New York Painter to Give Public Lecture

March 10, 2008

Samira Abbassy, a New York painter, will give a free public lecture, “Modernize the Myth,” at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 25, in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum of Art, on the University Park campus. Using the accumulated sources and reference materials compiled over a twenty-year period, she will introduce some of the seminal art of the Middle East and India, including Islamic, Hindu, Christian/Secular (Qajar) and pre-Islamic Babylonian art. Abbassy’s lecture is sponsored by the Penn State School of Visual Arts’ John M. Anderson Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series.

Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, southwestern Iran. Like many people from this region, she is Arabic rather than Persian. Her family moved to Britain, where she studied painting at Canterbury College of Art. Abbassy’s career centered in London for most of the 1980s and 1990s, where she showed with Mercury Gallery in Cork Street, The Royal Academy, and numerous other galleries in Britain and Europe. In 1998 she moved to New York and set up a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, where she currently works. She draws on the visual traditions of both Middle Eastern and Western art. For more information on the artist, visit http://www.samiraabbassy.com.

Image:
Annunciation / Favorite of Ten-Thousand to My Soul

Contact: Ann Shostrom, ashostrom@psu.edu