510 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
I have read two of Carmen Maria Machado’s works: her memoir In the Dream House and a short story from her forthcoming collection, The Tour. Both times her words almost brought me to tears. It’s not explicitly the content of her works that causes the swell of tears in my eyes, though their storylines are certainly powerful in and of themselves.
Butterflies, tigers, a pair of crying eyes, a blossoming branch—if you can imagine it, Iza Hu (C '23) can design and tattoo it.
The way we interpret art informs our connection with it. From one person to another, our interpretations may differ, but one thing remains the same—art is, at once, both our emotional window and mirror. The most beautiful things about art are the endless ways it can be formed and understood. Often, it feels like the blank canvas is the only medium through which the complexity of our emotions can be captured; amongst the worst of them, existentialism. It allows for an avenue through which existential dread, or existential euphoria (hair pulling, amongst other things) can be reflected upon and even created.
On the night of Friday, March 24, amongst the ancient artifacts of the Penn Museum, another exhibit was on display. Leather skirts, hypnotic patterns, laced corsets, metallic makeup, and skin–tight platform boots circled the third floor of the museum. A red carpet with rose petals sprinkled about led the way into Gallery 54. The lights of the large circular room, with even higher ceilings, were dimmed. Lit candles, brightly colored orbs, and the flash of cameras served as the main sources of light. The Penn Met Gala was a night to remember.
Dolly Alderton knows what she's talking about when it comes to adulthood—or at least what we've come to consider #adulting. Everything I Know About Love is a collection of diary entries, recipes, anecdotes, and ironic reflections of what she learned about parties, dates, work, life, and—most importantly—love in her adolescence and early twenties.
It’s 5:30 p.m. on the first 60–degree day in March, and Rittenhouse Square is packed. People just getting off work walk their leashed dogs, ranging from tiny white designer ones to mutts that reach my hip. Parents push strollers as children run around without jackets for the first time in months, while friends sit on benches tagged, “In Memorial Of.” An artist rests with his back against the fence, willing passersby to purchase the paintings that sit alongside him. Another plays the flute.
When high school students envision Penn, they don’t often think of the arts as being an integral force on campus. The preprofessional track, the competitive environment, and the strong engineering and Wharton schools likely take precedence in their minds. However, the legacy of Peter LaBerge (C '17), founder of The Adroit Journal, continues to grow as more high school students apply to Penn through his influence as a graduate of Penn’s renowned English program.
Black curtains do more than just shield the public from art. They represent a divide between the morality of censorship for tastelessly sexual or religious minority pieces, and those who feel that policing of media should be curbed at all costs.
Nestled in the heart of Old City, multicolored plants grow haphazardly through the wire fences meant to constrain them—that is, in Kate Bright’s paintings at the Locks Gallery. The upstairs gallery, where her paintings will be on view until March 18, contains ten distinct little rainbow worlds, filled with magical squash, figs, leaves, and flora from every season at every time of day. If you look long enough, you can almost feel the plants growing out of the constraints of their canvas boundaries towards the white gallery walls.
“AI is the natural progression of evolution for humans. It is the next species.” My friend tapped his cigarette. We sat by the BioPond, looking up at the nerve–like branches of the trees—brains stemming into the sky. In the generation of OpenAI, with programs like ChatGPT or Dall–E, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more indistinguishable from our own DNA. As we question what this means for the human community, artists at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have some answers.
“I was told by my professors that when you’re in school, it’s really good to take the time to experiment,” Cecily Nishimura (C '23) tells me in a crowded coffee shop. So that’s what she tries to do.
The audience sits tight in Kelly Writers House, neatly tucked away from the bustle of Locust Walk, in an appropriate sanctuary given the guest speaker that will be coming in any second now: Ling Ma, the author of Severance and Bliss Montage, reputed for her astute and poignant criticism of modern society. Ma’s writing style effectively transmits the somberness of our modern condition through the coquettish use of satire that simply yearns to be read with ease, never sacrificing one for the other. Her impressive ability to interweave the dark and the light is not lost on contemporary readers, and she boasts handsome accolades including winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize, a spot on New York Times Notable Books of 2018, and being shortlisted for the 2019 Hemingway Foundation.
As I turn the corner into the main exhibition hall at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I see a painting I’ve seen a million times before—the stately, perhaps boring, Washington at Princeton (1779) by Charles Willson Peale. George Washington rests his hand on a cannon, standing confidently after winning the titular battle. The flag of the thirteen colonies waves in the background—just above his enslaved valet, William Lee.
“Artemisia Gentileschi, was in almost every aspect of her life, a path breaker … [she] established herself as an equal of any male artist of her time” says History of Art professor Sheila Barker. “Because of her unorthodox and brazen path in life, [she] was always surrounded by controversy.”
“Why should I paint dead fish, onions, and beer glasses? Girls are much prettier,” said Marie Laurencin, the painter who wasn't satisfied by how reality presented itself. Instead, she was mesmerized by dreamlike versions of life. Laurencin, despite creating a unique style of her own, is yet another female artist who’s been left out of the popular canon.
In the summer of 2016, construction workers stumbled upon a mystery while performing centennial renovations on the historic Thomas Evans building in Penn Dental Medicine. “My phone rang one day that summer, and Elizabeth Ketterlinus, Senior Associate Dean, announced that construction workers had located two boxes in the [Penn Dental Medicine] basement that might be of interest. An hour later, I was perusing their contents,” says Lynn Marsden–Atlass, director of the Arthur Ross Gallery, remembering the start of a nearly decades–long artistic mystery.
The Traces by Mairead Small Staid is a philosophical exploration of happiness in which the author interweaves musings by figures like Aristotle, Cesare Pavese, and Alain de Botton with her own. She turns her self–reflection outward onto the reader, making this debut memoir both revealing and introspective. Small Staid discusses place, longing, and memory, journeying back through her life–altering time as a student abroad in Florence, Italy where she spent idyllic days studying “poems and paintings below oaken ceilings” and "[drinking] espresso in a sunlit courtyard.”
I walk through the air–conditioned corridors of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), appreciating oil paintings in golden frames and white marble statues. Suddenly, I am stuck by a bright yellow poster, “Do women have to be naked to get into the São Paulo Museum of Art?”
Despite having been painted more than 150 years ago, Édouard Manet’s Olympia continues to resonate throughout the art world. In 1865, the painting debuted in Paris’ prestigious Salon, controlled by the French Academy of Fine Arts, immediately scandalizing the scene. The work subversively approached the reclining female nude with its daring technical, stylistic, and thematic choices. While she was created by a man, Olympia has consequently joined the ranks of groundbreaking and influential women, both in the art world and beyond.
If you’ve ever found yourself involved in any sort of fanbase, you’ve probably stumbled upon fanfiction. Maybe you were unhappy with the last season of Game of Thrones, so you searched for an alternate ending. Perhaps you’ve scoured the Internet for a blossoming romance between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy and devoutly followed their (non–canon) journey from enemies to lovers. While many may grow out of their Harry Potter or Game of Thrones obsessions, fanfiction remains a fundamental part of fan communities, or “fandoms,” of all kinds.
Solutions by The State News