Performing Arts Center and Visual Arts School Collaborate on Student Exhibition
September 28, 2009
Thanks to a new collaboration between Penn State’s Center for the Performing Arts and School of Visual Arts, a series of paintings by graduate student Erica Harney are on exhibition through fall semester at the Eisenhower Auditorium Conference Room.
Harney’s series is called Seven Pipes of Ambiguity and includes seven five-by-three-feet paintings selected from her 2008 work. The inspiration for the series came from William Empson’s criticism on literature and poetry. “In one word, my work is about tension,” says Harney, who explains that her paintings focus on the relationship between different images, formats and concepts, and how two or more things can be happening simultaneously.
Harney’s paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the northeastern United States and Ireland. She earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting and a minor in art history from Alfred University at the School of Art and Design/New York State College of Ceramics in Alfred, N.Y. She is pursuing a master of fine arts in painting and drawing at Penn State.
“I think it’s great that my work will be displayed at the Center for the Performing Arts,” Harney says. She adds there is a “correlation between visual and performing arts, and they should not be segregated.”
Harney is applying for a scholarship to study in Istanbul, Turkey. In the city where the East and the West truly meet, Harney hopes to continue her focus on tension by studying the “conflicts of eastern and western culture, and religious trends.”
George Trudeau, director of the Center for the Performing Arts, says he approached Charles Garoian, director of the School of Visual Arts, about displaying student work at the auditorium—at the corner of Eisenhower and Shortlidge roads—as a way of bringing together the performing and visual arts wings of Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture.
Garoian has made a commitment to have student work at Eisenhower each semester. “[It’s] a training opportunity for students to become better artists and learn how to display their work in public,” he says.
The college has funded a new hanging system in the conference room with a picture rail that allows “more flexibility for paintings of different sizes,” Trudeau says.
The conference room is open for Artistic Viewpoints and Kids Connections sessions one hour before most Center for the Performing Arts presentations at Eisenhower. The conference room is also used as a meeting and reception space for the Center for the Performing Arts staff and a variety of Penn State departments and community organizations.
Contact: Laura Sullivan, 814.863.6379