In This Issue: - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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
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