Lectures at Watermill Center This year’s series features speakers from a wide range of disciplines By Mark Segal | July 26, 2018 - 12:00pm

The Watermill Center’s annual summer lecture series will open next Thursday evening with “Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil,” a talk by William Middleton, a journalist and editor. Organized by Robert Wilson, the center’s founder and artistic director, this year’s series features speakers from a wide range of disciplines, including a poet, a playwright, a composer, and a professor of mathematics and economics.

The de Menils, whose art collection was one of the largest and most important assembled during the 20th century, settled in the 1940s in Houston, where they subsequently built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum.

Mr. Middleton, who has been the fashion features director for Harper’s Bazaar and the Paris bureau chief for Fairchild Publications, will present a behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the 20th century and the influence wielded by the de Menils through what they collected and built.

Aja Monet, an internationally established poet, educator, and human rights activist of Cuban-Jamaican decent, will speak on Aug. 7. The youngest individual to win the Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, Ms. Monet poses questions in her poetry about the power of the imagination and metaphor to engage issues such as racism, colonialism, and sexism. She was a featured speaker at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, D.C.

The series will shift from culture to politics on Aug. 9 when Eric Maskin, Adams University professor at Harvard, will discuss “How to Improve Presidential Elections” with Claude Grunitzky, the president and a board member of the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation. Dr. Maskin’s areas of expertise include game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, and political economy.

“Get on the Bus: Writing the Opening Scene” will be the subject of a talk on Aug. 14 by Robert O’Hara, a playwright and director whose many honors include the 2018 Herb Alpert Award, the N.A.A.C.P. Best Director and Best Play awards, two Obies, and the Oppenheim Award. His recent plays, “Zombie: The American” and “Barbecue,” premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, respectively.

The series will conclude on Aug. 16 with “Roots and Pulses,” a talk by Nico Muhly, a composer whose influences range from American Minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and others, he has written more than 80 works for the concert stage, including the opera “Marnie” (2017), which will be staged by the Met in the fall.

All talks take place at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15, and advance registration is required. About the Author Mark Segal Arts Assistant/Reporter