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William Paterson to Present Lecture about Artist Ben Shahn on Tuesday, April 5

Diana L. Linden, author of Ben Shahn's New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene, will speak on Tuesday, April 5 at 5:30 p.m. in the Atrium Auditorium at William Paterson University.

Linden will discuss the role of Jewish identity in Shahn's works, especially in his murals of the 1930s.

Ben Shahn was one of the most significant 20th century American artists. He was a painter, photographer, illustrator, graphic designer and muralist. He lived and worked from the mid-1930s until his death in 1969 in Roosevelt, NJ, which was called NJ Homesteads, until it was renamed after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. One of the University’s art buildings, Ben Shahn Center for the Arts, was named after Ben Shahn.

Linden, a historian of American art, served as visual essayist for City of Promises: The History of Jews in New York, 1654–Present (three-volume series, Deborah Dash Moore, ed.), which was selected for National Jewish Book Award's Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award, and co-edited The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Americas with Alejandro Anreus and Jonathan Weinberg. She received a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY in 1997.