EventsThe New Social Environment#549

Hearing the Brush: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer

Featuring Christopher Campbell, David Carrier, Nancy Locke, Sueyun Locks, Carter Ratcliff, Christopher Reed, William Valerio, and Phong H. Bui

Friday, April 29, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Art history scholars Christopher Campbell, David Carrier, Nancy Locke, Sueyun Locks, Carter Ratcliff, Christopher Reed, and William Valerio join Phong H. Bui for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Louise Akers.

Christopher Campbell

A photo of Christopher Campbell on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Visual artist and art historian Christopher Campbell lives and works in Pennsylvania. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with his most recent solo exhibition at Classic Gallery in Shanghai (2019). He holds an MA in art history from Brown University and has lectured at various institutions, including Pennsylvania State University. In 2020, he co-authored “Work, Labor, Matter: Warren Rohrer’s Abstraction” for Field Language: The Art and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer (Penn State University Press, 2020).

David Carrier

A photo of David Carrier on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
David Carrier taught philosophy in Pittsburgh and art history in Cleveland. He writes art criticism. His In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art (London, 2025) is forthcoming.

Nancy Locke

A photo of Nancy Locke on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Penn State professor Nancy Locke teaches courses in European art, ca. 1780–1940, and the history of photography from its inception to the present. She is the author of Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton University Press, 2001), and her current book-in-progress is Cézanne’s Shadows. Her articles have appeared in many journals, in several edited volumes, and in the exhibition catalogue Manet, l’inventeur du moderne (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2011). Dr. Locke has lectured at museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, and others. The recipient of several grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Dedalus Foundation, Dr. Locke has also juried grant proposals for several major granting agencies in the U.S. and Canada.

Sueyun Locks

A photo of Sueyun Locks on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
As director of the Locks Gallery since 1989, Sueyun Locks is committed to promoting the work of contemporary artists in Philadelphia as well as presenting exhibitions of established, internationally known artists. She currently serves as a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on the Director’s Council of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and on the Board of Managers at Pennsylvania Hospital. Previously she served on the Board of Overseers of PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees at the Curtis Institute of Music, where the Locks Foundation endowed a scholarship fund for promising musicians, and as a Chairperson of the Board of Moore College of Art and Design, where she established the Locks Career Center for Women in the Arts.

Carter Ratcliff

A photo of Carter Ratcliff on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Portrait by Phong H. Bui
Critic, poet, and author Carter Ratcliff has written books on Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Marisol, Gilbert & George, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975. His writings on art have appeared in exhibition catalogues, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is a contributing editor of Art in America and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, and the 2013 Annual T-Space Poetry Award.

    Christopher Reed

    A photo of Christopher Reed on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Art historian Christopher Reed is Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at the Pennsylvania State University. With his colleagues the poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Joyce Henri Robinson of Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art, he edited the catalogue for the exhibitions of the work of Warren and Jane Rohrer. He is the author of Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2004), and the co-editor of the exhibition catalogue A Room of their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections (2008). His most recent book, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities, was awarded the Modernist Studies Association book prize for 2017.

    William Valerio

    A photo of William Valerio on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Since 2010, William Valerio has served as the director and CEO of Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. He earned a doctorate in art history from Yale University in 1996, and was a curator at Queens Museum of Art in New York, where he became interim director of exhibitions. Drawn to Philadelphia in 2002 by Wharton’s MBA program, he worked on various projects for the Woodmere Art Museum as an intern even before graduating in 2004. Prior to joining Woodmere, Valerio was Assistant Director for Administration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

      Phong H. Bui

      A photo of Phong H. Bui on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Photo by Nicola Delorme
      Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects.

      The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

      Dao Strom

      A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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