Wright State art historian Karla Huebner to give online talks on surrealist artist Toyen

Karla Huebner, professor of art history at Wright State, published “Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic” in 2020.

Karla Huebner, Ph.D., professor of art history at Wright State University, will give two online talks on artist Toyen, a founding member of the Prague surrealist group.

Huebner will discuss “Toyen and Czech Surrealism” on Thursday, Aug. 5, at 6 p.m. The talk is sponsored by the New York Czech Center. Learn more and register.

Huebner will then give a talk on her 2020 book “Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic” for the San Francisco Public Library on Sunday, Aug. 8, at 5 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Pacific. Learn more and register.

Toyen is featured in an exhibition “Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel” at the National Gallery Prague this summer. Toyen is considered one of the most important artists of First Republic Czechoslovakia and a major member of the Paris surrealist group. Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work.

“Toyen is a meaningful and intriguing figure to audiences of various cultural backgrounds. Toyen’s artwork spans many styles and media and Toyen’s life shows how a woman of ambiguous gender was able to become a successful artist in early Czechoslovakia,” Huebner said.

Part art book and part biography, “Magnetic Woman” examines Toyen’s life and work, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

Huebner specializes in the history of European and American art from 1750 to the present with research interests that include Czech modernism, surrealism, and gender and sexuality. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Wright State.

She is the president of the Czechoslovak Studies Association and was on the board of Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.

Her novel “In Search of the Magic Theater” will be published in 2022.

Huebner has received research grants and fellowships that include a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. In 2015, she in participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Teaching the History of Modern Design.

She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pittsburgh, master’s degree in art history from American University and her bachelor’s degree in theatre arts from thw University of California, Santa Cruz.