News
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December 15, 2020
Graduate Student Artists Persevere During Pandemic and Find New InspirationStudents in the Weitzman School's Graduate Fine Arts Program are not only adapting to this year’s challenges, but discovering new inspiration as they continue to paint, draw, sculpt, perform, photograph, and film during the pandemic. Penn Today interviews three MFA candidates, who discuss how their practices have evolved over the course of the last nine months.
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December 8, 2020
Ph.D. Candidate Dana Khromov Researches Sensuality in Latin American Literature and FilmDana Khromov, a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies, learned Spanish as a hobby while working in a bakery and pursuing a masters’ degree in social work. She is currently writing a dissertation on the body as the site of sensuality in Latin American literature and film. Language is “inherently sensuous,” and words that evoke our senses of touch, smell, and hearing have the “capacity to provoke more response,” Khromov said.
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December 8, 2020
Kelly Writers House 10th Annual Edible Books“Our Edible Books Party allows us to celebrate books, allows us to celebrate food, allows us to celebrate community, and allows us to celebrate puns,” said Jessica Lowenthal, director of Penn’s Kelly Writers House. This year the entries were made with submitted pictures and recipes, combined with book jackets created by Heidi Kalloo, Writers House assistant program coordinator, into slides for presentation by Nick Seymour, a 2019 Penn graduate.
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November 23, 2020
Sachs Recipient and Multimedia Artist, Alex Smith Receives 2020 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage AwardAlex Smith is a writer, artist, activist, musician and creative who lives in the seams of existence, stitching together patchwork universes for the disenfranchised. “My work is a vessel for the spiritual, political, and psychosocial ushering of queer Black people into a future informed by our cultural needs and shaped by our dreams and imagination.” - Alex Smith. Smith’s writing, Afrofuturist collage art, and avant-garde punk music draw from influences including science fiction, comic art, and Dadaism to frame the creativity, survival, and hopefulness of queer and Black people. Alex is a also a recipient of our 2020 Black Artists Support Grant. To learn more about his Sachs-supported project, The Afterverse, please visit https://sachsarts.org/grant-awards/the-afterverse/.
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November 11, 2020
Acclaimed Artist, Simone Leigh’s Beautiful Bronze Statue Titled “Brick House”, Now Lives on Penn Campus“Brick House,” is the first large-scale piece in the artist’s Anatomy of Architecture series that merges human form with diverse architectural elements. Cast in bronze, the work stands 16 feet high, 9 feet in diameter at its base, and weighs 5,900 pounds. Simone Leigh was named the American representative to the 2022 Venice Biennale—the first Black woman to represent the U.S. at this prestigious international exhibition. In addition, she has received a Creative Capital Award (2012), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016), and the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, among other honors. Often her work is sparked by underlining texts from Black feminist thinkers, African and diaspora art objects, material culture and philosophies.