Photographer Tina Barney to lecture at Philadelphia Photo Art Center

LECTURE & BOOK SIGNING: TINA BARNEY

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 6:00 – 7:30pm

Hosted by the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center,

$5 suggested donation

Lecture located in Gray Area, 1400 N American St, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Photo: Tina Barney, Family Commission with Snake, 2007

48×60’’ chromogenic color print Image courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Tamara Suber (MFA '11) Featured in DesignPhiladelphia "Not a Vacant Lot" exhibit

"Not a Vacant Lot" features the Play House by Marianne Bernstein and an architectural installation by a class of PennDesign Landscape Architecture students. The installation is in a vacant lot at on 313 S Broad Street in Philadelphia and the work in the lot deals with the continuing vacancy problem facing the city of Philadelphia (with over 40,000 vacant lots).

Performances will be held daily from within the Play House from 4-7pm. Video screenings by 10 artists as well as award-winning photographs of Philadelphia vacant lots by Daniel Traub will be projected on the cube from 7-10pm daily. Kelsey Halliday Johnson (MFA '12) has been working to facilitate this project with artist-curator Marianne Bernstein. Tamara Suber (MFA '11) is one of the ten performance and video artist featured.

The closing reception for Design Philadelphia will be held at "Not a Vacant Lot" on Saturday the 22nd 7-10pm. Beer will be provided by Triumph Brewing Company and music by Broadzilla DJs with special guests.

Website

Spring photo course preview

Current Penn students- check out this teaser for the spring photo course offerings. Spring registration is right around the corner.

Photos by Christopher Payne, MArch'96, on display at Drexel's Pearlstein Gallery

Christopher Payne (Penn MArch'96), who spoke at PennDesign last spring about his photographic series "Asylum" is currently exhibiting some of the work at the Drexel University Leonard Pealstein Gallery through October 29th. Continuing Payne's interest in architecture, the series of photographs documents years of research into the history of the little seen public mental health system from the early 20th century. His new images are in stark contrast to popular media images of institutional squalor, terrifying environments that make fodder for horror movies, and systematized abuse against patients typically shown of state mental institutions. Instead Payne looks a lost trend of opening large public institutions in small rural towns with expansive properties, fresh air and gardens (for effective treatment) and world class architecture that was meant to cheer patients and create an environment for rehabilitation. These buildings were made by preeminent architects, but proved expensive to manage with state funds and exorbitant with a waning interest in the importance of mental health. Each institution was designed to be an entirely self sufficient community with the labor of the patients, providing their own clothing, food, and needs from within the institution making them architectural novelties.

The abandoned ruins in Payne's photos show a historical moment, both cultural and architectural, that changes the way we look at the history of mental health in our country. The work took nearly a decade to complete, with Payne getting unrestricted access from numerous states to document their history. 22 of his large format images are on display at the Pearlstein Gallery and it is worth the quick walk over to Drexel to see his technically fabulous and provoking images in person.

The gallery is located on 3215 Market Street and is open from Monday to Friday from 11am to 5pm. Free and open to the public. More info here

34st.com Summer Photo Contest Winners Announced!

(Above: Runner up image from Ayasha Guerin '12)

UPenn's 34th Street Magazine just announced the winners to their Summer Photo Arts Contest. Congrats to all of the winners and check out more of the image on 34st.com here.

Hamza Walker lectures @ ICA Philadelphia 10/6

Thursday October 6th at 6:30 pm
Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia
118 S 36th St Philadelphia 19104

Since 1994, Hamza Walker has served as Director of Education for The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago - a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. He also writes and has had articles and reviews published in such publications as Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett and Artforum.

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago is one of the country’s premiere exhibition spaces devoted exclusively to contemporary art. Founded in 1915 as a non-collecting museum, it has mantained the same mission - to promote developments in contemporary visual art through exhibitions and related events (lectures, concerts, readings, performances, film and video screenings) designed to broaden the context for a given artist’s work. Over the past few decades, The Society has developed a reputation for providing local, national and internationally recognized artists their first museum exhibitions, simultaneously bringing the world to Chicago and presenting Chicago to the world. The Renaissance Society has been a platform for many interesting video installations and work of photographers such as Laura Letinsky and Ben Gest (not to mention countless other international artists in other mediums).

For an interesting perspective on the curatorial and about art-education, please RSVP here before attending: http://penndesignpresentshamzawalker.eventbrite.com/

Hal Foster lectures at Tyler Wednesday 10/5

Lecture Information: 6pm, B04 auditorium, Tyler School of Art_Architecture, Temple University, 2001 N. 13th Street, Philadelphia [While this is not a Penn event, it is definitely worth sharing for any creative students or professionals in the Philadelphia area.]

Hal Foster is an internationally renowned author of books on modern and contemporary art and theory and a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. In 1991 he joined the editorial board of the international journal "October", a position he continues to hold. In addition to several edited collections, Foster’s books include Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (2002), and Prosthetic Gods (2004). He is also the author, with Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, of the textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004). His new book, Figment: Painting and Subjectivity in the First Pop Age, is due out in 2011. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster continues to write regularly for October, ArtForum, and The London Review of Books. Within photography he has written about conceptual photography, photo montage, appropriation, and postmodern photographic practices.

Second Year MFA Exhibition "call it" opens in Addams Gallery

The show titled " call it," exhibits the work of the second year MFA students in the Gallery at the Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall through October 13th. "call it" is intended as a preview of what may come in this next year, as all fourteen students proceed down their diverse and distinct paths towards thesis in May.

The show includes photography work by Kelsey Halliday Johnson, Caitlin Lennon, and Chloe Reison as well as work in other media.

Sarah Cohen (MFA '11) exhibits photographs from Mumbai Studio Abroad (Spring 2011)

Sarah Cohen (MFA '11) has photographs featured in a solo exhibition, entitled Jewish Life in India, at the Leona P. Kramer Memorial Gallery, Gratz College. The images Cohen will be presenting were taken in synagogues in Mumbai, India, while she was there for the Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Studio Abroad Class in Spring 2011: an opportunity she was granted during her final year of her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. The show is on view until October 26th.

For more information, please visit
http://www.gratz.edu/page11211.aspx

Olivia Coffey, Recent Photo Alum in group show in Chelsea

Olivia Coffey’s vivid color photographs capture the fragility of partnership and the fluid, subtle and often fleeting nature of intimacy. Calling upon cohabitating couples in “practical… profitable [and] constant” partnerships, Coffey shoots the duos posed comfortably in their shared homes. Printing the final selections as large scale Archival Pigment Ink Jet Prints on luster paper, the artist displays the intricacies of private domestic space in the larger than life, hyperreal proportions one might associate with film, television and related media.

Olivia Coffey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and currently resides in San Francisco.

The Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Exhibition
August 19 - September 9, 2011 Reception: Thursday August 25, 2011 6-8 PM

The Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Exhibition is an eagerly awaited show on the gallery calendar, and an examination of these works makes it easy to see why. Innovative, energetic and intensely appealing, this is an example of contemporary art at its breathtaking best. Each of the range of mediums and styles is used gracefully and creatively, resulting in a wonderfully varied collection of art.