2025 Finzi-Contini Lecture at the Whitney Humanities Center
Welcome: Cajetan Iheka, Director, Whitney Humanities Center
Introduction: Meghan O’Rourke, Editor, The Yale Review
Using the life and work of the neglected Norwegian painter Anna Eva Bergman, the lecture examines the problem of justice in the context of female creativity and asks whether biographical and imaginative solutions are a means of constructing the missing value-system around works made by women. Can the techniques of fiction be bent to the service of the obscured reality that lies behind visual art?
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent novel, Parade. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.