Sarah Burt, the Chan and Clara Ferguson Chief Curator of the C.M. Russell Museum, will deliver a free, public lecture presented by the University of Oklahoma Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West as part of the Merkel Family Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series.

The illustrated lecture, titled “O’Keeffe in Abiquiu: Mid-Century Modernism in a Spanish Colonial House,” is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m., Thursday, October 11, in the Mary Eddy and Fred Jones Auditorium of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Ave., in the OU Arts District.  The public lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

As the Manager for the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation for a decade, Burt offers an in-depth perspective on the artist and her famous New Mexico abode.  Burt will demonstrate how O’Keeffe transformed a dilapidated Spanish Colonial hacienda into her modern home, creating an idiosyncratic blend of traditional 19^th-century adobe architecture and mid-20^th-century modernist design that some consider to be the last great work of art of one of the most well-known and important female artists of early twentieth century America.

Founded in 1998, the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West is the first such university-based program in the nation. The center, which is part of the School of Art and Art History and the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, is dedicated to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in the field of American art history as it relates to the western United States. Through its resource holdings, national symposia, lecture series, course offerings and outreach programs, the Russell Center actively engages students and the public in developing a better understanding of, and appreciation for, 19th- and 20th-century Euro-American and Native American artistic traditions. Special focus is given to the art of Charles M. Russell and his contemporaries.  For more information on the Russell Center, visit the resources section of art.ou.edu. For accommodations on the basis of disability, call (405) 325-5939.