Virtual Weitzman School Talk | Crisis and Connection: Reflections through Art and Public Space

Thursday, May 14, 2020
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm (ET)

What is the role of art in shaping the ways we respond, commemorate, and reconnect in the wake of COVID-19? How will public spaces evolve and adapt? What are the ways we balance the impacts of the crisis and need to build modes of civic connection? 

Paul Farber (Senior Research Scholar in Weitzman’s Center for Public Art & Space and Artistic Director of Monument Lab) will share insights and case studies from his work, in conversation with John McInerney (Executive Director of The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art).

Registration Required.
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Paul Farber, PhD
Senior Research Scholar in Weitzman’s Center for Public Art & Space and Artistic Director of Monument Lab

Farber's research and curatorial projects explore transnational urban history, cultural memory, and creative approaches to civic engagement. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also the co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments.

Farber earned a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

John McInerney
Executive Director, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania and Interim Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director, Institute of Contemporary Art 

John McInerney is the inaugural Executive Director of The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania, having launched the University wide initiative in 2017. John McInerney was appointed as the Interim Daniel W. Dietrich II Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, a position he serves concurrently. He is also the Chair of the Provosts Arts Advisory Council and the Vice Chair of the Board of Eastern State Penitentiary historic site. 

McInerney earned an MS in Arts Administration from Drexel University and a BA in Business Administration from Loyola University in New Orleans.

Image:San Fiorano, Italy (Marzio Toniolo/via Reuters)