Photo-Active Visiting Artist Series

Allen introduces series of guest art lectures

ADRIANA YUGOVICH/Daily Paula Allen, visiting artist, speaks before a crowd at the School of Art.

By Jeff Druchniak
For the Daily

Last Friday night at 7 p.m., many University students had already begun partying in preparation for the football game and the rest of the weekend. But not all of them.

A crowd, composed mostly of students, turned out at the Art & Architecture Building on North Campus to see guest lecturer Paula Allen discuss and display her photographs. Allen's appearance and lecture, which took place in the School of Art & Design Auditorium, inaugurated a year-long program under the auspices of the Art & Design Photo-Active Feminist Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Allen is a visiting artist from New York, where she bases her career as a photographer of international fame. Her comments were interspersed with examples of her work, and afterwards, she also answered question asked by those in attendance. Allen has worked as a photo editor for the Central Park Journal and was a photographer for Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. Much of the work shown, however, was from Allen's book "Ladies," a collection of photographs representing women from a New York homeless shelter.

This project illustrates a theme in Allen's body of work. Allen primarily uses women and girls as her subjects. She is interested in the "marginalization" and exclusion of individuals in various ways, as a result of broader public struggles between genders, classes and ethnicities. As a result, Allen's lecture was an appropriate first installment for a lecture series sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and arranged in conjunction with the University's Year of Diversity. Seven more visiting artists will lecture between now and March. They will constitute a mix of local, national and international artists, including MacArthur Award recipient Wendy Ewald. The project is being coordinated by Profs. Carol Jacobsen and Joanne Leonard. According to Jacobsen, the school regularly arranges lectures with important artists, but this year was able to organize them into a yearlong thematic program with the support of the NEA and the University's administration. She expects subsequent lectures to follow the same format as Allen's, except for that of Kathy Constantinides, who will be joined by a panel of speakers on sexual exploitation.

09-30-98