Live at the Frick: Hisham Matar on Siena and the Imagination
In his remarkable 2019 book A Month in Siena, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hisham Matar describes Siena as “not only an allegory or a state of mind, but the self as city, modest and particular yet never totally knowable…” In this rare talk, the author will discuss his personal relationship to Siena and the ways in
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which the city has informed his imagination and the imagination of other artists, including the sculptors in the exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. Hisham Matar is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of three novels and two works of memoir. His novels include In the Country of Men (2008), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won numerous international prizes; Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune; and My Friends (2024), a novel about exile, friendship, and family, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Matar’s memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016) won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second memoir, A Month in Siena (2019), offers a meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape and shed further light on the present world around us. Matar is a professor at Barnard College and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. He lives in London and New York. Principal Cultural Sponsor Leadership support is provided by an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper and by Margot and Jeremiah M. Bogert, Elizabeth M. and Jean-Marie R. Eveillard, and The Christian Humann Foundation. Major support is provided by Clémence and William von Mueffling, Fondazione Bracco, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, The Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund for Exhibition Programming, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Additional support is provided by Filippo Benappi; Andrew Butterfield and Claire Schiffman; The Helen Clay Frick Foundation; Mr. and Mrs. Hubert L. Goldschmidt; Jon and Barbara Landau; Wendy Lewison; Carlo Orsi, Trinity Fine Art; Jane Richards; Sabina and Harlan Stone; the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation; Bosilika An in honor of the Abbruzzese Family; Eric Blair-Joannou; Loren Davis; Bailey Foote; and Alexander Mason Hankin.