In This Issue: - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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6 Dan Miller Makes a Gift to PAFA’s Future PAFA alumnus and current Graduate Program Chair, Dan Miller, recently committed a planned gift to provide endowment funds in support of the Color Woodcut Purchase Prize at PAFA. Dan originally established the prize in 1986, which is awarded by the Printmaking Faculty for a color woodcut print that exhibits outstanding merit. Dan’s recent planned gift will ensure the longevity of this annual prize awarded during graduation ceremonies. PAFA is extremely grateful for this special support of its current and future students. Did you know that charitable planned gifts can achieve both estate tax and income tax savings, allowing you to leave assets to your heirs that in many cases are not subject to additional taxes? There are many ways a charitable planned gift can help your family achieve its financial and philanthropic goals, while supporting what matters to you most at PAFA. To learn more about how to include PAFA in your estate plans, or for a personalized illustration of how a charitable planned gift to PAFA could benefit you, please contact Melissa DeRuiter, Executive Vice President of Development, at 215-972-2002 or mderuiter@pafa.org. All conversations are kept in strict confidence. If you have included PAFA in your estate plans, please let us know so we may thank you and recognize you in PAFA’s planned giving society. PAFA Receives Major NEA Grant PAFA has been awarded an $80,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts supporting two of PAFA’s public engagement programs in 2011-2012: • Family Arts Academy, a program centered on 90 art making workshops for parents and children, held both here at PAFA and at community locations, and • Academy Visit program offering museum gallery tours on several themes for k-12 school groups. The grant also helps pay the cost of bus transportation and student admission for schools that could otherwise not afford those costs. These two PAFA programs served approximately 15,000 individuals in 2010-11. Photos: Patricia Maunder Participants in Family Arts Academy’s “Creature feature” Workshop at PAFA last January. PAFA’s Peale Circle: Join Us! The Peale Circle is PAFA’s leadership level membership group (starting at $1,000) designed for American art enthusiasts and connoisseurs alike. The Peale Circle offers many membership privileges including special discounts, invitations to preview receptions before membership openings, and many unique events throughout the year that explore both historic and contemporary facets of American culture. See below for a listing of some of our upcoming events. Support from the Peale Circle helps PAFA achieve its mission to bring together artists and the public through exceptional teaching programs, a world-class collection of American art, major exhibitions, and widely accessible public programs. To join the Peale Circle or to upgrade your membership, please contact, Cecily Macy, Director of Individual Giving, at 215-972-2597, cmacy@pafa.org, or visit www.pafa.org and click on Giving and Membership. We would love to welcome you as a new Peale Circle member this year! Upcoming Peale Circle Events HERE Preview Reception Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building Friday, October 21, 2011, 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. President’s Dinner, 7:30 p.m. for Peale Circle members $2,500 and above Historic Landmark Building Scott Hocking , Hephaestus and the Garden of the Gods, Snow, 2010, Archival Pigment Print / Site Specific Installationfrom the series Garden of the Gods, 2009-2010, Detroit Peale Circle members are invited for a champagne reception and private tour of HERE with PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Julien Robson before the members’ opening. Followed by the opening reception, Peale Circle members at the Horace Pippin Circle level and above are invited to the President’s Dinner. Chicago! Thursday, October 27, - Sunday, October 30, 2011 (Additional fees apply) Join us in The Windy City for art, cuisine and culture! Experience private collections, insiders’ tours and sample superb cuisine. If you joined us in Seattle last year, you know this trip will be fantastic! PAFA Receives Two Major Grants for Tanner Exhibition Henry Ossawa Tanner, Entrance to the Casbah, 1912, Oil on wood pulp paper mounted on canvas, 32 x 26 in., Art Museum of Greater Lafayette, Lafayette, IN, 1914.02 A Berks County Idyll Friday, November 18, 2011 (Additional fees apply) We will explore the county next door! Beginning with a continental breakfast at PAFA, we will travel to Reading for a private tour of the lovely Reading Public Museum, lunch and a private collection tour at the home of Marnie and Peter Carlino and a visit to the extraordinary private gallery of George Sullivan, dedicated to Annual Student Exhibition Cresson Award winners. Photo: Linda Johnson Bill Viola: Ocean Without a Shore, Opening Reception Historic Landmark Building Friday, November 18, 2011, 6 - 8:30 p.m. Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, Preview Reception Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building Friday, January 27, 2012, 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. Peale Circle members are invited for a champagne reception and private tour of Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit with PAFA’s Curator of Historical Art, Dr. Anna O. Marley before the members’ opening. Palm Beach Art Show (Additional fees apply) Friday, February 3 - Sunday, February 5, 2012 The Exelon Foundation recently awarded PAFA a grant of $200,000, in support of the upcoming exhibition, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, with an additional $50,000 from PECO, the local division of Exelon. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant of $250,000 towards this major retrospective of Tanner’s work, as well, which will support costs associated with the exhibition, related publications, and educational programming. Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit will run from January 27 – April 15, 2012, and bring together the artist’s greatest works for the first time in a generation. The exhibition will take Make an Even Greater Impact through Matching Gifts If your employer has a matching gifts program, your support of PAFA could be doubled or even tripled. Some companies will match contributions from retirees, spouses, and directors (past and present). Please see your employer’s human resources department for matching gift forms and additional information. viewers through Tanner’s upbringing; his success as an American expatriate artist at the highest levels of the international art; his role as a leader of an artist’s colony in rural France; his unique contributions in aid of American servicemen to the Red Cross efforts in WWI France; his modernist invigoration of religious painting; and the scientific and technical innovations of the artist’s oeuvre.
From the Desk of the Dean By Jeffrey Carr, Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the School PAFA is justifiably proud of the long list of distinguished graduates of its School. Our museum collections are full of them: historic figures such as Charles Demuth and Mary Cassatt, as well as recent stars such as Vincent Desiderio and Barkley L. Hendricks. One of the principle ways PAFA celebrates its alums is through exhibitions in our museum. This summer has seen a bumper crop of alums in the museum galleries. PAFA’s museum hosted a wonderful show of emerging artists titled Urbanism: Reimaging the Lived Environment. Alumni Steven and Billy Dufala and 2006 MFA graduate Amy Walsh exhibited in this show. Amy, who taught in our Post-Baccalaureate program last year, created a huge environment of cardboard and plastic walls, with peek holes that invite you into miniature urban interiors and rooftop vistas. The effect is mysterious, magical and evocative of nighttime walks in Philadelphia, and poetic glimpses into lighted interiors and darkened doorways. In the School Gallery, Gift of the Women’s Board was an exhibition of two 2010 graduates of the Masters program, Katie Dillon and Reza Ghanad. Recipients of the prestigious “One Year Out” award while students at PAFA, the two alums created an exhibition that demonstrated the range and quality of the work of our graduates. Reza’s work is a mad cap tour through an artist’s mind, with a visual overload of rich visual effects, arcane art historic allusion, and mixed media painting techniques. Katie Dillon Low exhibited a large hand-made boat that manages to be both funny and disturbing; a ship of fools metaphor with an empty table, the preparations for a long voyage, and an empty birdcage from which the dove has flown. The work of these five artists has all the hallmarks of what we want from our alums: a sense of craft, an appreciation of the complex traditions of the visual arts, and an extraordinary sense of visual and poetic imagination. We are very proud of our alums. They continue to embody the evolving traditions and cultural diversity of the fine arts in America. Photo: Bresner Studios FACULTY SPOTLIGHT The Dufala Brothers: Toilet tricycles, dumpster coffins and teaching at PAFA The Dufala Brothers leaning against their 20 Yard Dumpster Coffin. For the past seven years, Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala, known as the Dufala Brothers, have been working on cutting-edge collaborative art projects. PAFA alumni and faculty members since 2009, they practice in a variety of media, including sculpture, theater, performance, music, digital media and drawing. The Dufala Brothers also investigate the human condition by repurposing industrial materials. As Andy Warhol used images of commercial objects to draw attention to an avaricious consumer culture, so the Dufala Brothers create start-to-finish object worlds, with a contemporaneity that urges the viewer to reclaim an increasingly besieged humanity. “When we see something that is wrong, unfair, counterproductive, wasteful and ridiculous, we want to initiate a dialogue,” says Steven, the middle child in a family of five boys. “We start to investigate, casting the net as wide as possible. Our role as artists is to monitor what’s going on, we are barometers of society.” “We like to work collectively,” adds Billy. “I jump on the bigpicture ideas and Steven examines the perimeters. We are each other’s sounding boards.” Both Dufala brothers graduated from PAFA’s Certificate ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT Maureen Drdak: Beckoning Your Senses Rabindra Shakya and Maureen Drdak in Shakya Atelier. In 2006 artist Maureen Drdak traveled to Nepal, trekking to the remote kingdom of Lo Monthang in Upper Mustang (NOVA “Lost Treasures of Tibet”), an experience that changed her life, leading to her 2008 collaboration with composer Andrea Clearfield in the innovative Lung-Ta (The Windhorse), a convergence of Tibet-inspired dance (choreography by Manfred Fischbeck), painting and music. Lung-ta is the mythic horse that carries the prayers of aspirants—and the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma—heavenward. It visualizes an ancient yet sophisticated concept—that of the cosmic winds flowing through and energizing the body of man. Drdak contributed three huge prayer flags to the project, abstract variations on the wind horse, incorporating a prayer for world peace written especially for the project by a Senior Tibetan monk. Lung-Ta was commissioned by Philadelphia-based Network for New Music, which premiered the artistic collaboration in 2009. “As a simultaneous performance and exhibition of dance music, and visual art, all your senses are beckoned,” says PAFA alum ’75 Maureen Drdak. “I’ve always felt a close relationship between music and visual art. Music reveals fragments and glimpses of physical form and strengthens a particular emotional force.” Lung-Ta will have its Midwest premiere at University of Chicago’s Rockefeller chapel in 2012. This spring, Drdak received a 2011-2012 Fulbright Award for Nepal, enabling her to return to Nepal to actualize her Prakriti Project, the first synthesis of painting and repoussé metal work. The Newars of Nepal are today’s masters of the repoussé form, and Drdak’s Prakriti Project presents a unique contribution to the vocabulary of the visual arts in furthering the dynamic expansion of cultural boundaries between Asia and the West. She will return to her studies with Rabindra Shakya, decendant of Kuber Singh Shakya, whose family’s artistic legacy and lineage dates from 1601 and was patronized by the Program. Billy Blaise Dufala graduated in 2003 with a Sculpture major. At the Academy he was awarded the Cresson Travel Scholarship, Valley National Gases Prize, The Alexander Prize, and Philadelphia Mayor’s Award. Steven Dufala graduated in 2000 with a Printmaking major. He has been awarded PAFA’s Cuff/Sammak Prize for Abstract Painting, the Wolf Scholarship in Honor of Peter Paone, and the John R. Conner Printmaking Prize. Recent art projects have included toilets affixed to bicycles, an ice cream truck mashed with a military tank (for which they received the prestigious West Prize in 2009), and drawings of body parts intertwined and morphing into machines. Their 20 Yard Dumpster Coffin was included in PAFA’s summer exhibition Urbanism: Reimagining the Lived Environment, the first piece of art work to be produced entirely through RAIR, the non-profit artist in residency program located within Revolution Recovery, a construction waste recycling facility in northeast Philadelphia. For the last two years the Dufala Brothers have been teaching courses at PAFA on found material techniques, which explore alternative methods to traditional art making practice, using Philadelphia’s abandoned material as a basis for students’ new work. As former Academy students, they bring unique insights and ideas to the teaching process. “I want to help the students navigate life at PAFA,” says Steven. “I remember it super well. We also want to expand their frame of reference. We’ve asked students to walk outside the building – a distance of at least five blocks – and work on a project. It’s necessary to constantly reinvestigate one’s relationship to one’s surrounding.” “It’s also important to prepare the students for life after PAFA,” he adds. “I believe the quality of life issue may be a challenge for them. Even though the students are adept at living with very little in the way of traditional comfort, the ability to put off a decent standard of living may not last forever, and it is an ingredient in a successful/sustainable art-making practice. Maureen Drdak, Lungta Triptych (detail), 2009, Image courtesy of the artist Malla kings of Nepal. Drdak connects deeply with the spiritual worldview of the cultures of the Himalayas. While embracing the uniqueness of these cultures, she also celebrates the inevitable bridging of historically and socially disparate elements. “Societies are rapidly changing, increasingly stretching the limits of communal connection,” says Drdak. “Art can be a powerful force for easing this dislocation; art can maintain meaningful cultural identity and be a positive force for selfdefinition, a grounding matrix enabling individuals to locate themselves within their societies, and their world.” Follow Drdak’s blog from Nepal at: www.maureendrdak.com The Dufala Brothers, Billy Blaise and Steven Dufala, posing in front of their work, Heap, 2011 Photo: Bresner Studios 7
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Page 5: Photo: Barbara Katus Now there are
Page 9 and 10: A New Season of PAFA After Dark Whe
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