Please join the Visual Studies Research Institute for a book talk by Ruth E. Iskin, Professor Emerita, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This event is co-sponsored by the Academic Engagement Network and the USC Department of Art History.

Mary Cassatt is usually presented as an American artist in today’s museums in the United States, although she lived in France most of her adult life and joined the French Impressionist group. In her recent book, Iskin argues that rather than defining her as either an American artist or a French Impressionist, we can best understand Cassatt through the complexity of her multiple identities as an American patriot, a committed French Impressionist, and a suffragist. This is the first comprehensive study to examine Cassatt’s life, work, and legacy through the prism of a transatlantic framework. It re-envisions Cassatt in the context of her transatlantic network, friendships, exhibitions, politics, and legacy.

Ruth E. Iskin’s most recent book, Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, was published by the UC Press in 2025. Earlier, she published The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s and Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting. She is the editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World and the co-editor of Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera. Her numerous articles have been published in journals, books, and museum exhibition catalogs, and her work has been translated into nine languages. In recent years, her research has been supported by the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (CASVA), to the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the French National Institute for Art History in Paris (INHA). She obtained her PhD from UCLA in 1998, and is Professor Emerita of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.