Join PAFA staff and students for this series of talks on American art and culture every Wednesday at noon. Enjoy discussions and lectures with scholars and artists covering a variety of topics related to PAFA's exhibitions, collections, and areas of interest. Visitors are encouraged to bring a bagged lunch, though limited options will be available for sale outside the Auditorium doors. For more information or to be placed on our mailing list, contact the Pennsylvania Academy at 215-972-2105 or mzimmerman@pafa.org.
Wednesdays, 12 noon to 1 p.m.
Hamilton Auditorium, Historic Landmark Building
Free to everyone
Click here to listen to a KYW news feature about Art-at-Lunch.
September
September 22nd – Este Es Mi Pais: The Art of Roxana Perez-Mendez
Roxana Perez-Mendez is a Philadelphia-based, Puerto Rican artist known for her simple holograms, videos and multimedia installations, often projecting herself into the place of the Other and exploring the treacherous landscape of the immigrant experience. Her current installation in PAFA’s Morris Gallery, Este Es Mi Pais, combines paintings from the collection of the museum with Pepper’s Ghost holograms, video images, and ready-made material, creating a situation in which illusion and reality overlap. Perez-Mendez will discuss this work, as well as her interdisciplinary practice and early investigations into history and identity.
September 29th – Salvador Dali’s The Ecumenical Council: A Paranoiac Reading
The Ecumenical Council (1960), one of Salvador Dalí’s most dramatic and tendentious religious paintings from his post-surrealist period, is generally interpreted as a pre-celebration of the Second Vatican Council. However, Jonathan Wallis of Moore College of Art Design argues that an additional interpretation of the painting emerges when the process Dalí employed to produce the painting – the “paranoiac-critical method” - is recognized as a necessary component to the process of unraveling it. Wallis argues that The Ecumenical Council can be read as a personal declaration by Dalí of his “divinely justified” candidacy as the next official Vatican artist, poised to revise the Catholic Church’s modern artistic identity and religious program as it moved into the second half of the twentieth century.
October
The Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend Lecture Series
October Art-at-Lunch lectures are supported by the Behrend Family in memory of Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend, a former docent at the Academy and great supporter of its education programs.
October 6th – The Artblog: Philadelphia and Beyond
For years, The Artblog has been providing grassroots commentary, criticism and gossip about the Philadelphia and New York art worlds to an eager public audience. Join Artblog founders Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon, for a visual journey through Philadelphia's red-hot art world. Learn about the art showing in Philadelphia's outer fringes, where experimental art rules, and discover how art being created in our own neighborhoods fits in with contemporary art movements around the world.
October 13th – Subverting Photographic Vision: Henry Koerner, Honoré Sharrer and the Camera
Photography has been integral to the way artists approach various movements, from Thomas Eakins' realism to Georgia O'Keeffe's abstractions. Robert Cozzolino, PAFA's Curator of Modern Art, discusses how the so-called "magic realist" artists in the 1940s and 1950s worked from a combination of photography, found newspaper sources, and reproductions of art to produce uncanny images that look neither photographic nor academic in their presentation of recognizable imagery. Using the work of Henry Koerner and Honore Sharrer, he illustrates how these artists attempted to overcome the "objective" eye of photography by taking liberties with reality and subverting audience expectation.
October 20th – Andy Warhol: The Artist and his Critics
More than twenty years after his untimely death in 1987, Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol is still largely misunderstood by both the general public and arts and humanities scholars. Deb Miller, an insider of the Warhol Circle and a close friend of the Warhola family, will consider Andy’s art and life within the context of Art History and Art Criticism. Particularly, she will show that while his Pop subjects, dramatic persona and renowned Factory revolutionized the art world in the 1960s, many of his themes and techniques represent modernized versions of well-established artistic traditions, and many of the criticisms of Warhol and his work by contemporary writers are nearly verbatim to those leveled against such revered Old Masters as Rembrandt and Caravaggio in earlier times.
October 27th – Self-Portraiture and Self-Presentation by Contemporary Women Artists
More so than their male peers, many female artists have deployed their own bodies as a form of artistic resource in the contemporary moment, whether simply to revisit the genre of self-portraiture or for more experimental purposes. With a view to exploring their motives and tactics, Anna Chave, Professor of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, surveys a range of uses to which women like Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeouis, Yayoi Kusama, Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin have have put their bodies - not only in their own art, but also through their calculated performances before the lenses of professional photographers.
November
The Mildred T. Lefkoe Memorial Lecture Series
November Art-at-Lunch lectures are made possible in memory of Mildred T. Lefkoe, a beloved member of the docent corps, having been its first vice president, 1987-89, and president, 1989-91.
November 3rd – The Richard Allen Monument at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition
Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition debuted the first African American public sculptural project in U. S. history - a monument to Richard Allen, one of the nation's black founding fathers and creator of the first black church in America, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. The Allen monument was lost soon after the exhibition, however, and was only recently rediscovered and returned to Philadelphia, where it is currently on view at the Mother Bethel AME church until 2011. Dr. Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor in the Tyler School of Art, discusses the significance of the sculpture's creation and exhibition within its cultural context.
November 10th – Assuming Identities: Portraits from Self-Portraits
Holly Trostle Brigham, a PAFA alum, is known for exploring gender and sexuality through self-representation, evolving self-portraits into mythological allegories and historical figures. In conjunction with themes presented in PAFA’s fall exhibition Narcissus in the Studio, Brigham discusses her series “Seven Sisters,” self-portrait homages to important female artists like Frida Kahlo and Judith Leyster, and introduces her next series, “Seven Sisters II.”
November 17th – For Your Pleasure: Megawords Magazine
The mission of the Megawords project is simple: to document our surroundings and experience, to have a voice free from the noise of commercialization and competing novelties, and to create an open and active dialogue between Megawords and the community at large. Join the Megawords team for a discussion of the importance of having an independent viewpoint when creating art and the place of collaboration with artists, writers, musicians, institutions and museums. Delve into the Megawords project history and the stories of its members own creative processes, alternative means of communication and dissemination of ideas.
November 24th – Thanksgiving Eve
No program.
December
December 1st – Enduring Legacy: Violet Oakley
Violet Oakley’s legacy as a prominent figure in Philadelphia’s artistic community at the turn of the century has long focused on her work as an illustrator, muralist and writer. PAFA's recent acquisition of Oakley’s stained glass lancet windows The Wise and Foolish Virgins, originally made for St. Peter’s Church in Germantown, offers a unique opportunity for aficionados to study a new facet of her artistic production. Cheryl Leibold, formerly PAFA’s Senior Archivist, tells the story of this remarkable female artist and her longstanding relationship with both the school and museum, and invites visitor to go into the galleries afterward to view this recent acquisition.
December 8th – A New Nation of Goods
In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? A New Nation of Goods, recently published by David Jaffee of the Bard Graduate Center, highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States—chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing—to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.