PAFA presents A Fine Arrangement: The Art of Still Life
PAFA presents A Fine Arrangement: The Art of Still Life
On view through April 12, 2015
PHILADELPHIA (November 7, 2014) - The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) presents A Fine Arrangement: The Art of Still Life, on view through April 12. The exhibition brings together nearly 90 works from PAFA, the Woodmere Art Museum, and contemporary works from artists with ties to both PAFA and the Philadelphia region.
Many of the artists included in the exhibition were trained at PAFA, including Charles Demuth, Charles Lewis Fussell, and John Peto. Other artists not only trained but also taught at PAFA, including Arthur B. Carles, Ben Kamihira, Jimmy Leuders, Elizabeth Osborne, and Franklin Watkins.
The exhibition's curators, Jan Baltzell and Michael Gallagher, are also artists and PAFA faculty members. For them, still life continues to be a relevant art form that grows and combines with other subjects, concepts, and media to engage a diverse range of artistic practices.
In the Western tradition of academic art, the still life evolved from an early supportive role as a symbolic device in figurative painting into a significant genre unto itself. More than merely an art of imitation, still life offers the possibility to engage topics and subjects including religious and allegorical symbolism, landscape, architecture, narrative, and abstraction.
Today, still life is a teaching tool and an area of exploration for independent advanced students in PAFA's School of Fine Arts, and a distinct genre collected by PAFA's Museum.
A Fine Arrangement is on view in the Annenberg Gallery and the School of Fine Arts Gallery in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building. It is being presented in conjunction with Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis.
###
