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Collaborations with Institute of Contemporary Art
Nationally and for our graduate community, the Institute of Contemporary Art provides a forum for the presentation and documentation of recent developments in the visual arts. Artists present innovative work at the ICA and often lecture and critique students. The ICA hosts a number of lectures each year by visiting artists participating in our MFA program.
Graduate students recently assisted the artistic practice of sculptor Judy Pfaff over a period of two weeks on a site-specific installation commissioned by the ICA.
The Common Press
The Common Press is the letterpress printing studio at the University of Pennsylvania. The press is a collaboration of interests at Penn, including writing (Kelly Writers House), print culture (the Rare Book & Manuscript Library) and visual arts and design (the School of Design). The facility provides a mixed media environment where students can move between digital and manual image making, collaborating with writers, printmakers and others in the book arts. The Common Press exists to assist in teaching design and to facilitate collaborative projects across the university. It was founded last year, on January 17, 2006, the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth.
Poet Painter Series
The School of Design and Kelly Writers House present the Poet Painter Series, a program where distinguished poets and painters known for their collaborative work present slides talks, poetry readings, discussions, and critique graduate students in their studios. Recent participants have included, Bill Berkson, Kenward Elmslie, Yvonne Jacquette, Maureen Owen, Ron Padgett, George Schneeman, Trevor Winkfield, John Yau, and Geoff Young.
Collaborations of the Fabric Workshop and Museum
The Fabric Workshop and Museum is the only contemporary art museum in the United States devoted to creating new work in fabric and other materials in collaboration with emerging and established artists from around the world. While Laura Owens was in residence at FWM, she also visited Penn's graduate studios and held a public lecture. In 2004, the collaboration with FWM's "Surface Tension" exhibition, a day of critiques with the artists of Surface Tension ended with a panel discussion moderated by graduate faculty Joshua Mosley, where participants discussed the diverse ways contemporary video artists are using expanding technologies in the creation of images. Most recently, Matthew Ritchie visited the MFA studios and gave a lecture at Penn in conjunction with his exhibition at FWM..
MFA Thesis Show in Old City
During May the graduating MFA class mounts an exhibition in the gallery district of Philadelphia. The exhibition was curated by Claudia Gould, Director Institute of Contemporary Art in 2001; Matt Freedman, sculptor and writer in 2002; Alex Baker, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2003, and by Judith Stein, independent curator, in 2005.
Of the 2005 show at the IceBox Project Space, Philadelphia art critic Roberta Fallon writes,
"Hiring a curator to hang Penn's student show is a breakthrough idea. A curated show creates a thematic pathway pointing up relationships between this student's sculpture and this student's painting. It's good for the viewer and good for the students."
Notes from the catalog essay, 2002:
... As academic allegiances to style and content have given way to passionate and committed bodies of work, self conscious experiments in identity and polemics have been replaced by emphatic, beautiful and persuasive art.
-- Matt Freedman
2005 MFA Thesis Exhbition Website |
