Spring 2011
February 17, 18:
Virgil Marti Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Currently living in Philadelphia, Vigil received his BFA in painting from the School of Fine Arts, Washington University and his MFA from Tyler School of Art. He works in various materials including fabric, screen printing and sculpture and has exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Biennial, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Elizabeth Dee Gallery. He is currently a guest curator for the Philadelphia ICA’s exhibit Set Pieces, which restages objects and art works from the PMA’s permanent collection. (On view until Feb 13, 2011.)
February 24, 25:
Shawn Barber Lecture Thurs at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crit, painting demo on Friday.
Barber earned his BFA from Ringling College of Art in 1999 and has paintings held in private collections throughout the United States, Canada, Asia, Europe and Australia. His body of work focuses primarily on painting, portraiture, and documenting contemporary tattoo culture. His pictures balance both meticulous brushwork paired with energizing abstractions of color and line. Shawn currently resides in Los Angeles and works as a tattoo and fine artist.
March 3, 4:
Steve Powers Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Steve Powers is a graffiti artist who recently partnered with the Pew and Philadelphia’s Mural Arts to create a stunning project called Love Letters. The piece includes more than 50 graffitied walls that can be seen from the elevated train along Market Street in West Philly. The messages, which focus on the complexities and rewards of relationships, have a sincere and visual connection to the different locations they inhabit. In addition to his street work, Powers has exhibited at the Venice and Liverpool Biennials, and Deitch Projects.
March 17, 18:
Willie Cole Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Willie Cole is a noted African American sculptor. He is best known for assembling and transforming ordinary domestic objects such as shoes, hair dryers and irons. By repeating objects and images, Cole comments on consumer culture and his works can be found in museums such as the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, the Walker Art Center, the PMA and many others.
March 24, 25:
Naoko Matsubara Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Naoko Matsubara is a Japanese-born woodcut printmaker and painter now living in Ontario, Canada. She received her BFA from the Kyoto Academy of Fine Art and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work is included in public collections ranging from the Art Institute of Chicago to the White House.
March 31, April 1:
Lois Dodd Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Lois Dodd is an influential American painter with over 50 solo exhibitions to her credit. Her affinity for representational exactitude is tempered with high-key formalist abstraction, leading critic Hilton Kramer to categorize her work as a mix between Charles Sheeler and Piet Mondrian. She lives and works in Rockland, Maine.
April 14, 15:
Dennis Campay Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Campay graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1992 and presently splits his time between Atlanta and the historic neighborhood of San Marco in Jacksonville, FL. His work could best be described as a combination of location, experience of travel, and an urban aesthetic. Mr. Campay creates mixed media works and drawings and has been recognized throughout the U.S. and Europe with numerous awards and honors.
April 21,22:
Steven Assael Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits. Painting demo on Friday.
Assael was born in New York, NY in 1957. He attended Pratt Institute and presently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York as well as The New York Academy of Figurative Art. Working from observation, Steven balances naturalism with a romanticism that permeates the figures and surroundings of his paintings and drawings. Mr. Assael is recognized nationally as one of the leading representational figurative artists of his generation.
April 28,29:
Michelle Doll Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits.
Michelle Doll was born in Canton, Ohio and received a BFA from Kent State University and a MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Doll’s paintings have been exhibited internationally and have been featured in shows curated by Eric Fischl, April Gornik, David Salle, and Will Cotton. This is her first show at DFN Gallery.
Fall 2010
September 9, 10:
Jim Baker Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Jimmy is a multi-media artist who lives and works in the great city of Cincinnati, Ohio. His paintings, digital photographs, installations and musical compositions refer to aspects of our past we may prefer to forget while presenting an apocalyptic vision of our not-so-distant future. Baker is currently represented by Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles and has recently held solo shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, France and Basel, Switzerland.
September 16, 17
Ron English Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Ron is a widely known contemporary American artist known for his irreverent appropriations and reinterpretations of advertising icons and art world historical imagery. A forefather of the underground or ‘outsider’ art movement, English’s work can be seen everywhere from his extralegal ‘liberated’ public billboards to the finest collections and museums in the world. He is the subject of the award-winning documentary POPaganda, the Art and Crimes of Ron English and can most recently be seen in the Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop.
September 30:
Nato Thompson Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Nato is a curator at the New York–based public arts institution Creative Time. He has organized major projects such as Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and the multi-phase national exhibition Democracy in America: The National Campaign. Nato worked as a curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, a survey of political art of the 1990s. He holds a BA in Political Theory from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in Arts Administration from the Art Institute of Chicago.
October 7:
James Hyde Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
James is an internationally renowned sculptor whose work is in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim in NY, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art among many others. He won the 2008 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and graduated from University of Rochester. His work often blends sculpture with painting to explore issues of semiotics, deconstruction and multiplication. James is represented in Zürich, Paris and London and also served on PAFA’s fourth wall panel in 2010.
October 9:
Odd Nerdrum Lecture Saturday, October 9 at 4:00pm in the Hamilton Auditorium
Odd Nerdrum was born in Sweden and studied at the Art Academy in Oslo, Norway, and later with Joseph Beuys. Guided by the Old Masters, Nerdrum's paintings plumb the depths of the human soul, exploring loneliness, fear, brutality, hatred, sexuality, birth death and degradation with unparalleled virtuosity. Nerdrum's work is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, among others. He is represented by Forum Gallery, New York.
**Odd Nerdrum lecture is sponsored by the Continuing Education Department.
October 14, 15:
Delphine Poussot Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Delphine Poussot is a French-born watercolor painter currently living in Villanova, PA. Her current paintings seek to capture the natural light and soft movement of still life compositions set in plein air landscapes. Delphine is a member of the Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society and currently serves as a trustee on the Board of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
October 14:
Stuart Shils Lecture Thursday, October 14 at 6:00 in the Hamilton Audtorium.
A PAFA alumnus and faculty member, Shils has painted the landscape for over 25 years and his work has been presented in solo shows in Philadelphia, New York, Tel Aviv, Boston, San Francisco and Cork, Ireland. Critical review and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Art in America, The New Yorker, American Artist and numerous other publications.
**Stuart Shils lecture is sponsored by the Continuing Education Department.
October 21, 22:
Tom LaDuke Lecture Thursday at 11:35 Location TBD followed by crits
Tom currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Artcenter College of Design in Pasadena. He received his BFA from California State University and his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings have several layers usually starting with a film still or reference to another art work, on which he aggressively piles paint to disrupt or re-contextualize the original image. The LA Times noted “LaDuke exploits a painting's capacity for exposing handmade deceptions.” He will be doing a show of paintings in PAFA’s Morris Gallery from October until January.
October 28, 29:
Carrie Ann Baade Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Carrie received her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, which included a year of study at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, and her MFA from the University of Delaware. Her surreal oil paintings combine pictorial elements of myth, literature and art history to develop deeply unsettling meta-narratives. Carrie is currently represented by Pop Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico and works as an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Florida State University.
November 4, 5:
Matthew Suib and Nadia Hironaka Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Auditorium followed by crits
This collaborative team, currently living in Philadelphia, has been working together 2007 to combine immersive video and sound installations. They have worked together on The Soft Epic or Savages of the Pacific Northwest and Black Hole and their work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, Beijing and Japan. They founded Screening, Philly’s first gallery dedicated to works on video and film. Nadia has a MFA in film from the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at MICA.
November 5:
Ken Kewley Lecture Friday, November 5 at 6:00 in the Hamilton Auditorium. Ken received a BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While living in New York City, he was a night watchmen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and considers this a major part of his formal education. Kewley has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, most recently at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, with an upcoming exhibition this November at the Rothschild Gallery in Tel Aviv. His work in included in many private and public collections and has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Sun, ARTnews, and the New York Observer.
**Ken Kewley's lecture is sponsored by the Continuing Education Department.
November 18, 19:
Sharyn O’Mara Lecture Thursday at 11:35 in the Hamilton Auditorium followed by crits
Sharyn works in multiple mediums including works on paper, installations and video. Her piece Victim Impact Statement, currently on view at Eastern State Penitentiary focuses on impact of a violent crime on a 45-year-old woman who was attacked.
Spring 2010
March 18, 2010
Saskia Jordá was born in Venezuela and currently divides her time between Arizona and New York. After receiving her BFA in painting from Arizona State University she went on to receive her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Her current art practice is interdisciplinary, including installations, videos, collaborations and performances. Focusing on cultural identity, Saskia states "Having relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States, I became aware of the layers of ‘skin’ that define and separate cultures – one’s own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one’s dwelling place – all these protecting the vital space of one’s hidden identity."
March 30, 2010
Kiki Smith, born in Nuremberg, Germany is an internationally recognized American artist working in various medias. Currently on exhibit in the Fisher Brooks Gallery as part of Philagrafika, Kiki says of her print works, "Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.” Please note: This program is a collaborative effort between the Visiting Artists Program and the Department of Museum Education. Details to be released soon.
April 8, 2010
Joe Forkan is a figurative and landscape painter who lives and works in Southern California. He was born in New York, and grew up in Tucson, AZ, where he received his BFA from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received an MFA in Painting from the University of Delaware in 2002 and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at California State University Fullerton. Lecture located in Hamilton Auditorium 11:30 am.
April 15, 2010
Jenny Drumgoole graduated from Yale with an MFA in photography and currently lives in Philadelphia. Her five chapter video work Husky, which focuses on themes of ego versus id and incorporates various television and filmmaking genres was exhibited at SoHo 20 Gallery. She's also shown at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, The Center for Contemporary Art in Israel, the Figge von Rosen Gallery in Germany and the IFC Center in New York.
April 23, 2010
Lisa Sanditz was born in 1973 in St. Louis, Missouri and received her MFA from Pratt Institute, NY. In describing her richly colored paintings, Sanditz says she investigates the "sublime landscape, locating its essence as much in the commercial as in the natural. I have investigated this through the ways the marketplace and the wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other, in such American venues as sports events, shopping malls, residential development, highways, casinos and tourist destinations."
Fall 2009
September 3, 2009
Sarah Stolfa earned her BS in photography from Drexel University, Philadelphia, in 2005 and her MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2008. The work for which she has garnered the most recognition is a portrait series of the regular patrons at McGlinchey’s Bar, where she has worked as a bartender for several years. With this series, Stolfa won The New York Times Photography Contest for College Students in 2004 and several of her photographs were reproduced in The New York Times Magazine. Stolfa is the founder and Executive Director of Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, a nonprofit organization devoted to the study, practice, and appreciation of photography in the Philadelphia region. Artisan books will published Stolfa’s work “The Regulars” in June 2009.
September 10, 2009
Daniel Sprick was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and studied at the Ramon Froman School of Art, The National Academy of Design in New York City, and the University of Northern Colorado where he received his BA in 1978. Well educated in the pictorial tradition of art history, Sprick’s influences reach back to Northern European masters such as Robert Campin and Rogier van de Weyden, admiring their ability to render a convincing look at invisible realms and otherworldly occurrences. Sprick has exhibited nationally and teaches at the Art Students League of Denver.
September 17, 2009
Edgar Jerins was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1958. By the age of 18, Edgar had received a full scholarship from the Scholastic Art Awards to attend PAFA. Edgar graduated from the Academy in 1980. Also in that year he was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, an international grant for realist artists. Jerins was then able to move to Los Angeles, where he began his portrait career. After his stay in California he returned to the East Coast and continued to participate in group shows where he won many awards, including the Nathaniel Burwash Artist Award in Boston (1997), the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Grant (2002) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2004).
October 15, 2009
Julie Heffernan is known for her lush and sensuous large-scale figurative (and still life) paintings that at first glance seem to have stepped out of either the Italian or Spanish Renaissance or 17th century Dutch genre still-life or grand manner landscape painting. Heffernan has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades including The Korean Biennial; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, NC; Tampa Museum of Art, Fl; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Columbia Museum of Art, SC; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; The New Museum, NY; The Norton Museum, FL; The American Academy of Arts And Letters, NY; Kohler Arts Center, WI; The Palmer Museum of Art, PA; National Academy of Art, NY; McNay Art Museum, TX; Herter Art Gallery, MA; Mint Museum, NC; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, VA, among numerous others.
November 5, 2009
Joe Santore, born in 1945 in Philadelphia, earned his BFA at the Philadelphia College of Art and his MFA at Yale University. His body of work includes many rich, painterly still lifes, but in the 1980s, he returned primarily to figure work. Many of his paintings show evocative situations or expressions, which is his method of pulling the viewer into the work, and quite often he pushes the figures forward within the space. Distortions and inconsistencies of perspective also give his work a quality of Cubist jumbling but with a lush, layered palette. Santore is currently a professor at Bard College in New York.
November 12, 2009
ZHANG HONGTU was born in China in 1943. Most of Zhang's works are mixed media conceptual paintings. Zhang's images have frequently featured a central cutout, the edges of which form the silhouette of an well known cultural icons from both eastern and western culture. After the Chinese government crashed pro-democracy movement, which has been called Tiananmen Square incident, Zhang has intensively created a series of the image of Chairman Mao Zedong as a symbol of pervasive power. These Mao images really made a splash that journals, magazines, advertisers, even trendy fashion houses adopted Zhang's work. Zhang has won many awards and exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Spring 2009
February 12, 2009
Carolyn Healy & John Phillips are collaborative artists based in Philadelphia who produce site-specific multimedia installations. Carolyn works in the visual realm creating all the sculptural objects in their pieces: she prepares the environment in which they are seen, and does all the lighting of the work. John composes the sound and video components, designs the interactive systems, gizmos and computer programming. Both artists have received many grants and both have shown their art collaboratively and separately throughout the country.
March 19, 2009
Claire Watkins since earning her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004, Claire Watkins has exhibited in Richmond, VA, Washington, D.C., New York, London and Aichi, Japan. Her kinetic sculptures probe the relationships between the movement and circuitry of organic systems and the synthetic networks constantly acting upon them.
March 26, 2009
Kai Vierstra received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004 and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His installations, sculptures, videos and two-dimensional works comment on natural processes and the human impulse to understand and control them.
April 2, 2009
Melinda Stickney-Gibson, based in New York, has a truly dedicated following. She is known nation-wide for her unique and challenging brand of abstract painting. While obliquely narrative, her work is brutally honest and speaks to the soul. Born in Springfield, Illinois, Melinda attended Arizona State University, and is currently living and working in upstate New York. Melinda has shown her work across the nation including an impressive array of one-person exhibitions, selected group exhibitions and many selected corporate collections.
April 9, 2009
John Miller is a New York- and Berlin-based artist and critic whose large scale installations and junk-based assemblage sculptures speak to the commodification of the art object and cast a suspicious eye on his peers in the contemporary art world. His works have been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Miller's writings have been published in several books as well as periodicals such as October and Artforum magazines.
Fall 2008
September 11, 2008
Zak Smith’s frenetic, encompassing drawings describe in detail his subjects—the people, environments, and experiences of his life. Meticulous ink renderings and colorful explosions characterize his elaborate pieces. Smith’s work Gravity’s Rainbow (2004) is an amazing compilation of over 700 drawings, one for each page of the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name. His work was exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and in the publication Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing.
September 18, 2008
Zoe Strauss’s raw photographs brilliantly capture the beauty and struggle of everyday life. These images, which often simultaneously convey conflicting emotions, manage to communicate the deep realities of their subjects. Often taken in South Philadelphia, Strauss’s place of residence, her photographs offer beautiful glimpses into the heart of the city. Strauss is well known for her exhibitions under I-95 in Philly, where her photographs can be properly seen within her community.
September 25, 2008
Kalup Linzy’s video and performance work is extremely well known within an immense range of institutions: from galleries and museums across the world, to YouTube and MySpace. Linzy’s videos—which he writes, directs, edits, and acts in—satirize an equally broad range, from American soap operas and Hollywood films to Nigerian video dramas. His work calls into question constructs of pop culture, sexuality, race, and class. Linzy is a Guggenheim fellow for 2007-2008.
October 16, 2008
Jon Rubin’s work investigates the behavior of the individual within group environments and the psychology of social and public context. Through a variety of media, frequent collaborations, and participatory elements, Rubin creates absorbing, community-based projects. Rubin has exhibited his work at many institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Nemo Film Festival in Paris, as well as many public locations. Rubin is a 1990 alumnus of PAFA’s certificate program.
November 6, 2008
Mauro Zamora explores the landscape in his paintings, drawings, and installations—not particularly the traditional vista, but in how the landscape relates to our world, our history, and our emotions. Zamora’s fascination with the landscape references “what we do with the land, and how we do it.” Zamora is an alumnus of PAFA’s certificate and MFA programs.
November 13, 2008
Carlos Motta’s work focuses on the individual’s role in society and his or her relationship to the state and the media. Motta challenges usual methods of reading and writing history while alluding to alternate systems of historical interpretation. In his 2008 installation at the ICA in Philadelphia, Motta examined perceptions of governance, U.S. foreign policy, and democracy through an enormous series of photographs taken throughout Latin America and over 300 video interviews with inhabitants of the region.
Spring 2008
January 24, 2008
Emma Amos
Amos confronts the post-colonial perspective through bold and colorful mixed-media works. Amos questions commonly held ideas about American history and the depiction of women's bodies as symbols of sexuality and the self in the contemporary world.
February 7, 2008
Honour Mack
Mack's paintings are lush and physical. She uses a varied range of gestural marks to create expansive and abstract forms that reveal internal and external body systems.
February 28, 2008
Hanneline Rogeberg
Rogeberg recognizes the importance of human touch and explores its visual manifestations through her figurative paintings. Rogeberg believes "the body as well as the skin will hold the history of its experience."
March 13, 2008
Daniela Hoelzl: “Bodies and Affects: Caravaggio, Giordano Bruno and Francis Bacon"
Philosopher, art critic and curator, Hoelzl is based in Vienna and Dusseldorf and has taught at the the Akademie fur Bildende Kunst in Vienna. Her book of selected essays, Discourses, was published in 1999 by Passagen, Vienna. She has published numerous critical/literary texts in monographs on contemporary artists.
March 14, 2008
Carson Fox
Fox seeks out a beauty that coexists with tension in her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. She uses circumstantial materials to create a fantasy realm composed of both decorative surfaces that provide a feeling of accessibility and contradictory materials that elicit a sense of uneasiness.
March 20, 2008
Wade Schuman
Schuman uses the natural palette, articulate spaces, and precise drawing of 19th-century naturalism and surrealism's unsuspecting synthesis of subjects to comment on life, love, and the human condition.
March 27, 2008
Kelli Connell
Connell digitally manipulates her photographic negatives to create intimate scenes in which her models interact with images of themselves. These beautiful, private photographs, that are based on both memories from her own life as well as recollections of witnessed encounters, spark associations from the viewer that question his or her notion of identity within personal relationships and his or her mental construction of belief systems.