PAFA Hosts Curator Talk on November 19 and Daylong Symposium on November 21

 PHILADELPHIA— In conjunction with the exhibition Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) will be hosting a curator talk entitled "An Eye for Humor: Barkley L. Hendricks’ Excellent Adventure" and a daylong symposium entitled, “The Evolution of the Cool.” The curator talk will take place on November 19 at 6 p.m. in PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building (118 North Broad Street) and the symposium will take place on November 21 from 10 a.m.– 4 p.m. in the Academy’s Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building (128 North Broad Street).

 

Both events are free with pre-registration, $10 at the door. Seating will be limited. For tickets, contact 215-972-2105 or mzimmerman@pafa.org.

 

Event descriptions are as follows:

 

 

How does the sparkle of a single idea become the foundation for a painting survey or artistic retrospective? How does the first conversation between artist and curator take place? What artistic, curatorial, and collaborative processes are required to move a major exhibition forward?

 

Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and organizer of Birth of the Cool, sits down with special guest Barkley L. Hendricks for a conversation that chronicles the journey of this exhibition from idea to reality. Along the way, Schoonmaker and Hendricks will explore the ongoing use of humor in Hendricks’ work, including both his paintings on view in the galleries as well as some of his photographs.

 

 

The symposium will bring together experts from the fields of art, music, dance, and fashion to discuss the cultural developments that inspired the work of Barkley L. Hendricks as well as the trajectory of influences that are visible in the present day. With presentations, panel discussions, and a talk by the artist, this symposium will highlight the myriad perspectives on American culture that come together in Hendricks’ portraits and greatly inform our understanding of the paintings currently on view in his retrospective.

 

Best known for his stunning, life-sized canvasses portraying people of color from the urban northeast, it is through these cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational images that Hendricks explores the cultural complexity of black identity in the contemporary world. Variously he works from real life sitters and photographs in a format that is reminiscent of images from fashion magazines and movie posters. In these commanding, full-length portraits of African American men and women silhouetted against crisp monochromatic grounds, Hendricks transforms his subjects from ordinary people into larger than life celebrity icons.

 

 

Emil De John has worked in New York City fashion for 40 years and has designed for Jones New York, Bill Blass Men’s Sportswear, Alex DeJohn Dress Division, and Osh Kosh Childrenswear as well as collections for Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus. He has been Chairman of the Fashion Design Program at Moore College of Art and Design, Director of the Fashion Design Department at Drexel University, and is currently Fashion Instructor at The Art Institute of Philadelphia, where he is a full-time faculty member. De John has won numerous awards including a New York Critics Design Award, Neiman Marcus Humanitarian Award, and the Mayor of Philadelphia’s “Phashion Phest” Award. His designs have graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Glamour, and The New York Times, Philadelphia Bulletin, and Philadelphia Inquirer fashion magazine sections. He has been featured as an “Outstanding American Designer” in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and Glamour.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University and a cultural historian who has been instrumental in bringing to light the Africanist presence in European-based American concert dance. In addition to her scholarly work, Dixon Gottschild is a practicing choreographer and performer. In collaboration with her husband Hellmut Gottschild, she created and performed Stick it Out (1993), Frogs (1996), and Tongue Smell Color (2000). As the Philadelphia correspondent for Dance Magazine, she writes features and reviews on a range of topics from the Pennsylvania Ballet to hip hop. From 1982 to 1999 Dixon Gottschild was Professor of Dance Studies at Temple University. Dixon Gottschild has been awarded a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Research Facilitation Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Writer/Historian Fellowship.

 

Barkley L. Hendricks was born in Philadelphia in 1945 and studied at the PAFA from 1963 to 1967. He was the first African American student to be awarded two consecutive travel scholarships, which brought him to Europe in 1966 and then North Africa in 1968. Abroad he encountered works by the old masters of European painting such as Rembrandt, van Dyck, Caravaggio and van Eyck, which informed the process of his painting. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from Yale University in1972 and since then his work has been collected and exhibited widely. He is a professor of art at Connecticut College in New London, where he has been teaching since 1972.

Sarah Lewis is Writer, Curator and Critic at the Yale School of Art. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale School of Art, she held curatorial positions at Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been selected as Co-Curator for the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, commissioning architect David Adjaye to design the interior and the first collaborative piece by Kara Walker and Wynton Marsalis. Her writing has been published extensively, focusing on artists from America and Africa including Mark Bradford, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley in publications for The Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Guggenheim, and Art in America. She is a Trustee of The Brearley School, a former Elected Director for Harvard University and was a member of President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee. She is currently a prospective candidate for a Deputy Director level post at the National Endowment for the Arts. She received her B.A. from Harvard University, an M.Phil from Oxford University in Economic and Social History on the Marshall Scholarship, and her Ph.D. dissertation will be submitted to Yale University’s History of Art Department in 2010.

 

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin. Along with teaching courses in the arts of the African Diaspora, American art, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism. Powell has helped organize several art exhibitions that have appeared in major museums and galleries including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Powell studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate in art history at Yale University and is a past recipient of two Ford Foundation Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, numerous Smithsonian Institution Fellowships and Grants, and a Fulbright Grant for Graduate Study Abroad.

 

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania where she also serves as Director of the Program in Visual Studies. Shaw received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and was an assistant professor at Harvard University for five years before coming to Pennsylvania in 2005. Her research and teaching focus on the art and material culture of the New World: from Moses Williams to Kara Walker, from Canada to the Caribbean to Cape Horn, and from Taos to Tahiti. Shaw's first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, was published by Duke University Press in the winter of 2004. Her second project, a museum exhibition and catalog, titled Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006) was organized with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover.

 

Randy Weston is one of the world's foremost pianists and composers. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926, he listened to the early jazz giants that were to influence him. Though Weston cites Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, and of course, Duke Ellington as his other piano heroes, it was Monk who had the greatest impact. Weston’s first recording as a leader came in 1954 on Riverside Records and it was in the 1950's, when Weston played around New York with Cecil Payne and Kenny Dorham, that he wrote many of his best loved tunes, including "Saucer Eyes," "Pam's Waltz," "Little Niles," and, "Hi-Fly." Weston has never failed to make the connections between African and American music and in the late 1960's, he settled in Morocco, traveling throughout the African continent and tasting the musical fruits of other nations. 

 

 

10:00   Welcome and Introduction by Julien Robson, PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art

 

10:30 Barkley L. Hendricks, Artist and Professor of Studio Art, Connecticut College

 

11:00 Randy Weston, Jazz pianist and composer

 

11:30 Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Professor Emeritus of Dance, Temple University

 

12:00 Panel Discussion and Q&A with morning speakers, moderated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania

 

12:30 Lunch Break

 

2:00 Sarah Lewis, Critic, Yale University

 

2:30 Emil DeJohn, Fashion Designer; Fashion Instructor, The Art Institute of Philadelphia

 

3:00 Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art, Duke University

 

3:30 Panel Discussion and Q&A with afternoon speakers, moderated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania

 

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and curated by Trevor Schoonmaker.

 

The presentation of Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool at PAFA is organized by Julien Robson, PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art.

 

The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council with funding from the State of North Carolina.

 

Funding for the tour of Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Additional support provided by an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 grant through the National Endowment for the Arts, the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, StoneRidge Investment Partners, LLC, the Lomax Family Foundation, and Mr. & Mrs. Harold Sorgenti.

 

Media support provided by The Philadelphia Tribune.

 

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Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is America's oldest continually operating school of fine arts and museum.  A recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Arts presented by the President of the United States of America, the Academy is a recognized leader in fine arts education.  Nearly every major American artist has taught, studied, or exhibited at the Academy. The institution's world-class collection of American art continues to grow and provides what only a few other art institutions in the world offer: the rare combination of an outstanding museum and an extraordinary faculty known for its commitment to students and for the stature and quality of its artistic work.

 

Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Academy is located at 118-128 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. Admission to Permanent Collection is Adults $10, Seniors & Students with I.D. $8, Youth ages 5-18, $6. Admission to Special Exhibitions (includes Permanent Collection) is Adults $15, Seniors & Students with I.D. $12, Youth Ages 5-18, $8. Admission is free for members and children under age of 5. Admission to Morris Gallery exhibitions is free.