Margaret and Terry Stent Distinguished Conversation in American Art – High Museum

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EventsMargaret and Terry Stent Distinguished Conversation in American Art

April 2, 2026 | 7–8 p.m.
Location: High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Edmonia Lewis (American, 1845–1907), Columbus, ca. 1865–1867, marble, Gift of the West Foundation in honor of Gudmund Vigtel and Michael E. Shapiro, 2010.71.

The Margaret and Terry Stent Distinguished Conversation in American Art will focus on the High Museum of Art’s American Art collection. This event will specifically explore the work of Edmonia Lewis, a nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous sculptor. It will feature Anni Pullagura, Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art at the High, in discussion with Shawnya Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, and Caitlin Meehye Beach, Associate Professor of Art History at CUNY Graduate Center. The conversation aims to deepen understanding of Lewis’s artistic practice and her role in nineteenth-century American sculpture while considering how to approach narratives surrounding historic American art.

Anni Pullagura, PhD, has been the Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art at the High since November 2024. She is responsible for the development of the museum’s collection of American artworks created between the seventeenth century and the 1960s. Pullagura previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and the National Gallery of Art, and also worked as a consulting assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. She is currently collaborating on a reinstallation of the American art galleries, set to open later this year.

Dr. Shawnya L. Harris has served as the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art since 2015. She began her museum career in North Carolina and earned a Ph.D. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Harris is currently co-curating Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone, a major exhibition opening in February 2026. Her exhibitions include Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, and her work has received multiple awards, including the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in 2018 for her publication Expanding Tradition.

Caitlin Meehye Beach is an associate professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on transatlantic art histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and encompasses the intersection of art history with Black Studies and Asian American Studies. She is the author of Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (2022), which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize. Beach has received various research fellowships from prestigious institutions and previously served as assistant professor of art history at Fordham University.