Margaret and Terry Stent Conversation in American Art
April 2, 2026 | 7–8 p.m.
Location: High Museum of Art
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.
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Join us for the Margaret and Terry Stent Distinguished Conversation in American Art as we reexamine the High Museum of Art’s American Art collection. Exploring the work of the nineteenth century Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis, this program features Anni Pullagura, Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art at the High in conversation 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. This timely discussion will deepen thinking around Lewis’s artistic practice and her presence in nineteenth century American sculpture, while considering how to tell more thoughtful stories about historic American art.
About the Speakers
Anni Pullagura, PhD, joined the High in November 2024 as the Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art. Pullagura is responsible for the growth and development of the museum’s collection of American paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints by academically trained artists working in the United States from the seventeenth century through the 1960s, as well as related exhibitions and programs. Pullagura previously served as the inaugural postdoctoral fellow offered jointly by the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., while also serving as a consulting assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA/Boston). In her fellowship, she worked with colleagues on the research and interpretation of the museums’ pre-twentieth-century collections. She will work closely with Katherine Jentleson, Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-taught Art, and with curators of other collections whose holdings include works by American artists, on a major reinstallation of the American art galleries, set to open later this year.
Dr. Shawnya L. Harris is the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, a position she has held since 2015. She began her museum career in North Carolina and holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University.
Harris is currently co-curator of Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone, a major traveling exhibition opening in February 2026, and co-editor of its accompanying scholarly publication. Her previous exhibitions include Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. Harris’s scholarship and curatorial work have been recognized with multiple honors, including awards from the Southeastern Museums Conference and the Southeastern College Art Conference. In 2018, she received the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History for Expanding Tradition: Selections from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection. A 2021 alumna of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, she was named Museum Professional of the Year by the Georgia Association of Museums in 2022.
Caitlin Meehye Beach is associate professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her teaching and research focus on transatlantic art histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which includes the study of art’s relationship to histories of racial capitalism and racial formation; sculpture and the decorative arts; and the practice of art history at the intersection of Black Studies and Asian American Studies. She is the author of Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (University of California Press, 2022), which was the recipient of the 35th Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art and the Phillips Book Prize. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Decorative Arts Trust, among others. Before becoming associate professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2024, Beach was assistant professor of art history and affiliated faculty in African and African American Studies at Fordham University, where she also served as interim co-director of the Asian American Studies Program. She holds an A.B. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
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