Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

What can we learn from the way she worked? So who was Mary Cassatt? Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 into a fairly well-to-do family.

She began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts while she was still a teenager.

But you've got to remember what we're talking about here.

This was the 1800s.

And he had very little patience for people who didn't get it.

In 1923, Barnes lent a large group of works from his collection to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for an exhibition.

The reviews were brutal.

Critics greeted the paintings with confusion and mockery.

So over the years, he tightened the rules around the foundation.

And then, very late in his life, he made one particularly consequential decision.

Originally, Barnes had arranged for major Philadelphia institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, to have a role in selecting future trustees.

Then he fell out with them.

I had worked in Oxford, Mississippi for a year and had fun and traveled and worked.

then applied to PAFA.

And so when I came into

PAFA, I was already completely abstracted.

I really wanted to go to Tyler and I didn't feel like I was ready for graduate school.

And so I took a year between and then I learned about a post-baccalaureate and that PAFA had one.

And so I applied and I got a scholarship to go and I'd never really been out of the South by that time.

And so I

At Woolworth's, Stoner would sign paintings, lettering, and advertising, and later become a freelance artist in Wilkesboro.

Kirby was an early champion of Stoner's, paying his tuition to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

At one point, it was claimed that Stoner, or at least invented, or at least enhanced the Mr. Peanut mascot, who first appeared in 1916, and that he had worked for the local planter's peanuts company as an illustrator.

In 1916, the planter's company did a sponsored... a contest for a new mascot, with the winner going to a 14-year-old Antonio Gentle.

If there was no photographic evidence, then we looked to another work to stand in its place because we felt like That was a way to place Lewis into larger discourses.

I remember working on the Henry Tanner Show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts years ago, and that was a purely monographic exhibition.

And someone asked me, well, what other artists were there working in Tanner's time that you would place him alongside? And I didn't have a great answer for that at the time, and neither did the exhibition.

But in thinking about, say, Tanner alongside Lewis and the way that, for both of them, religious faith infused their work, but also Tanner's father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, he published the Christian recorder of this newspaper in the AME Church that during his time as editor of that newspaper, they published over a dozen articles on Edmonia Lewis.

And so one of them, obviously, Philadelphia Museum of Art, of course, which we're all familiar with.

But I'm going to go to PAFA, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

This is such a spectacular building.

And if it's fallen under your radar, I highly recommend you checking it out.

And so the sun and the light really kind of bounces off some of these works of art.

And I'm curious to see what that looks like, curious to spend some time in this wonderful building.

This exhibition, Nation of Artists, there's guided tours at PAFA on September 12th and September 19th, 25 bucks for adults.

So check out the full schedule over at pafa.org slash