News

• October 8, 2019

  Sculptor Michelle Lopez Creates Installation for ICA Exhibition ‘Ballast & Barricades’

  Michelle Lopez pushes the boundaries of materials in a new room-sized exhibition, “Ballast & Barricades,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The site-specific installation, on display until May 10, features construction-derived materials hanging from, and reaching up to, the 30-foot-high gallery ceiling. Steel pipes, chain-link fencing, wooden barricades, and bright orange ropes fill the room from top to bottom, all connected, balanced by a 1,000-pound piece of a building salvaged from a teardown in Northeast Philadelphia.

• October 8, 2019

  Penn Leads the Vote to Make Penn a Civic-Minded Population of Voters in All Elections

  The Penn community is taking steps to engage young voters on issues that have local, national, and even global impact. Step one: getting everyone on campus registered to vote. That is one of the core goals of Penn Leads the Vote (PLTV), a student-run nonpartisan organization in the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, that collaborates with the Office of Government and Community Affairs (OGCA), with support from Fox Leadership and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. “Democracy is something we do together,” Legend, a Penn alumnus, told the crowd of students at Irvine Auditorium, adding how all elections matter—the big, presidential ones, as well as the local ones.

• October 8, 2019

  President Amy Gutmann Celebrated the Naming of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and Stuart Weitzman Plaza

  Gutmann announced that the central plaza, located adjacent to College Green between Meyerson Hall and Fisher Fine Arts Library, is now named the Stuart Amy Weitzman Plaza. The area will undergo significant redesign and renovation by renowned landscape architect Laurie Olin, practice professor emeritus of landscape architecture of the Weitzman School, and colleagues at his firm OLIN. Weitzman, the designer and footwear industry icon, graduated from the Wharton School in 1963. He has had a “lifetime of engagement with Penn,” and “believes in the power of design to immeasurably improve the human experience,” said Gutmann.

• October 2, 2019

  Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley Named Sachs Visiting Professors

  The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has appointed artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professors in the Department of Fine Arts for the 2019–2020 Academic Year.

• October 1, 2019

  In Memory of Lives Lost Crossing the Border

  The expanse of desert lands spanning the doorstep of Mexico to Arizona is filled with stories of migrants who’ve trudged through the terrain and struggled through long nights and hot days to cross the border. Many of them—at least 3,200 since 2000—never finished this journey. “Hostile Terrain 94,” a pop-up exhibit coming to the Penn Museum, reminds us of those people.