MOUNT VERNON, VA. — The 2016 Mount Vernon Art and Architecture Symposium, “Brushstrokes and Buildings: Art, Architecture, and the Promise of America,” will draw together leading curators, historians, art historians, and preservationists as they reconsider iconic images and landmark structures of early America May 27–29 at the Fred W. Smith National Library.

John Gadsby Chapman painted this view of the east side of Mount Vernon in the 1830s.

Participants can retrace the steps of artists whose unforgettable images of the Revolution and its heroes still shape American identity. Revisit long-lost interiors that gave physical form to the ideals and aspirations of the new Republic, from Baltimore garden rooms, to Boston parlors, to Mount Vernon’s piazza.

The lectures include “All Dressed Up and No Place To Go,” by Cary Carson; “Thomas Jefferson: Framing the Arts in America,” by Susan Stein; “The ‘Front of Faded Red:’ Imaging Washington’s Boyhood and its Home,” by Philip Levy; “Colonial Upstarts or Harbingers of a New World to Come?: Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley,” by Emily Ballew Neff; “From ‘I Neat Landskip… for a Chimny’ to views ‘worth a voyage across the Atlantic’: Landscape Representation in George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello,” buy Anna O. Marley; “The Country House in American Art,” by William L. Coleman; “John Gadsby Chapman: Painting Virginia’s Historical Legacy in the 1830s,” by Lydia Brandt and Adam Erby; “‘Anything Work Looking Up:’ Edward Lamson Henry and American Architecture” by Amy Kurtz Lansing; “‘Splendid and Fascinating:’ Boston Interiors in the New Republic,” by Jane and Richard Nylander; and “Thomas Cole: The Unknown Architect” by Annette Blaugrund.

The cost is $250. The symposium will take place in the library’s David M. Rubenstein Leadership Hall, 3600 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway.

For more information, contact Emily Rosa at erosa@mountvernon.org or 703-667-3620.