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Warwick Lecture Series: The Art Beneath Our Feet
February 28, 2023 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Art Beneath Our Feet: The journey to discovering that the largest cave art in the Americas is here in the Southern United States.
Why are people artists? And what do the first artworks tell us about ourselves? Those questions have guided National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez on a decade-long quest to understand art’s biological origins and how it connects our past to our present.
His journey has taken him from the southern coast of Africa, where humans first begin making paint over 100,000 years ago, to the discovery of the America’s largest cave artworks right here in the South.
This presentation is in partnership with Ancient Art Archive.
About the Speaker
Stephen Alvarez’s journey has taken him from the southern coast of Africa, where humans first begin making paint over 100,000 years ago, to the discovery of the America’s largest cave artworks right here in the South.
“Standing in front of 36,000-year-old cave paintings in France, I felt time collapse and the artist speak straight to me across an unimaginable gulf of time,” says Alvarez. “The experience changed me. I started the Archive not just to preserve ancient art sites and our common cultural heritage, but to share them with everyone.”
Stephen Alvarez is an internationally acclaimed National Geographic photographer who produces global stories about exploration, adventure, culture, and archeology. He has published over a dozen feature stories in National Geographic Magazine. The magazine has sent him from the highest peaks in the Andes to the depths of the deepest cave in the world. His latest National Geographic story on the Origins of Art led him from early human sites on the southern coast of Africa to Paleolithic art caves in France and Spain.
Moved by the power of humanity’s earliest artworks, Alvarez founded the Ancient Art Archive, a non-profit dedicated to using the newest image-based VR technology to digitally preserve and share them with everyone, everywhere. Stephen’s images have won awards in Pictures of the Year International and Communication Arts and have been exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignan, France. Recent appearances include NPR, PBS, and CBS Saturday Morning, and recent press coverage includes articles in The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, Antiquity, and CNN. Stephen is a frequent speaker, consultant, and commenter on how new photographic technology is changing the world.