You're Invited!
Making the Imaginary Real:
Luis Quintanilla's Don Quixote Murals
The Don Quixote murals in Haag Hall at the University of Missouri-Kansas City were painted by Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla in 1941 during his exile from Spain. The murals are notable not only for their artistic merit but also for their historical significance — they are among the few surviving public works by Quintanilla, as many others were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.
Join us for a special lecture. Dr. Patrick Lenaghan will discuss the challenges artists face when illustrating Don Quixote, bringing in examples of artists who successfully illustrated the squire, as well as those who failed. Attendees will then have the chance to view the recently restored murals through a special guided tour and dialogue session with Dr. Lenaghan and our other special featured guest, Christine Kierig. Reserve your seat today.
UMKC Royall Hall, Room 111
Light refreshments will be served.
Complimentary parking is available in the Rockhill Parking Garage on levels four and five.
An internationally acclaimed scholar, PATRICK LENAGHAN received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Before joining the Hispanic Society, Lenaghan worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, first in the Department of European Paintings and then in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Since 1995, he has been at The Hispanic Society of America where he has organized numerous exhibitions ranging from Baroque sculpture to Picasso’s response to Spanish literature. He has also curated international exhibitions, such as Imágenes del Quijote at the Museo Nacional del Prado. In 2018, Lenaghan was named a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Sta Isabel de Hungría in Seville, delivering his discurso de ingreso on March 17, 2018.
CHRISTINE KIERIG is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Moving Pictures: Murals and Mass Media by Spanish Exiles in the Americas, 1940-1955, centers the lives of two exiled Spanish modernists in the Americas — Josep Renau in Mexico and Luis Quintanilla in the United States. Specifically, she researches their mass media projects for peripheral cultural institutions — a rural luxury hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a midwestern university in Kansas City, Missouri, and the burgeoning film and cinema industries, analyzing how these two artists staged their lives in exile on either side of the southern US border. Prior to beginning fieldwork in 2024, she held the position of curatorial assistant for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, California. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation for American Art, and the Mexican government, among others.
The work of the Luis Quintanilla’s Murals Restoration Project is done in partnership with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. KCMC is a collaborative initiative that supports preservation and commemorative organizations across the city and is funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
