Bridgeport Brass: Labor, Politics & Art Panel Discussion

 In conjunction with the exhibition Bridgeport at Work, join us for a special conversation and visual presentation exploring the connections between the labor movement and the significance of Robert Lambdin’s brass murals in art history. Delve into ideas of union membership, advertising, and propaganda at Bridgeport Brass with Cecelia Bucki, PhD, Professor of History at Fairfield University, and Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, Executive Director of the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center and Town of Westport Curator with the Westport Public Art Collections.

$5 suggested donation

About the Speakers

Kathleen Motes Bennewitz is executive director of the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center in Nyack, NY, and also serves as Town of Westport Curator with the Westport Public Art Collections. After curatorial positions at the Amon Carter Museum and Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, and in education at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she served as Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Greenwich Historical Society (the historic site of the Cos Cob art colony) and Fairfield Museum and History Center. She has curated exhibits on American art and artists over her career and earned art history degrees from Princeton University (AB) and the University of Delaware (MA).

Cecelia Bucki, PhD has been Professor of History at Fairfield University for the past twenty-five years, after previously teaching at Hamilton College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. Her specialties within U.S. History are social, labor and working-class, and immigration and ethnic history. Her main research interest is the nexus of U.S. 20th-century labor and urban politics, as demonstrated in her first book, the award-winning Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915-1936 (University of Illinois Press, 2001). She has worked deeply in the nineteenth-century urban and industrial history of Connecticut, including a study and museum script for the Mattatuck Museum on the industrialization of Waterbury. At the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center, she is focusing on the 1880s-era transition of Bridgeport’s South End to industrial production and the arrival of European immigrants to the neighborhood. Her broader experience in local history has been as editor-in-chief of the journal Connecticut History Review from 2011-2017.