News

• March 19, 2020

  Teaching Art Online Under COVID-19

  As we individually scramble to stock our pantries and secure our loved ones, we are also figuring out how on earth to switch our hands-on teaching of studio-based art to virtual platforms.

• March 19, 2020

  Coronavirus and the Philly Concert Scene

  Speaking to several different Philly-area concert promoters throughout the day today, the common theme is that everything is changing by the hour as fears about the spread of coronavirus continue to escalate.

• March 17, 2020

  A Simple Exercise to Help Stay Calm in the Face of Coronavirus Uncertainty

  Martin Seligman, director of Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, offers a quick and straightforward way to refocus the mind. The situation with coronavirus and COVID-19 is changing daily, and such uncertainty and flux can lead to anxiety and fear. “The human mind is automatically attracted to the worst possible case, often very inaccurately,” says Martin Seligman, who founded the field of Positive Psychology and runs Penn’s Positive Psychology Center. To refocus the mind, Seligman suggests a simple exercise called “Put It in Perspective,” which starts by conjuring the worst-case scenario, which our minds tend to do first, then moves to best-case scenario, and finishes with the most likely scenario. The idea is to redirect your thoughts from irrational to rational.

• March 17, 2020

  The History Behind International Women’s Day

  March is Women’s History Month, and March 8 marks International Women’s Day. Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at Penn and author of “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence,” talks to Penn Today about how International Women’s Day began and why the U.S. has been late to embrace it.

• March 17, 2020

  Painter John Singer Sargent’s Secret African American Muse

  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston explores the relationship between the famous artist and his now-famous model. Thomas McKeller worked as an elevator operator in an elite Boston hotel. His life, which spanned the first half of the 20th century, was largely unheralded. But the countenance of McKeller, who was African-American, is everywhere in Boston, in the work of one of the most prominent painters of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent. “There was a very strong backlash, especially by members of Congress — the labels were seen as being revisionist and very strident in their historical content,” said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, an associate professor of history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.