Lectures and Events

2-3 pm (in person), $10; FREE for members

Lecturer: Ruth Fine, widow of Larry Day, painter, printmaker, and independent curator

In this presentation, images from both popular culture and art history are depicted as essential to Day’s painterly identity.  Biographical information will convey Day’s importance to the re-emergence of figurative art in the 1960s, and the role teaching played for this “dean of Philadelphia painters.” Day’s late drawings, in particular, convey the surreal experience of modern life. Together, Day’s paintings, drawings, and prints in a variety of media, emphasize his unique and masterful approach to structuring the geometry of the city and a remarkable array of figure compositions as represented across all three Philadelphia exhibition venues.   

2-3 pm (in person), FREE FOR WOODMERE & ROBESON HOUSE MEMBERS

Lecturer: Sherry L. Howard, author, art collector, and Robeson House volunteer

As part of the Parlor Talks series, Robeson House volunteer Sherry Howard will offer a presentation and book signing for her new book, ART WITH HEART: How I Built a Sweet Collection by Buying Cheap at Auction. Sherry has been collecting art at auctions for years. Her collection encompasses many artists from the Philadelphia region, including Samuel J. Brown, Julius Bloch, Columbus Knox, Moe Brookers, and Ed Loper Sr. A chapter in the book features the work of Roland Ayers. Attendees will also be able to tour the exciting new exhibit, Paul Robeson: His Movies, His Music, His Message. 

6 pm (in person); FREE

Lecturer: TK Smith, a curator, writer, and Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware.

Master draftsman Roland Ayers (1932 – 2014) employed a stream of consciousness method of drawing that he believed offered the opportunity to experience and express freedom. Ayers rendered bodies −suspended and entangled−in acts of desire, both beautiful and grotesque. Entanglements with the Erotic will explore Ayers’s use of eroticism as a method of resistance and spiritual transcendence. With ink on paper, he revealed the most intimate parts of himself −dreams, fears, and desires− boldly embracing pleasure and vulnerability to create vivid and surreal imagery from the well of his own psyche. 

Guests are invited to arrive early and enjoy refreshments prior to the lecture, which will be followed by a closing reception for Roland Ayers: Calligraphy of Dreams.

2 pm (in person); $15 ($10 members) 

Lecturer: Patricia Likos Ricci, Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Fine Arts Department, Elizabethtown College

At the forefront of the cultural shift to postmodernism, Philadelphia painter Larry Day was among the artists who abandoned Abstract Expressionism to explore the expressive potential of figurative painting in the 1960s. For Day, the art of previous centuries was very much alive and spoke to him in a language of space and form, myth and metaphor, that was not yet extinct. Like a time-traveler, he engaged in visual dialogues with artists of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, anachronistically blending their compositions and figures with his own social circle in Philadelphia. 

“Because the concern is with mythic factors,” he wrote,  “the present and the past co-exist as do disparate images brought together by a suspended temporal world.” Rendered with his masterly drawing technique, Day’s unique genre of realism is by turns ironic, mysterious, ambiguous, witty, and ultimately profound. Like memories externalized, he represents people in places they can only inhabit in the artist’s mind where time and space have no boundaries. A philosophical artist, Larry Day invites the viewer to participate in his sustained meditation on the timelessness of art as an existential search for meaning.   

Lecturer: Phong Bui, artist, publisher, and artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail