Lecture | Feminist Focus: Fifty Years of Women's Art in Philadelphia

In partnership with (re) Focus 2024, an exhibition at Moore College of Art and Design.

 

Lecturer: Patricia Likos Ricci, Distinguished Professor of the History of Art, Elizabethtown College

 

 

Patricia Likos Ricci will trace the developments in women’s art from a feminist perspective over the past fifty years, demonstrating considerable changes and expansion of issues. Barbara Bullock and Violet Oakley – with exhibitions currently on view at Woodmere – will be highlighted, as will the work of other Philadelphia-area women in Woodmere’s collection and those involved in the citywide 1974 festival FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts and the current exhibition (re) Focus 2024 at Moore College of Art and Design.

The civil rights movement gave women of color more attention and the gay rights movement has made it possible to openly display LGBTQ artists and express their issues. In the context of current museums reckoning with race, Ricci will focus particularly on women artists of color and LGBTQ artists. She will discuss the rediscovery of women artists in response to Linda Nochlin's seminal article "Why have there been no great women artists?" of 1971.

Patricia Likos Ricci, PhD is Distinguished Professor of the History of Art, co-advisor of the Architectural Studies program and an affiliated member of the Women and Gender Studies faculty. She teaches courses in European and American Art, World Architecture, and a seminar on the Italian Renaissance. Her research focuses on American Renaissance murals and architecture and the interface between the arts and sciences.

She publishes and lectures on the emerging professional women artists of Philadelphia: Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Emily Sartain and the members of The Plastic Club. The authority on the muralist Violet Oakley, she was guest curator of the retrospective exhibition A Grand Vision: Violet Oakley and the American Renaissance held at Woodmere Art Museum (2017-18).

Her publications on the history of architecture include “Cultural Politics in the United States Capitol: The Case of Constantino Brumidi, 1805-1880” (Iconocrazia 18, 2020); “Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Englishness and the Search for an American National Style, 1850-1900” (Architectural History 64, 2021); and “Ruskin Rediscovered” (Nineteenth Century 25, 2005). She was co-author of the historical survey Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania (SAH, 2012) and guest editor of “The State as a Work of Art: Design, Technology and Social Reform, 1876-1917” (PMHB, 2002).

Dr. Ricci has written about the mutual interests of artists and scientists in “The Inquiring Eye: Illustration and the Production of Knowledge” (A Companion to Illustration: Art and Theory, Blackwell, 2019); “Edwin Austin Abbey’s The Passage of the Hours: Astronomy as History” (Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2015); “The Joseph Priestley House” (PMHB, 2012) and “Lux ex tenebris: Étienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton” (Canopus, 2005).

Dr. Ricci received her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College and her undergraduate degree from Moore College of Art and Design. A practicing artist, her painting Search and Rescue is on the Artists' Registry of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.