Exhibition Opening Conversation: William Blake — Artist, Poet, Maker, and Radical Thinker
Elizabeth Wyckoff, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Timothy Young, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, in conversation about William Blake’s illuminated poems. Moderated by Richard Brodhead, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English Emeritus and Interim Director at the Yale Center for British Art, 2024–25
About this program
Join exhibition cocurators Elizabeth Wyckoff and Timothy Young to learn more about William Blake: Burning Bright, which showcases the YCBA’s impressive collection of works by William Blake (1757–1827). What made the artist and poet unique? The curators provide an overview of Blake's career as presented in the exhibition and then focus on how he defied the norms to create the highly original “illuminated books” at the core of this show. Blake’s invention of a method for printing both image and text from a single copper plate resulted in an unprecedented fusion of art. Intimate in scale and created to be experienced in book form, the colorful pages draw the reader into Blake’s distinctive worldview. Richard Brodhead, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English Emeritus and Interim Director at the Yale Center for British Art, moderates the program.
About Elizabeth Wyckoff
Elizabeth Wyckoff is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the YCBA and has more than thirty years of curatorial and museum experience. She served as the curator and department head of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) from 2010 to 2023. She previously held curatorial positions in the prints and drawings collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. During her tenure at SLAM, Wyckoff curated numerous exhibitions and oversaw several transformative acquisitions, from old masters to contemporary prints and drawings. She has lectured and published extensively on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century historical prints to contemporary works on paper.
About Timothy Young
Timothy Young is Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the YCBA, where he oversees a collection based on Paul Mellon’s personal library. Previously he was Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where he had curatorial oversight of materials related to the arts, humanities, and literature from 1800 through the present. In November 2024, Young served as the Sandars Reader in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, where he delivered lectures on the topic “Resistance to Bibliography.”
About Richard Brodhead
Richard Brodhead is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor Emeritus of English at Yale. From 1972 to 2004, he served on the Yale faculty teaching widely in the fields of English and American Studies. He chaired the Yale Department of English before becoming dean of Yale College in 1993. His scholarly works include The School of Hawthorne; Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America; and The Journals of Charles W. Chestnutt. His writings as dean are collected in The Good of this Place (2004). Brodhead became president of Duke University in 2004, serving for thirteen years. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and cochaired the academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees. For his national role in higher education, Brodhead was given the Academic Leadership Award by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. From 2024 to 2025, he served as Interim Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art.
After the program, join us for informal gallery talks focused on key works in the exhibition.
