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.
September through May
Hamilton Auditorium, Historic Landmark Building
Free to everyone
Click here to listen to a KYW news feature about Art-at-Lunch.
February
3 Prints and Process: Selections from the C.R. Ettinger Studio
Master Printer Cindi Royce Ettinger has been creating original prints at the C.R. Ettinger Studio in Philadelphia since 1982. This fall, her collaborative work with esteemed artists like Virgil Marti, Astrid Bowlby, and Sarah McEneaney is on view in PAFA’s Hamilton Building and Ettinger joins us for a talk on contemporary print-making practices, especially featuring her work with intaglio and relief processes and the nature of collaboration between artists.
10 “Subverting Photographic Vision: Henry Koerner, Honoré Sharrer and the Camera.”
As a sneak peek into an exhibition in progress, Robert Cozzolino, PAFA's Curator of Modern Art discusses how realist artists in the 1940s and 1950s worked from a combination of photography, found newspaper sources, life, reproductions of art, and the imagination to produce uncanny images that look neither photographic nor academic in their presentation of recognizable imagery. Taking liberties with reality and subverting audience expectations of realist imagery, artists such as Henry Koerner and Honoré Sharrer produced images that attempt to overcome the "objective" eye of photography. (This lecture was canceled due to inclement weather. Look for it to be rescheduled in the Fall of 2010.)
17 Behind the Scenes in Painting Conservation
This illustrated lecture by leading conservator Joyce Hill Stoner tells the story of paintings found underneath other paintings using x-radiography, the step by step reconstruction of a painting by Charles Willson Peale, and advances made in cleaning materials designed to remove discoloration due to varnish and nicotine. Stoner’s work at Winterthur and the University of Delaware has also brought her into partnership working alongside living artists, from Robert Motherwell to Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and her talk explains many of the contemporary issues in painting conservation.
24 Bearing Witness to War When all the Photographers are Blinded
Recent PEW Fellowship winner Daniel Heyman talks about his work with Iraqi civilians victimized war, highlighting the printed and painted portraits of victims of random violence and torture in American prisons. His most recent and metaphorical series of etchings printed on wood constructions concerns the impossibility of bearing witness when the hard facts of a war are kept out of public view, and examples of his work will be on view as part of the C. R. Ettinger Studio Selections from 2000 to 2010 exhibition this winter at PAFA.
March
3 Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student
“Deconstruction” is touted in every visual area from architecture to fashion, yet few really understand what Jacques Derrida's notorious concept means. Now, PAFA’s own Dr. Kevin Richards has written Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student, a concise and accessible illustration of Derrida’s ideas in practice for the art lover. Dr. Richards talks about this new book and situates the ideas in terms of his own artistic process and creative projects.
10 Spring Break: No Program
17 Interchange: Bill Scott’s Paintings and Prints
Bill Scott, an abstract painter and printmaker, speaks about the influence his painting process had on his first attempts at printmaking over a decade ago, and of how the process of printmaking has inspired his more recent paintings. Scott, who teaches in PAFA’s certificate program, is represented by Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York. His intaglio prints are included in PAFA’s current exhibition, C. R. Ettinger Studio Selections from 2000 to 2010.
24 Drawing from the Past: The Historic Cast Collection at PAFA
In July 1805, even before land for the first building had been secured, the founders of PAFA wrote to France asking for a collection of plaster casts from Paris. Ever since, drawing from the cast has been an integral part of the education of artists attending PAFA. Cheryl Leibold, esteemed Senior Archivist, narrates the history of collecting, exhibiting and studying from the historic cast collection at PAFA over the last two hundred years.
31 The Seen and The Imagined
Michael Gallagher, exhibiting artist at Schmidt-Dean Gallery and assistant professor at PAFA, discusses the visual languages employed in painting as an art form, examining particularly the complicated conversation between representation and abstraction on canvas. Using still-life as his major motif, Gallagher pulls from both art historical and contemporary works, as well as his own painting practice, to illuminate the painting’s continued relevance in a modern age.
April
7 Demuth, Duchamp, and…Delay
That Charles Demuth and Marcel Duchamp were friends is an undisputed historical fact. Drawing on new research, PhD. candidate Jonathan Frederick Walz argues that their relationship was actually closer than previously thought. “You should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public,” once quipped Duchamp, and taking the artist at his word, this talk illuminates Charles Demuth’s fixation on Duchamp, revealing an interpersonal preoccupation secreted within an aesthetic delay, which has gone unrecognized over the last century—until now.
14 Arthur Dove Paints the Weather
Through his abstract renderings of the natural world, Arthur Dove explored the capacity of painting to depict material phenomena that are not visible to the naked eye, including sound, wind, light waves, and gravitational pull. Rachael DeLue, professor of art history at Princeton University, considers Dove’s interest in articulating a pictorial language for translating the unseen into visual form, much as a scientist would translate a hypothesis or a theory and shows how his artistic project was intimately tied to larger cultural conversations in the early decades of the twentieth century about the subjects and methods of scientific inquiry and the nature of human cognition.
21 Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History
At PAFA, the legacy of the grandfather of American Portraiture, Thomas Eakins, is tied directly into our understanding of ourselves as an institution of American Art. Dr. Akela Reason of Georgia State University shares her recent research and book on this Philadelphia icon, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History, which will be released in January 2010 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
28 PAFA Certificate Students
Graduating certificate students discuss their work and artistic vision, paying special attention to pieces on view in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building.
May
5 PAFA Grad Students
Graduating MFA students discuss their work and artistic vision, paying special attention to pieces on view in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building.