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Visual Arts

ICA, WXPN awarded Pew Center for Arts & Heritage project grants
Musicians from the Black Opry Revue performing on a porch

WXPN is partnering with the Black Opry collective to support a Black Opry residency for five emerging Black Americana musicians. (Image: Black Opry Revue, 2021, by Gabriel Baretto)

WXPN

ICA, WXPN awarded Pew Center for Arts & Heritage project grants

The Institute of Contemporary Art and WXPN have been awarded 2022 project grants from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Stuart Weitzman School of Design alumni James Maurelle, now on the faculty, and James Allister Sprang are among 12 Pew Fellows in the Arts named this year.
Exploring the depth of smell through art
Odd-shaped blocks arranged on a concrete surface

Blocks and stones, imbued with scent, are placed on a concrete step in the ICA gallery, as part of a new exhibit by artist, chemist, and linguist Sissel Tolaas.

Exploring the depth of smell through art

With “RE_______,” a fall exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian artist, chemist, and linguist, the galleries put smell front and center.
Do art museums prioritize visitor well-being enough?
Two people standing in front of a wall of art. One of them is holding up a second piece of art in gloved hands. The other gestures toward the art, holding a computer or clipboard in the other hand.

Katherine Cotter and James Pawelski (not pictured) surveyed more than 200 curators, educators, researchers, security guards, exhibit designers, and others working at art museums to gauge how museums can impact visitors’ well-being.

Do art museums prioritize visitor well-being enough?

Research from the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center reveals that the people working in these institutions want to see greater emphasis on human flourishing, but they feel ill-equipped to make it happen.

Michele W. Berger

Creating an artist’s book at the Common Press
two sets of arms over a hand-operated printing press, one set with gloved hands putting ink on a metal cylinder and the other placing a printing plate with an image of a tree without leaves on the flat surface in front of the cylinder

Artist-in-residence Katie Baldwin works with a hand-operated printing press in Penn’s Common Press, located in the Fisher Fine Arts Library, to print pages for her forthcoming book.

Creating an artist’s book at the Common Press

Artist-in-residence Katie Baldwin is printing a book she wrote and illustrated, inspired by a 400-plus-year-old volume in the Penn Libraries collection, sponsored by a residency with the Philadelphia Center for the Book.
Cultural representations in films
Maori amidst foliage

Cultural representations in films

In partnership with BlackStar Projects, Maori Karmael Holmes of Penn Live Arts curates films to uplift the work of Black, brown, and Indigenous artists.

Anna Chen

Grappling with a watershed’s uncertain environmental future
Several people around a table, one holds a satellite map.

Grappling with a watershed’s uncertain environmental future

Artists supported by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities created tools for navigating unpredictable ecological challenges, then brought them to life in a series of public workshops at the Independence Seaport Museum.

Katherine Unger Baillie