Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision

September 23, 2023 - January 21, 2024

Woodmere Art Museum is pleased to present Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision, a retrospective of the artist’s illustrious career. Fearless Vision will showcase Bullock’s development over sixty years of creative practice, from the paintings and drawings of the late 1960s and 1970s to the cut, painted, and sculpted works in heavy-weight paper she is known for today. The exhibition will demonstrate the artist’s participation in a national movement in the arts to strengthen Black identity through explorations of African art, music, and dance and the impact of her extensive travels through Africa and the Caribbean.

Socially-driven artists are accepted as part of the mix in the arts today, but this was not always the case. Bullock stands out as a pioneering figure in Philadelphia whose work extends outside the studio and into the city, especially into the city’s Black communities, with an embrace of African art as inspiration, declaration of strength, and path to reclaiming an ancestral cultural identity. Forcefully, but gently with the beauty of her art and teaching, Bullock takes a stand for social justice, working in the cultural and educational spheres of Philadelphia.  Fearless Vision shows how Bullock’s studio practice evolved in dialogue with her work as both educator and social activist, exploring the cross-fertilization of ideas about art and social healing.

Bullock worked in K-12 schools, museums, community organizations, senior centers, and public spaces. Her long-term leadership of the art programs at the Ile-Ife Black Humanitarian Center (1971-1975) and Prints for Progress (1980-1993) were seminal experiences in her creative practice. The exhibition will include many of the objects that Bullock made to inspire students and participants in community projects such as game boards, pop-up books, hats, fans, boxes, altars, and miniature theaters. They share a vocabulary of figurative elements, animal forms, patterns, textures, and colors that characterize Bullock's studio practice.

Woodmere collaborated with independent art historians and curators Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims in preparing an oral history with Bullock that is transcribed as a central element in the accompanying catalogue publication. The catalogue will include a chronology of education projects that follows the artist’s archive and lesson plans donated by Bullock to Woodmere’s historic archives of Philadelphia’s artists. The catalogue will be available at the Woodmere Art Museum Store.

Support for Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision is provided by The Edna Wright Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, the William M. King Charitable Foundation, Robert and Frances Kohler, the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, The Dorothy del Bueno Endowed Exhibition Fund at Woodmere, the Nixon Family on behalf of James V. Nixon, Jr., and other generous contributors, including those who wish to remain anonymous. Woodmere thanks the Lomax family and WURD, who are the exhibition’s media partners.

Feminist Focus: Fifty Years of Women’s Art in Philadelphia

In partnership with the Re-Focus (1974-2024) exhibition at Moore College of Art & Design 

Saturday, January 13, 2024  | 2 pm

Lecturer: Patricia Likos Ricci, Distinguished Professor of the History of Art, Elizabethtown College

Professor Ricci will trace the developments in women’s art from a feminist perspective over the past fifty years, demonstrating considerable change and expansion of issues. Dr. Ricci will focus particularly on women artists of color and LGBTQ artists.

The Violet Oakley Experience

Violet Oakley (1874–1961) has a unique status in the history of American art. During the American Renaissance, a period of cultural renewal at the turn of the twentieth century, she was easily the most renowned woman in the cultural life of the country, achieving international fame when she was commissioned to create a monumental series of murals in the new Pennsylvania State Capitol. A cosmopolitan artist and cultural leader in Philadelphia, Oakley embodied the contemporary interpretation of the Renaissance in both the civic humanism of her work and in her belief that the arts improve the social fabric of modern life. Her versatility in different genres and media was recognized with a gold medal in illustration at the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904; a gold medal in mural painting for The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1905; a gold medal for the stained glass window The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; and a medal of honor for The Building of the House of Wisdom from the Architectural League of New York in 1916. 

At a time when women artists usually concentrated on domestic themes, the critic Charles H. Caffin observed Oakley’s “vision of life… moving outward in ever-widening circles that embrace the strivings of all men and women towards the universal.”2 Oakley was a role model for aspiring female professionals for two decades before women won the right to vote. She became the second woman appointed to the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In her later years she fashioned a role for herself as an activist promoting gender and racial equality, international government, and world peace.