CAM Talk – Exhibition Series: Castaway: Mark Rothko on the Beach, by Adam Greenhalgh

Saturday, August 1, 2026 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Downtown Campus Auditorium 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA 01930 Registration Required This lecture will be recorded. Ticketing Options: Individual Lecture Tickets— SOLD OUT CAM Members $5, Non-Members (Adult) $30. Additional prices available when registering. Tickets do not include admission to the special exhibition. Exhibition Lecture Series Package Tickets — SOLD OUT CAM Members $25, Non-Members (Adult) $100. Additional prices available when registering. Tickets include five lectures and admission to the special exhibition after the talk on July 22. Click here to become a member and save! Mark Rothko did not like the beach. And yet it figures prominently, literally and figuratively, in his work. This lecture will trace Rothko’s engagement with the beach, from early watercolors made on Cape Ann alongside Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb to symbolic evocations in surrealistic paintings and drawings of the 1940s. His late abstract paintings of the 1960s also arguably reverberate like towering cliffs with the sounds of the shore. Rothko’s works will be considered alongside artists for whom the coast offered rich material, including Edvard Munch, Caspar David Friedrich, and J.M.W. Turner. The beach has long figured as a liminal zone well suited for symbolic treatments of existential themes—love, sex, death, spirituality. Rothko’s seaside subjects are no different. Adam Greenhalgh is associate curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He has been lead author since 2015 of the catalogue raisonné Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper. His scholarship has appeared widely in journals, exhibition and collection catalogues, including contributions to Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press (2013), which he co-curated; Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery (2016); and Facture (2020), the National Gallery’s journal of technical art history and conservation. Most recently, he was curator of Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper (2023) and author of the companion volume. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland, an MA from Williams College, and a BA from the University of Virginia. Image Credit: Philip G. Cavanaugh (1931–2022), Mark Rothko on the beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1958. © Philip G. Cavanaugh Estate.