FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Sharyn Turner
336.758.5580
  
or Sarah R. Smith
336.758.5524
  
 
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (June 11, 2012) – Reynolda House Museum of American Art will present a lecture by Susan Harlan titled "Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral: Authenticating Shakespeare at Winston-Salem's Pageant of 1916" on Tuesday, June 26 at 5:30 p.m.

Admission is free for members and students, $5 for non-members. For information, please call 336.758.5150 or visit reynoldahouse.org.

Harlan, assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, will take the audience back to 1916 when many communities, including Winston-Salem, recognized the tercentenary of William Shakespeare's death with pageants. Held on the campus of Salem College, Winston-Salem's celebration included reproductions of several buildings from Stratford-upon-Avon, an outdoor production of "The Winter's Tale" and elaborate gardens supervised by Katharine Smith Reynolds, who selected verses to accompany flowers grown in Reynolda's greenhouses.

The talk is held in conjunction with Reynolda House's current exhibition, "A Genius for Place: American Landscapes of the Country Place Era," on view through Aug. 5. Like Reynolda House, the estates featured in the exhibition enjoyed their own pageants and celebrations. Harlan will explore the themes of authenticity and reproduction in historical pageantry of the period.

This spring, the museum launched a project using QR codes to share archival images of the estate with visitors. A Shakespearean Garden of Flowers and Verses was planted in the front garden of the museum, where visitors can enjoy blooms inspired by Shakespeare's verse and use a smartphone to scan codes placed on small signs to see images and read information about the 1916 Winston-Salem pageant.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is one of the nation's premier American art museums, with masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its collection.  Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features changing exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings and other events.  The museum is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the historic 1917 estate of Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband, Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolda House and adjacent Reynolda Gardens and Reynolda Village feature a spectacular public garden, dining, shopping and walking trails. For more information, please visit reynoldahouse.org or call 336.758.5150.

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