The New Social Environment#549

Hearing the Brush: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer

Featuring Christopher Campbell, David Carrier, Nancy Locke, Sueyun Locks, Carter Ratcliff, Christopher Reed, William Valerio, and Phong H. Bui

 

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Art history scholars Christopher Campbell, David Carrier, Nancy Locke, Sueyun Locks, Carter Ratcliff, Christopher Reed, and William Valerio join Phong H. Bui for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Louise Akers.

In this talk

Visit Hearing the Brush: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, on view at Woodmere Art Museum through July 10, 2022

Visit Warren Rohrer, on view at Locks Gallery through May 12, 2022 →

Christopher Campbell

Photo of Christopher Campbell
Visual artist and art historian Christopher Campbell lives and works in Pennsylvania. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with his most recent solo exhibition at Classic Gallery in Shanghai (2019). He holds an MA in art history from Brown University and has lectured at various institutions, including Pennsylvania State University. In 2020, he co-authored “Work, Labor, Matter: Warren Rohrer’s Abstraction” for Field Language: The Art and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer (Penn State University Press, 2020).

David Carrier

Picture of David Carrier
David Carrier taught philosophy in Pittsburgh and art history in Cleveland. He writes art criticism. His In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art (London, 2025) is forthcoming.

Nancy Locke

Photo of Nancy Locke
Penn State professor Nancy Locke teaches courses in European art, ca. 1780–1940, and the history of photography from its inception to the present. She is the author of Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton University Press, 2001), and her current book-in-progress is Cézanne’s Shadows. Her articles have appeared in many journals, in several edited volumes, and in the exhibition catalogue Manet, l’inventeur du moderne (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2011). Dr. Locke has lectured at museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, and others. The recipient of several grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Dedalus Foundation, Dr. Locke has also juried grant proposals for several major granting agencies in the U.S. and Canada.

Sueyun Locks

Photo of Sueyun Locks with a book
As director of the Locks Gallery since 1989, Sueyun Locks is committed to promoting the work of contemporary artists in Philadelphia as well as presenting exhibitions of established, internationally known artists. She currently serves as a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on the Director’s Council of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and on the Board of Managers at Pennsylvania Hospital. Previously she served on the Board of Overseers of PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees at the Curtis Institute of Music, where the Locks Foundation endowed a scholarship fund for promising musicians, and as a Chairperson of the Board of Moore College of Art and Design, where she established the Locks Career Center for Women in the Arts.

Carter Ratcliff

A drawing of Carter Ratcliff by Phong H. Bui
Portrait by Phong H. Bui
Critic, poet, and author Carter Ratcliff has written books on Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Marisol, Gilbert & George, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975. His writings on art have appeared in exhibition catalogues, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is a contributing editor of Art in America and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, and the 2013 Annual T-Space Poetry Award.

Christopher Reed

Photo of Christopher Reed wearing an orange vest
Art historian Christopher Reed is Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at the Pennsylvania State University. With his colleagues the poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Joyce Henri Robinson of Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art, he edited the catalogue for the exhibitions of the work of Warren and Jane Rohrer. He is the author of Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2004), and the co-editor of the exhibition catalogue A Room of their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections (2008). His most recent book, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities, was awarded the Modernist Studies Association book prize for 2017.

William Valerio

Photo of William Valerio
Since 2010, William Valerio has served as the director and CEO of Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. He earned a doctorate in art history from Yale University in 1996, and was a curator at Queens Museum of Art in New York, where he became interim director of exhibitions. Drawn to Philadelphia in 2002 by Wharton’s MBA program, he worked on various projects for the Woodmere Art Museum as an intern even before graduating in 2004. Prior to joining Woodmere, Valerio was Assistant Director for Administration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Phong H. Bui

Photo of Phong Bui taken by Nicola Delorme
Photo by Nicola Delorme
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Louise Akers reading.

Louise Akers

A photo of [Louise] holding a potted green plant.
Poet Louise Akers (Brooklyn, NY) earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018. Their chapbook, Alien year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Akers’s work can be found or will be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Brooklyn Review, Bat City Review, bæst journal, and elsewhere. Their first full length book, Elizabeth/The Story of Drone (Propeller Books), is forthcoming in 2022.

❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.