A Conversation with Peter Paone: Snowpeople and Beyond

 

"As a child, snowmen were not part of my life," Peter Paone writes. "I grew up in the narrow streets of South Philadelphia, with shoveled sidewalks. The thirty gouaches in this exhibition are my effort to give birth to what never was." The artist calls this series Snowpeople. He remarks, "The snowpeople are a community—they represent what you’ll find in any crowd. They express melancholy, joy, humor." As such, they witness Paone's career-long passion for representing the human condition. 

 

Join us for a conversation between Paone and Amy Gillette, Woodmere's associate curator. They will explore the Snowpeople exhibition as well as his other works on display at Frances M. Maguire Hall—including his Carnaby Street miniatures, created in London during the peak of the 1960s social revolution. 

 

Peter Paone was born and raised in South Philadelphia, in a first-generation Italian-American home. He has been a leader in the Philadelphia arts community as an artist, collector, and teacher for over seven decades. In the 1950s, Paone studied at the Barnes Foundation and earned a degree in art education at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later the University of the Arts). His work has been exhibited at institutions across the United States and internationally, and he has held faculty positions at both the Pratt Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he established and chaired the printmaking department. Paone has stated, “I’m interested in a universal human condition—stories that are continuing and repeating in a positive way and a haunted way.”