HANOVER, NH.- American art curator and scholar Mark D. Mitchell will present a slide lecture entitled "Freedom Fighters: John Sloan and the American Moderns in the Dartmouth Collection" on Friday, May 20, at 4:30 P.M. in the Hood Museum of Art's Arthur M. Loew Auditorium. Refreshments will follow in the Kim Gallery. Dr. Mitchell, who received his Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University in 2002, is the Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum in New York. He was formerly a curatorial assistant at the Hood Museum of Art, where he intensively researched works in the museum's collection in preparation for the current exhibition Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art, in which the work of Sloan is featured. Dr. Mitchell authored almost thirty of the entries in the accompanying catalogue, including one that addressed John Sloan's brutally powerful black crayon drawing entitled Ludlow, Colorado, of 1914.

Since its initial publication as a cover illustration both for a socialist newspaper, the New York Call, and soon thereafter the influential magazine The Masses, John Sloan's drawing of a coal miner's suicidal vengeance after the murders of his wife and children has become an icon of American labor history. It is an enduring memorial to the twenty individuals-thirteen of them women and children-who were shot or burned to death when Colorado National Guardsmen fired upon an undefended union tent colony on April 20, 1914, in what was quickly dubbed the Ludlow Massacre. Sloan's drawing is a cornerstone of the Hood's collection of modern drawings and watercolors. Dr. Mitchell will provide the art historical and cultural context for this and other early-twentieth-century American drawings and watercolors featured in the exhibition.

Dr. Mitchell has particular expertise in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art. Prior to his work on the Hood's collection, he was a curatorial assistant at the Princeton University Art Museum, where he catalogued the museum's collection of American drawings and watercolors and subsequently authored nineteen catalogue entries for the first volume of American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum, published in 2004. He also curated the first-ever exhibition of the work of luminist painter Francis A. Silva for Berry-Hill Galleries in New York and authored the accompanying catalogue, published in 2002. Dr. Mitchell is currently writing a catalogue of the art collection at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and is co-organizing a major traveling exhibition for the National Academy Museum entitled Luminism Revisited: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam, 1919-1865, which will open in the fall of 2006.

Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Marks of Distinction is supported in part by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. Its presentation at the Hood Museum of Art is generously supported by the Bernard R. Siskind 1955 Fund and the Hansen Family Fund. Following the exhibition's debut at the Hood Museum of Art, approximately eighty of the works in Marks of Distinction will travel to the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan, from June 24 to September 11, and the National Academy Museum in New York City, from October 20 to December 31.