Upper Gallery
Elizabeth Milroy will talk about the efforts of painters and photographers to record Philadelphia's historic structures and places as the nation's centennial approached, focusing in particular on the work of watercolorist David Kennedy. For more than 50 years, Kennedy documented buildings and landscapes throughout the city—among his most important watercolors are views of buildings that were demolished for the development of East and West Fairmount Park in the years leading up to the world's fair.
Elizabeth Milroy is Professor Emerita of Art & Art History at Drexel, Professor Emerita of Art History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, and has published and lectured widely on the history of cultural spaces in the United States and Canada. She is author of The Grid and the River: Philadelphia's Green Spaces, 1682-1876 (Penn State University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies for significant contribution to the study and understanding of garden history and landscape studies. She also coedited the anthology Reading American Art, a standard textbook in the field. After teaching at Wesleyan University, she was appointed the Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2016-21 she served as Professor and Department Head of Art & Art History at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. She is Secretary of the Board of Councilors of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Committee on Historic Designation with the City of Philadelphia’s Historical Commission.
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