Erica Ehrenbard

Join us for a virtual talk and studio tour of Carriage Creative Co. with studio co-founder, Erica Ehrenbard. This talk will be moderated by Doah Lee (MFA’16) and hosted by Jill Sablosky (MFA’79), both are members of our Penn Weitzman Alumni Association.

About the Speakers:

Erica Ehrenbard
Co-founder of Carriage Creative Co.

Erica Ehrenbard is a sculptor based in Philadelphia whose multi-disciplinary practice intertwines fine art with design, research, architecture, and custom fabrication. Ehrenbard uses sculpture as a means of releasing human energy into a physical form. She works extensively with metals and fiber to push the materials into realms that surpass reasoning and give an inner logic to her work. Ehrenbard is interested in connecting to viewers on a core level, by illuminating sensations of being alive and capturing innately shared experience. The human body, as an emotive gesture, has been a central and evolving theme in her work over the years.

From 2015-2020, Ehrenbard was a member of KieranTimberlake’s Research Group, where she delved into various material studies and engaged architects in prototyping at a 1:1 scale. Additionally, she produced creative installations for the U.S. Embassy London, University of Washington, and Wellesley College, working collaboratively with respective architectural design teams. In 2019, after revitalizing a carriage house into a metalworking studio, Ehrenbard co-founded Carriage Creative Co. to expand her professional practice into custom design & fabrication. Ehrenbard has a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design (2012), and has been awarded scholarships with Vermont Studio Center, Chashama, and Center for Metal Arts.

Doah Lee (MFA'16)
Visual Arts Teacher, The Haverford School
Visiting Art Critic and Artist in Residency, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Doah Lee is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Philadelphia. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She earned her MFA from University of Pennsylvania and her BFA with a concentration in Painting and Printmaking at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. In her work, Lee explores and exploits cultural symbols through repetition in a practice that mediates on cultural translation, immigration, otherness and femininity in focusing more specifically on issue of self-identification. She searches through the ways how children speak, listen, see, and draw and their relationships with the influencing points over a person’s identity under socio-political and cultural pressures. Her work has been featured in various exhibitions in Virginia, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea. Lee has been a resident-artist at Vermont Studio Center and Cheltenham Center of the Art. She is a curator and co-director of an artist-run exhibition space, FJORD gallery. Currently, Lee works as a visiting art critic and artist in residency at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and teaches at Haverford School.

Jill Sablosky (MFA'79)
Public Artist/Sculptor

Jill Sablosky is a sculptor who works primarily with stone.  Her form is architectural-multiple sculptural elements function as gathering spaces. Native to Philadelphia, she has lived and worked in the marble region of Pietrasanta, Italy and in Glen Rose, Texas, home to dinosaur tracks and wildlife preserves.  She draws inspiration from these diverse landscapes—the grand mountains of Italy and the mysterious micro world of fossilized north central Texas. Combining marble, granite and limestones from these regions reveals layered dimensions, color and texture. Beyond the physical, and as response to chaotic planetary and human conditions, her purpose has been to create places of structural stability - with a sense of harmony and well-being.  

Sablosky's works have been commissioned nationally for private and public settings. Outdoor public artworks are located at the San Antonio Federal Building and Western Connecticut State University. In Philadelphia, ‘functional’ sculptures are to be found at the Federal Reserve Bank and Society Hill Towers. Currently, she is working with the City of Philadelphia Public Art Program to produce the public art component for Engine 37, a historic firehouse receiving full restoration and a new addition.

Sablosky recently served as Vice-President of the Penn Weitzman Alumni Association from 2018-2020, and received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979.

This virtual event is sponsored by the PWAA. The Penn Weitzman Alumni Association (PWAA) is here to be a professional, creative, and social resource to the Weitzman alumni community of over 11,000 members. The PWAA aims to support and strengthen the School by increasing communication amongst graduates from all departments and their friends, by offering counsel to its leadership, by assisting with fundraising on its behalf, and by connecting alumni from its various departments with the professional disciplines which its graduates profess.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of an event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.