Temple Contemporary
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
(Im)Positions: Women Portraying Women’s Bodies
A panel discussion featuring visual artists and Tyler alums Erin M. Riley (MFA ’09), Autumn Wallace (BFA ’18), Chelsey Luster (BFA ’19) and moderated by art historian and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Therese “Terry” Dolan, PhD.
Erin M. Riley’s meticulously crafted, large-scale tapestries depict intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw imagery that reflects upon relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence, and trauma. Collaging personal photographs, images sourced from the internet, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera to create her compositions, the Brooklyn-based weaver exposes the range of women’s lived experiences and how trauma weighs on the search for self-identity.
Autumn Wallace is a visual artist who works across media to create paintings and sculptures that examine human sexuality, gender, and the black femme experience. Influenced by early 1990s cartoons, Byzantine aesthetics, Baroque style, and what Wallace describes as “low-quality adult materials,” Wallace’s work generates a sense of fluidity whereby figures defy spatial, social, physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries.
Image: Detail of (L-R) Chelsey Luster, Luster (2023); Erin Riley, Why Now (2021); Autumn Wallace, Fine Words Butter No Parsnips (2022).
Date:
Panel Discussion: Friday, March 15 at 6pm
Location:
Science Education Research Center (SERC)
1925 N. 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19125.
Contact:
Keia Carter Simmons, Associate Director, Temple Contemporary: exhibits@temple.edu
Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based curator, educator, and visual artist from Baltimore, MD. Luster's visual artwork explores the complexities of safe spaces in Queer and Black culture through mixed-medium paintings and installations. Luster is a Vox Populi member and has recently taken part in the Mural Arts 2022 Black Artists Fellowship and the 2021 Center for Emerging Artists Fellowship. Luster is the exhibition manager at Philadelphia's Magic Gardens and has independently curated multiple exhibitions with art institutions in Philadelphia, including IceBox Project Space, Da Vinci Art Alliance, William Way LGBT+ Center, and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists.
Modern and contemporary art historian Therese “Terry” Dolan has published three books, Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time, Inventing Reality: The Paintings of John Moore, and Gavarni and the Critics. Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Art Bulletin, Nineteenth Century French Studies, Women's Art Journal, and La Revue de l’Art, among others. In 2002, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship to study with Carolyn Abbate at Princeton University on opera and voice. She served as chair of Tyler’s Department of Art History from 1998 to 2004 and Interim Dean of Tyler from January 2008 to June 2009.