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

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 former professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University and Champney Family Professor in Cleveland, has been Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Class of 1932 Fellow in Philosophy, Princeton University; a Getty Scholar; and a Clark Fellow. He has lectured in China, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand and North America. In Spring, 2009 he was a Fulbright-Luce Lecturer in Beijing, and he lectured also in Taiwan. His recent books include A World Art History and its Objects (Penn State. 2008) and Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art (Peter Lang. 2008). He has published catalogue essays for many museums and art criticism for Apollo, art critical, Artforum, Artus and Burlington Magazine. And he has been a guest editor for Brooklyn Rail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artist, writer, and independent curator Phong H. Bui is Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Among many other awards, Bui received The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize for Arts Writers in 2017, was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021.