Past Lectures
A conversation with author, philanthropist, collector, entrepreneur, and two-time Superbowl champion Malcolm Jenkins and Eleanor Nairne, the Keith L and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at PMA, on Jenkins’ collection of contemporary African American art. The program will take place in the tent before the show opens on Sunday. There will be a book signing afterward in the new Learning and Engagement space at the North Entrance of PMA.
$30 ticket includes admission to the show.
$45 ticket includes admission to the show and museum.
Join PBS’s ANTIQUES ROADSHOW Senior Producer, Sam Farrell, and several of the show exhibitors, Eric Hanks, Betty Krulik, Arlie Sulka, David Walker who have also appeared on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW as specialists in their fields and Alasdair Nichol, Deputy Chairman of Freeman’s I Hindman. They will discuss with Sam their favorite finds on the show. The panel will take place in the tent before the show opens on Saturday.
$30 ticket includes admission to the show.
$45 ticket includes admission to the show and museum.
Join Philadelphia designer Barbara Eberlein and Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Montgomery-Garvan curator of American Decorative Arts, Alexandra Kirtley, as they host Michael Diaz-Griffith, the Director of the Design Leadership Network, for a provocative conversation about collecting art, designing interiors, visiting art shows, and the role of museums within today’s visually exciting world. Their talk stems from the many ideas and experiences Michael put forth in his recently published book The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors. A book signing will follow the talk. The panel will take place in the new Learning & Engagement Center at the North Entrance of Philadelphia Museum of Art. This program is free with museum admission.
A conversation between Flavie Durand-Ruel, Director of FDR Fine Arts, art historian and great great granddaughter of Cassatt’s dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They will discuss how Mary Cassatt and Paul Durand-Ruel promoted her artwork and shaped a taste for Impressionism in the United States.
New technologies and scientific discoveries changed the way European artists worked in the 1800s. Breakthroughs in chemistry brought new colors into painting studios and ceramic workshops, while innovative materials and manufacturing techniques encouraged designers to create new kinds of useful—yet artistic—goods. Join PMA Assistant Curators Tara Contractor and Colin Fanning as they explore these intersections of art and science through the lens of the museum’s collection, and discuss how contemporary science can help us better understand the innovations of the past.
Sasha Suda, George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be joined by Eric Pryor, President of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Zoë Ryan, Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss the role of museums in their communities.
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About
Sasha Suda
Sasha Suda is the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was appointed in June 2022 and began her tenure in September. She brings new generation leadership to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and believes that the visual arts have the power to connect the past to the present and that they can help us to forge a more inspiring, creative, and equitable future. Born in Toronto to Czech parents, she studied at Princeton University before completing her Master’s degree in art history at Williams College and her PhD at New York University. Her professional career began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she worked in various roles in the Medieval Department between 2003 and 2011. She returned to her native Toronto to work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, first as an assistant curator, and eventually as Curator of European Art and the Elliott Chair of Prints & Drawings. In these roles, she led major international exhibition projects and spearheaded innovative digital initiatives that presented historical art to audiences in a new light. From 2019 until 2022, she served as director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada where she led the revitalization of its purpose, vision, and mission and first-ever strategic planning process, leading to advances in digital rebranding, exhibition planning, and external stakeholder engagement, with a focus on justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.
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About
Eric Pryor
Eric Pryor is the seventh President and CEO of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also known as PAFA. A strategic, creative, and collaborative leader, Pryor has over 25 years of experience in education, museum administration, and community-building initiatives. Over the course of his career, Pryor has excelled at fundraising, strategic planning, and revitalization efforts with an unwavering dedication to the positive impact that the arts can have on our lives, and specifically the lives of youth. He joined PAFA in January 2022 from the Harlem School of the Arts, where he served as president since 2015. During his tenure he secured funding that enabled the school to undertake its first major renovation in 40 years. Previously Pryor served as Executive Director of The Center for Arts Education in New York; Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum, known as “New Jersey’s Smithsonian;” and President of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. He is also an active community volunteer, an artist, and a lifelong learner. Currently, he is a Board Member for the Parkway Council of Philadelphia. He has a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Wayne State University, and has completed Columbia University’s Executive Leadership Program for Nonprofits. Pryor resides in both Philadelphia and West Orange, New Jersey, where he is joined by his wife and two daughters.
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About
Zoë Ryan
Zoë Ryan is Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Since joining ICA in 2020, she has focused on expanding the institution’s role as a launchpad for contemporary art, research, and ideas with projects that support and amplify emerging and underrecognized artists and critical inquiry across disciplines at the university, in Philadelphia, and beyond. Prior to this, Zoë was John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she set the vision for collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary architecture and design as expanded fields of practice that are in dialogue with the socio-political conditions of the times. Her research explores how art, architecture, and design can be a catalyst for social and cultural change and she is an active lecturer and panelist at national and international institutions. Upcoming projects include a co-edited volume of writings by Cuban-Mexican designer Clara Porset, many translated into English for the first time (Concordia University Press). Her past publications, include: In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (2019); As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History (2017); and David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material (2015), co-edited with Okwui Enwezor. In 2014, Ryan was the curator of the second Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be. Ryan has taught graduate courses in design history and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the Design Trust International Advisory Council, Hong Kong and on the Executive Committee of the International Confederation of Architecture Museums.
Form portraiture to the classical ideal, the human face features prominently throughout three centuries of American art. Join PMA curators Kathleen Foster and Alexandra Kirtley in a conversation about how American artists and artisans portrayed the human face in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries in paintings, sculptures, and furniture and the decorative arts. The discussion will bring context to the works of art that will be on exhibit at The Philadelphia Show and encourage participants to see the faces throughout the Show and the American art galleries in a greater context—and even consider the faces of artists and artisans themselves.
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About
Alexandra Kirtley
Alexandra Kirtley is the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since joining the PMA’s curatorial team in American art in 2001, Alexandra Kirtley has overseen a survey of the American furniture collection and multiple conservation and upholstery projects, made significant acquisitions to fill gaps in the American decorative arts collections, and spearheaded new research that has redefined the interpretation of American art. Her most notable exhibitions include the retrospective “Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris” in 2008 and, with conservator Peggy Olley, the groundbreaking “Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House” in 2016. Her latest book, American Furniture 1650-1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA/Yale U Press, 2020) is the first ever catalogue of the museum’s early American furniture, widely acknowledged one of the finest collections of its type in the country.
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About
Kathleen Foster
Dr. Kathleen Adair Foster is the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2002. Dr. Foster received her Ph.D. at Yale University. She has taught at Williams College, Temple University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an adjunct professor in the History of Art department. Before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dr. Foster held curatorial posts at the Indiana University Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she was chief curator and director of research and publications. Dr. Foster has received numerous grants and fellowships and has been a Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2015, she was Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the speed of modern life in the United States, accelerated by the invention of cars, airplanes, electric lighting, telephones, and mass-media marketing, changed how people lived their lives, and the objects they chose to live with. Through the power of design—form, color, ornament, and materials—the earliest industrial designers created a modern aesthetic that came to represent American hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Join author Nonie Gadsden, the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Colin Fanning Assistant Curator in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as they look closely at some major works of the era—each of which offers a window into the social, cultural, technological, and economic world in which they were made and used.
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About
Nonie Gadsden
Nonie Gadsden is the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). She earned her B.A. from Yale College and her M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. Gadsden is responsible for a wide range of artwork at the MFA including decorative arts and sculpture from North, Central and South America, from ancient times through the 20th century. Her recent work includes serving as lead curator for “Women Take the Floor” (2019-2021), a reinstallation of the Art of the Americas Wing 20th-century galleries that highlighted the work of under recognized women artists; co-leading the creation of a museum-wide Folk Art Initiative; mounting an exhibition that starts to question the collecting category of folk art, “Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art” (2021); developing new 20th century galleries, including “Art and Jazz” and “Folk Meets Modernism” (opened 2022); and publishing a book based on the MFA’s collection of American modern design, America Goes Modern: The Rise of the Industrial Designer (2022).
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About
Colin Fanning
Colin Fanning is an Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he works primarily on modern and contemporary design. His most recent exhibition project is Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT, currently open in the museum’s Collab Gallery. Colin is also completing a PhD in design history at Bard Graduate Center in New York, with a dissertation focused on design education in the late 20th century.
Louis Marchesano, Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs will speak about two exciting new acquisitions of private collections that were recently gifted to the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. They will discuss the strategies of the collectors and why these gifts are especially significant to the museum. They will also share insights about collecting works on paper.
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About
Louis Marchesano
Louis Marchesano is the Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. He was a curator at the Getty Research Institute for twenty two years before arriving at PMA in 2019. As curator and now department head, Louis has acquired over 12,000 works on paper on behalf of public collections. In 2017, the French ministry of culture bestowed on him the title Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) in recognition of his efforts to promote French culture with his ground-breaking collaborative catalogue A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660-1715 (2015). For Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics (2021), a Getty publication on a German artist from the earlier twentieth century, he received the prestigious Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship. In 2022, Louis’s Peter Hauenschild and Georg Ritter: Seeing a Thing Clearly appeared as the lead essay in an exhibition catalogue on contemporary drawing published by the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
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About
Peter Barberie
Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since 2008 he has organized more than twenty-five exhibitions and overseen the acquisition of more than six thousand photographs, including the core print collection of the Paul Strand Archive, making PMA the keystone collection of the artist’s work. Mr. Barberie has published widely on the history of photography including six titles edited for PMA exhibitions on Eugène Atget, Richard Benson, David Lebe, the Julien Levy Gallery, Paul Strand, and Zoe Strauss.
PMA Assistant Curators Alisa Chiles and Colin Fanning discuss how the Museum grapples with the hidden complexities of a seemingly simple question: “what is design?” Highlighting examples from the Museum’s collection and past exhibitions, they explore what it means to collect and display modern and contemporary design in an art-museum context.
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About
Alisa Chiles
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About
Colin Fanning
Colin Fanning is Assistant Curator in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, working primarily on contemporary design but broadly engaged with decorative arts after 1700. He was previously a fellow in the same department, organizing and co-organizing PMA exhibitions including Dieter Rams: Principled Design and Designs for Different Futures. He is also completing a PhD in design history and material culture at Bard Graduate Center, where his research focuses on the intellectual and technological transformations of design pedagogy in the late twentieth century.
Join Jessica Todd Smith, the Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as they virtually discuss in the recently installed Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century. This exhibition explores how artists living and/or working in the United States during the twentieth century have responded to tragedy, grappled with mortality, and honored those who have passed. The presentation will focus on series and repetition in the Malcolm X sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud and Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings by Robert Motherwell.
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About
Jessica Todd Smith
Jessica Todd Smith is the Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her recent projects include the exhibition Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 and the book American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prior arriving in Philadelphia in 2016, Smith was the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. At the Huntington, she worked on three expansions of the American galleries and organized numerous exhibitions including Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 (2007) and Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame (2011), both accompanied by publications. She also wrote American Made: Highlights from the Huntington’s Art Collection (2014), the first book to focus on American art at the Huntington.
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About
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and has served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Senior Historian and Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She is the author of numerous publications on the art and culture of the United States, with an emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
A virtual program with Alexandra Kirtley, The Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Dr. Tiffany Momon, Assistant Professor at Sewanee: The University of the South, and founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive discussing Thomas Gross, Jr.’s monumental double chest currently on view in the Robert McNeil Early American Galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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About
Alexandra Kirtley
Alexandra Kirtley is the the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since joining the PMA’s curatorial team in American art in 2001, Alexandra Kirtley has overseen a survey of the American furniture collection and multiple conservation and upholstery projects, made significant acquisitions to fill gaps in the American decorative arts collections, and spearheaded new research that has redefined the interpretation of American art. Her most notable exhibitions include the retrospective “Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris” in 2008 and, with conservator Peggy Olley, the groundbreaking “Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House” in 2016. Her latest book, American Furniture 1650-1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA/Yale U Press, 2020) is the first ever catalogue of the museum’s early American furniture, widely acknowledged one of the finest collections of its type in the country.
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About
Tiffany Momon
Dr. Tiffany Momon is a public historian and Assistant Professor of History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She earned her Ph.D. in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University, working with the Center for Historic Preservation. As a professor in Sewanee’s history department, Momon teaches courses in public history, digital history, and historic preservation. Additionally, her role at Sewanee brings the responsibilities of serving as faculty affiliate for the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, an initiative investigating the university’s historical entanglements with slavery and slavery’s legacies. Momon is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (blackcraftspeople.org), a Black digital humanities project that centers Black craftspeople, their lives, and their contributions to the making and building of America. Throughout her career, Momon has lectured on Black craftspeople at organizations such as the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and Winterthur Museum and Gardens. Her most recent publications include “John “Quash” Williams, Charleston Builder,” featured in the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and National Register of Historic Places nominations for Talladega College and Stillman College, two historically Black colleges in Alabama.
Tour the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new Early American Galleries with PMA curator Kathleen Foster. Explore the galleries, learn about the thinking behind the new installation and hear stories about works of art that are new to the Early American Art Galleries.
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About
Kathleen Foster
Dr. Kathleen Adair Foster is the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2002. Dr. Foster received her Ph.D. at Yale University. She has taught at Williams College, Temple University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an adjunct professor in the History of Art department. Before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dr. Foster held curatorial posts at the Indiana University Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she was chief curator and director of research and publications. Dr. Foster has received numerous grants and fellowships and has been a Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2015, she was Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
A Conversation followed by virtual studio visits with the artists featured in the “making” videos for the new American Galleries at PMA. Featured are ceramicist Michelle Erikson, silversmith Carson Sio, and ceramicist Daniel Ricardo Terán. This event will be hosted in partnership with the museum’s Leadership Annual Giving and Young Friends groups.
This lecture is by invitation only. Please contact Huntley Platt directly for access. Huntley.Platt@philamuseum.org
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About
Daniel Ricardo Terán
Daniel Ricardo Terán is a Potter based in Philadelphia, PA. He earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007 and has held residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME, The Armory Art Center, West Palm Beach, FL, Pottery Northwest, Seattle, WA, and The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA. He has exhibited nationally and has pieces in private collections and museums, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kamm Teapot Foundation. In 2017 Terán and his partner established Palmer Planter Company, a production pottery supporting handmade, local manufacturing, and plastic free products. Today they supply clay pots to hundreds of retailers across the US. palmerplantercompany.com
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About
Carson Sio
Carson Sio is a Philadelphia based silver and coppersmith. He began metalsmithing while earning a BS in Industrial Design from The University of the Arts. His largely self-taught studio practice has been producing work in Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles while exploring traditional techniques in metalsmithing including forging, raising, chasing and repousse, and constructed hollow-ware since 2011.
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About
Michelle Erickson
Michelle Erickson has a BFA from the College of William and Mary and is an independent ceramic artist and scholar. Internationally recognized for her mastery of colonial era ceramic techniques her pieces reinvent ceramic history to create 21st century social political and environmental narratives. Her pieces are in the collections of major museums in America and Britain that include the Museum of Art and Design NY, the Seattle Art Museum, the Potteries Museums Stoke on Trent and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ms. Erickson’s body of scholarship concerning the rediscovery of seventeenth and eighteenth century ceramics techniques has been documented in many publications most notably several volumes of the annual journal Ceramics In America. Her contemporary art has been profiled in numerous national and international publications and she has lectured and demonstrated her art widely at institutions including the The Potteries Museums Stoke on Trent, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has designed and produced ceramics for many museums, institutions and collectors as well as major motion pictures such as The Patriot, and HBO’s series John Adams. In 2012 Michelle was artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in the category of World Class Maker. During her tenure Ms. Erickson collaborated with Nike’s 2012 Olympic Track and Field Innovation and also composed three exciting short videos produced by the V&A in conjunction with the Chipstone Foundation. Erickson’s long list of exhibitions include her solo shows Conversations In Clay at Virginia MOCA May- August 2015 and You &I Are …Earth at Wilton House Museum, Richmond VA 2016, The Politics of Clay, Blue Spiral Gallery 1 Ashville NC 2018 and Michelle Erickson Distilled The Last Drop Project NC Pottery Center 2018. Michelle completed 2016 spring and summer artist residencies at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond VA and at Starworks in Star and Seagrove NC. In 2018 Erickson was artist in residence at the Museum of the American Revolution creating the film Making a Bonnin and Morris Pickle Stand released fall 2019. Ms Erickson was one of six finalists selected for the 2016 Gibbes Museum of Art 1858 Prize. Michelle’s 21stcentury protest ceramics are included in the historic exhibition Breaking the Chains: Ceramics and the Abolitionist Movement at The Reeves Collection Washington & Lee University 2020- present. Her ceramic art was featured in the Design Miami exhibition America(s) November 2020 and her piece The Party’s Over awarded honorable mention in their Top Ten Contemporary. Michelle one of 10 artists and designers selected by curator Glenn Adamson to participate in the traveling exhibition project Another Crossing that began in 2018 and is rescheduled to debut at Fuller Craft Museum July 2021.
A conversation with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jessica T. Smith, PMA Curator, about the installation Painting Identity at PMA. Their discussion will highlight how these 15 artists used portraiture to frame their perceptions of people, experiment with techniques and reflect upon social issues.
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About
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and has served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Senior Historian and Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She is the author of numerous publications on the art and culture of the United States, with an emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
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About
Jessica Todd Smith
Jessica Todd Smith is the Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her recent projects include the exhibition Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 and the book American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The creation of new galleries of early American Art has meant revisiting how the museum presents many works in its collection. One of the most iconic is Charles Willson Peale’s remarkable Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale), celebrated as both a feat of illusion and as proto-installation art conceived to engage with its surroundings and confound the perceptions of viewers. Over the past two years the painting and the way it is displayed have been the focus of historical and technical study to answer questions like: Should we show it the way it’s been installed since the 1960s, with a stairstep that projects out of the painting, or do something different, and either way, why? What do the historical record and technical examination tell us? And how has the painting itself changed over time? Join PMA conservator Lucia Bay, curator Carol Soltis, and director of Conservation Mark Tucker for a conservation-studio conversation about the quest for authentic presentation of this landmark painting that remains a novel and surprising delight after more than two centuries.
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About
Carol Soltis
Carol Soltis, Project Associate Curator, joined PMA’s Department of American Art in 2006. Among her responsibilities, as part of the curatorial team, has been to oversee the assimilation of Robert L. McNeil, Jr.’s extensive gift of works by the Peale family into our collection. Author of the Museum’s 2017 publication, The Art of the Peales she has written extensively on various members of the family and curated and co-curated exhibitions on Rembrandt Peale and Thomas Sully. A former member of The Peale Family Papers at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, she holds a Ph. D in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania.
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About
Lucia Bay
Lucia Bay is The Joan and John Thalheimer Associate Conservator of Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She joined the painting conservation studio as a technician in 2010 before moving to London, UK where she obtained a postgraduate diploma in the conservation of easel paintings from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She returned to the museum in 2016 and for the last two year she has focused on preparing early American paintings and their frames for the reinstallation of the Early American Art galleries.
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About
Mark Tucker
Mark Tucker is The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation. As head of the Paintings Conservation department between 1985 and 2015, he undertook and directed numerous preservation, conservation research, and treatment projects, among the most notable being the 2010 treatment of Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. Co-curator of the exhibition that debuted the restored painting and of two other exhibitions, he has published extensively on the work of artists dating from the late Middle Ages through the end of the 19th century.
Director Timothy Rub discusses the recently published catalogue American Furniture 1650-1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art with author and curator Alexandra Kirtley. Chairs, tables and chests to some were dynamic sculpture to early American artisans and patrons, and Alexandra will discuss her groundbreaking research on the PMA’s furniture collection and the people who made it and commissioned it. The catalogue opens with Alexandra’s lively essay about collecting early American furniture at the PMA, and Alexandra and Timothy will talk about that history and share their own the stories of how the museum has formed a collection recognized around the world as being one of the finest collections of its type.
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About
Timothy Rub
Timothy Rub was appointed as The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. Over the past twelve years he has implemented a comprehensive strategic plan, reshaped the Museum’s exhibitions program and overseen several major building projects such as the South Asian Art Galleries, the Chinese Galleries and the 19th Century Galleries. The museum is also in the midst of realizing an ambitious Facilities Master Plan designed by architect Frank Gehry that will modernize and significantly expand the Museum’s landmark main building. Before coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he served as the Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2006 to 2009 where he oversaw the reinstallation of its renovated 1916 building and new East Wing designed by architect Rafael Viñoly. He was Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum from 2000 to 2006 and Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College from 1991 to 1999.
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About
Alexandra Kirtley
Alexandra Kirtley is the the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since joining the PMA’s curatorial team in American art in 2001, Alexandra Kirtley has overseen a survey of the American furniture collection and multiple conservation and upholstery projects, made significant acquisitions to fill gaps in the American decorative arts collections, and spearheaded new research that has redefined the interpretation of American art. Her most notable exhibitions include the retrospective “Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris” in 2008 and, with conservator Peggy Olley, the groundbreaking “Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House” in 2016. Her latest book, American Furniture 1650-1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA/Yale U Press, 2020) is the first ever catalogue of the museum’s early American furniture, widely acknowledged one of the finest collections of its type in the country.
