Cultivators: Ruth Fine and Allan L. Edmunds In Conversation
Join Ruth Fine and Allan L. Edmunds in an afternoon of conversation about their significant and generative careers as artists, educators, curators, and career builders who have created space, opportunities and recognition for a long list of great artists. Fine and Edmunds will celebrate 50 years of friendship and collaboration. As printmakers, both find inspiration in printmaking’s collaborative process and have contributed to the elevation of printmaking as a fine art medium and as an important pillar in an artist’s career.
2:00 PM Gallery Talk with Ruth Fine
2:30 PM Ruth Fine and Allan L. Edmunds in Conversation
This program is presented as part of (re)FOCUS. A citywide festival recognizing women artists, (re)FOCUS is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts in 1974. With over 150 exhibitions, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations the 1974 festival was one of the first large-scale surveys of the work of contemporary American women artists, signaling the inception of the American Feminist Art Movement.
Museum admission is included in your registration.
Image: Ruth Fine (b. 1941), Vacation Garden Variation, 1967, Color lithograph, ed. 5/5.
Ruth Fine was a curator for the National Gallery of Art for four decades, first for the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in Jenkintown PA, then as Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings, followed by Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art. In Washington she curated dozens of exhibitions -- studies of the art of Romare Bearden, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, and several printmaking workshops. She conceived and oversaw the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. Fine has also written about Brandywine Workshop and Archives.
Returning to Philadelphia, she organized Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis for PAFA (2015), the catalogue for which received the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award for Museum Scholarship. In 2023 she received the Archives of American Art’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and the Print Center New York’s Award for Curatorial Practice. Co-curated with Fred Moten and currently circulating, Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present, will be at the Brandywine Museum of Art during summer, 2024. Fine chairs the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and is a consultant to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
Cultivator: The Curatorial and Artistic Practice of Ruth Fine features a selection of her prints installed with works by artists she has curated is on view as part of (re)FOCUS. All works are in the collection of PAFA.
Photo credit: Frank Stewart
Allan L. Edmunds was born in Philadelphia and attended classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial and Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where he focused on printmaking and education. He earned his BFA and MFA from Tyler. Edmunds employs a variety of printmaking processes in his own work, including lithography, offset lithography, and screenprinting.
In 1972, Edmunds founded the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, a non-profit visual arts organization that under his leadership has served as a center for the advancement of fine art printmaking. He helped to establish a network of Satellite Collections of Brandywine prints at 22 institutions across the country and built the Artura.org free database of contemporary diverse art.
Edmunds is also responsible for the formation of the virtual Institute for Inclusion, Diversity and Equity in Education and the Arts (IIDEEA), a collaborative venture of professionals in the visual arts, art education and museums. Edmunds has continued his studio practice throughout his career. His art is in many public collections, locally and nationally.
Photo by Gustavo Garcia, 2019. Courtesy of Brandywine Workshop and Archives