Virtual Color! Lecture Series | Looking Closely at Robert Weingarten’s Photography of Painters’ Palettes with Shannon Perich

Location: Online

With special guest Robert Weingarten

Free and open to the public | Registration required to receive Zoom link

This lecture will be hosted via Zoom Webinar. A Zoom link is provided in your confirmation email and will include simple instructions on how to join with your computer, mobile phone or tablet. 

Robert Weingarten’s series Palettes, featured as The Rockwell’s spotlight exhibition this season, offers an opportunity to explore scale, perception, color, and the history of photography. Shannon Perich, curator, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has worked closely with Weingarten for almost two decades, bringing together the largest museum collection of his work. The lecture, with Shannon and special guest, Robert Weingarten himself, will situate Weingarten’s Palettes series within the artist’s larger body of work and the history of photography. As an early adopter of digital photography and printing, Weingarten imagined new ways of seeing and image-making. “Palette” refers to both the mixing surface and range of colors an artist uses. Playing with the multiple definitions as we approach his large-scale close-ups of painter’s palettes invites us to think about the acts of painting, photographic image-making, and our own understanding of how we see. 

About Shannon Thomas Perich

Shannon Thomas Perich is the curator in the Photographic History Collection, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History where she has served for almost three decades. The author of books, articles, essays, and blogs, her exhibitions have been seen at the museum and across the county in co-curated and traveling exhibitions. Perich has periodically served as an adjunct professor at the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore. She is currently serving as chair of the July 2026 conference for the International Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCSA). 

Thank you!

The 2025 Color! Lecture Series is made possible by CCU Wealth Strategies.