Every time I stroll through the Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, I gain new insights into the complex decade of the 1920s. This time I was struck by how many different roles women play in the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs on view. The 1920s was a time of rapid social change that offered new freedoms to women, who had slipped out of the corset and into the voting booth just a few years earlier.

Photographer and contemporary visual artist, Hank Willis Thomas, will be giving a free lecture on Saturday, January 28, at 2:30 p.m. in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Recital Hall.