Blue Marsh: Landscape Lost
Reception Thursday 6 - 8 p.m. Sept. 12, 2013
Exhibit extended through Nov. 21, 2013
Curators: Steven Potteiger and Marilyn J. Fox, director Freyberger Gallery
Photo Courtesy: Andrew Williams
This exhibit explores the time (1974 ? 1979) when the Blue Marsh Dam project commenced, and investigates the subsequent permanent change to the land and the people who lived there.
The exhibit includes: contemporary and historic photographs, paintings, artifacts and text that brings to the public the unconstrained beauty of the landscape lost during the construction of the Blue Marsh Dam and Recreational Area. With photographs of the working farms and historic homesteads and the haunting images of vacated homes and barns,and paintings created by a young artist whose family was displaced by the project.
Farms, homes, villages, roads, and the heritage of those displaced are all but forgotten - except for those individuals whose lives and families changed forever. The photographs and paintings have never been gathered for one exhibit, nor has there been an exhibit that focuses on the Blue Marsh dam project.
A reckoning of the permanent transformation to the land, farms and families in the name of the construction of a dam that provides both flood control and recreation facilities is part of the heritage of Berks County and that should be recognized.
ART and SCIENCE
January 2013
The objective of this exhibit is exploring various disciplines of science through the visual arts. Six members of the Science Division faculty were interviewed via video. From the video interviews, artists were invited to select a faculty member(s) whose research intrigued them or paralleled their own investigations. Artists were selected on their ability to interpret this material in an aesthetic way, using the information as a point of departure for their creative endeavors. Art work may illuminate, define, or interpret the information provided.
Architectural Conditions
Spring 2013
Architectural Conditions is an exhibit of recent works from a collaboration that began decades ago, when childhood friends, Ken Fifer, now a Professor of English at Penn State Berks, and Larry Mitnick, an Architect and Associate Professor at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, began to engage in each others? art.
(Right) Micro/Macro collage by Larry Mitnick inspired by a poem by Ken Fifer.
Through the years, the two have written songs, made movies, and generally corresponded through art. The current project began with Larry responding to one of Ken's poems with a collage; as the project developed to fill a one day cycle, sometimes the original poem would change with a new response instigated by the collage. A collection of twelve poem/collages, mounted together offers the viewer the interplay between words and vision.
?We met each other as children, growing up in the same Bronx Housing Project. Our collaborations, large and small, started back then. We invite you to entertain our assumption that an identification of the architectural conditions can be embodied within poetry as well as in pictorial terms. The collages are not foremost meant to illustrate the poems but to locate their architectural conditions; the poems likewise do not seek to describe or illustrate the collages but to locate and share their spatial relationships,? explains Fifer and Mitnick.
Exhibit through April 18, 2013
Ken Fifer, Professor of English, published writer, poet