Join us for an afternoon of conversation, reflection, and insight as artists from the acclaimed exhibition Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni gather to discuss the enduring power of the museum, the legacy of modernism, and painting as a medium of freedom and innovation.  Moderated by curator and professor Lisa Wainwright, ideas about the canonical giants who stimulated these artists—Turner, Monet, Gauguin, O’Keefe, Pollock—as well as more far-ranging influences of Navajo textiles, Roman sculpture, and video art from the Art Institute of Chicago, will underscore the museum as a living archive and a potent source of knowledge, complexity, and creative friction. Wainwright will ask what it means to return to modernism in a time of radical plurality? How do contemporary artists reconcile inspiration with critique, or heritage with invention? This panel will explore the convergences between tradition and transformation, medium specificity in an age of digital noise, identity and abstraction, and politics and painting.