Research Institute
“The Splendid and Ever-revealing Maya Murals at Bonampak”
2018
Z.S. Strother
Riggio Professor of African Art
Columbia University
“Masks and the Aesthetic Emotions”
2017
Rose Marie San Juan
Professor
University College London
“The Rib Within: Eve and Early Modern Wax Anatomical Sculpture”
2016
Michele Bogart
Professor
Stony Brook University
“Hot Town, Sculpture in the City: Power, Process, Patronage, and Public Art in New York After 1955”
2015
Mabel O. Wilson
Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor, Architecture
Columbia University
“Other Monumentalities: Race, Style, and National Architecture”
2014
Madeline H. Caviness
Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus
Tufts University
“The Jewish Hat: Badge of Shame or Mark of Honor?”
2013
Anne Wagner
Chair Emerita, Dept of Art History
University of California, Berkeley
“Rosemarie Trockle’s Wonderland: A Feminist World View”
2012
Sally Stein
Professor Emerita, Dept of Art History and Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine
“Between f/stops and F-starts: Women and Photography between the “Waves” of Feminism”
2011
Faith Wilding
Artist, and formerly Associate Professor of Performance Art
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“Bread and Roses: Making Feminist Art and Politics”
About Gretchen Taylor Millson
