The Legacies Left by Exhibitions of the Work of Lee Krasner, Patti Hill, and others

This presentation will address how the Arcadia University Gallery over the last half century has focused on issues that shed new light on the relationship of past to present and future. One is how the legacy of abstraction has influenced the abstraction of today. An exhibition of Lee Krasner's work in 1974 was Arcadia's contribution to the original FOCUS project. It raises the question today of how do contemporary BIPOC artists respond to the history of abstract expressionism which until recent exhibitions of abstract expressionist art by women artists has been viewed as a white male art movement. Another issue raised by an exhibition at the Arcadia University Gallery was the introduction of digital art into contemporary art practice. The exhibition focused on the work of Patti Hill, the artist who used home desktop printers to create artworks that made use of the spontaneity of errors to humanize the mechanical quality of digital printing. These are just two of the exhibitions that will be discussed.