Dress Code: Edward Hopper, Urban Solitude, and the Clothing of Modern Life

Explore the artwork of Edward Hopper in this lecture by Dr. James Denison, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and Kalamazoo College. Denison’s presentation will consider the use of fashion in Edward Hopper’s paintings of urban American life, interpreting his simplified representations of clothes as a strategy crucial to the sense of isolation and emotional restraint often associated with his work. Hopper’s paintings of the 1920’s, ’30s, and ’40s only represent a limited portion of the fashion landscape of the era, a potent choice given the widely held notion that his pictures thematize the psychological experience of modern life. A native of the DC area and a graduate of Bowdoin College, James completed his PhD in art history at the University of Michigan, where he wrote a thesis on the connections between the Stieglitz Circle and racism in the interwar U.S. In 2023 he joined Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts as a postdoctoral fellow.