Image: Bates College Museum of Art, New York
Christopher Reed’s talk, 'Moving Feelings: Kinesthetic Empathy and Queer Affiliation in the Art of Carl Sprinchorn, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley,' is scheduled for Monday, November 2, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. at the Olin Arts Center in Lewiston, Maine.
The three American modernist painters explored the physical sensations of connection among bodies and with landscapes through what 19th-century philosophers and 20th-century neuroscientists called 'kinesthetic empathy.' The event’s framing challenges the European avant-garde’s commitment to aesthetics of alienation by presenting the painters’ work through its exploration of connection among bodies and landscapes.
Reed will examine how kinesthetic empathy intersects with Queer Theory to promote forms of affiliation described by the event as 'unruly.'
Reed is Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at Penn State University, where he directs the interdisciplinary PhD program in Visual Studies. His scholarship and teaching address modern art and design in relation to the ways visual culture has expressed and sustained subcultural identities. He is the author of 'Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas' and co-author of 'If Memory Serves: AIDS, Gay Men, and the Promise of the Queer Past.'
