Special Events

Free Public Lecture by Contemporary Sculptor Leonardo Drew

Tuesday, March 11, 7:30 p.m.
Wanamaker Hall, Principia College, Elsah, IL 62028

For over three decades, Leonardo Drew has become known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal, and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the labored process of writing oneself into history.

Drew’s works have been shown internationally and are included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Tate, London. His works have recently been acquired by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, Indiana; and New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana among others.(Image and bio credits: Galerie LeLong)

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Free Public Lecture by internationally
acclaimed artist Judy Pfaff

Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 7:30 p.m.
Wanamaker Hall, Principia College, Elsah, IL 62028

Judy Pfaff’s prolific artistic career spans more than five decades. Highly influential and renowned for her site-specific installations, Pfaff creates work that spans disciplines and eschews definition. She has ceaselessly reinvented her distinctive visual lexicon, employing conventional and unconventional materials. Like an alchemist, she transforms the mundane and ordinary into something extraordinary and mesmerizing. Pfaff adores investigating materials and handcrafting all her objects as painter, sculptor, carpenter, welder, glassblower, printmaker, and designer. Guided by intuition, Pfaff makes her singular vision concrete by creating surprising combinations of objects that highlight life’s contradictory forces and inherent duality. Her work is a topography of human emotions, the nexus of countless storylines linking the events of our time to our personal and collective experiences.

Regarded as a major pioneer of installation art, Pfaff has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad and received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), a MacArthur Fellowship (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). She represented the United States in the 1998 São Paulo Biennial, and her work has been included in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1975, 1981, and 1987). Her work is in numerous prominent collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Tate Gallery (London).

_{(Source: Introduction to the 2023-2024 exhibition, “Picking Up the Pieces” at The Sarasota Art Museum, Florida, and Judy Pfaff Studio)}