Recent PCA&D community achievements

Recognizing recent accomplishments by students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Pennsylvania College of Art & Design: 

• Four Graphic Design seniors have been named winners in the 2021 Graphic Design USA Student Package Design competition. Bringing home national-level honors are: Isaac Baker, Jia Bernstein, Zorina Eckman, and John Hollas. All four are members of Prof. Tom Newmaster‘s packaging design class.
• Designathon 2021 was a massive success. Organizer and Graphic Design Department Chair Pam Barby, faculty members Bill Dussinger and Laura Korzon, and Dean Jessica Edonick, led teams of 18 student designers and five alumni in this 12-hour Design for Good tradition. Their work resulted in dozens of new, free, professional-level marketing and branding pieces on behalf of eight regional nonprofit organizations. You can see the teams, and a gallery of their work, here.
• Members of the Directions in Contemporary Art Class have work on exhibit through May 15 in Chain mail for bad communicators at Street Road Artists’ Space. The Chester County project integrates indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces,  ongoing on-site projects, and Little Free Library Cochranville. Student artists in the show are Rachel Boldt, Sharnee Burnett, Karissa Deiter, Meranda Hall, Paige Hershey, Brittany Lare, Sarah Lennon, Danielle Parker, Spencer Robbins, and Mab Ulrich-Neureuter. The class is taught by Henry Gepfer, Fine Art Adjunct.
• The online portfolio for The Print Center’s 95th Annual International Competition is now live, featuring the work of two PCA&D faculty members who were honored last year. Henry Gepfer, Fine Art Adjunct, was named a Finalist in the juried competition, and Becky Blosser, Assistant Professor in Fine Art, was named a Semifinalist. They were among 35 selected, from more than 600 submissions, of artists who use photography or printmaking as critical components in their work.

You can see the Print Center portfolio for Gepfer here.

To see the Print Center portfolio for Blosser, click here.

• Prof. Gepfer also has two pieces, Life Goes On and Broadside 1, in the national juried exhibition at Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio. You can view the full exhibition here.
• Theatre: Vincent, a graphite drawing by Evan Kitson, Adjunct Instructor in the Fine Art Department and 2010 graduate of PCA&D,  is included in New York gallery Sugarlift‘s show, Memento Mori. You can follow Kitson’s work on Instagram, @evan_kitson, and at evankitson.com.
• PCA&D’s new Healing Arts program was recently featured by Fox43 News. Artist and expressive arts therapist Jennifer Quigley MA, LPC, REAT, has been named to the College’s first Healing Arts Residency. This pilot program establishes a dynamic, ongoing partnership between local medical facilities, key community leaders and influencers, and the art and design community. Its goal is to develop initiatives that inspire creative practices and promote community healing, wellness, coping, and personal growth. The initiative is part of PCA&D’s new Institute of Leadership, Creative Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, led by Deborah Barber. Quigley’s project will exhibit in the College’s Art Garden and on the campus exterior during June First Friday.
• Artwork from a Center for Creative Exploration class taught by Adam Serrano highlighted First Friday celebrations at A Day in the Life Records in downtown Lancaster. The exhibition featured the work of 7th- through 9th-graders in Serrano’s Creating Art in Adobe Photoshop class, who were tasked with creating album covers that captured the look and feel of a fictional band’s release. The “boot camp of design” covered skills in both photography and Photoshop, and a version of the class will be taught by Serrano again this summer.
• The new book by Pacifico Silano ’08, Photography, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, has been reviewed by London publication Financial Times Sunday. “Like (Richard) Prince and other photographic artists who work with appropriated images, Silano wants to show with his art that ‘a photograph is not this fixed thing … As time goes by, we read it through the lens of history, what’s changed, how our perceptions are evolving.’ We can never look at the same photograph twice, his book suggests: each time we see it, we’re a new person.” The book is published by Loose Joints. Work by Silano is now on display in the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, in Fantasy America, an exhibition that incorporates pieces from the museum’s collection into his own work, and his solo show, Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like They Used To) is open through May 9 at the Houston Center for Photography.
• Todd Snovel, Director of Development & Strategic Initiatives, recently was interviewed by Penn Capital-Star about Pennsylvania’s plans for partnering in the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission on the nation’s 250^th anniversary celebrations in 2026. He addressed inclusion of the LGBTQ and other communities not usually given a voice in telling the stories of this nation’s history.
• An exhibition curated by Aidan Thackray ’22, Illustration, has opened at Garden Spot Village. Zammesei (or “to be together,” in Pennsylvania Dutch) resulted from a collaboration between PCA&D’s Center for Creative Exploration and the Lancaster County retirement community: Members of Garden Spot Village were invited to take part with members of the general public in CCE’s winter session of online art workshops and the resulting work, along with art from other CCE students and faculty, has been collected in this collaboration.  Zammesei is a celebration of ways in which art, and creativity, can bring together generations and bridge isolation brought about by the past year’s COVID-19 pandemic.
• Work from Photography & Video Chair Eric Weeks‘s series World Was in the Face of the Beloved, as well as an interview, have been published in FotoNostrum Magazine Issue 13. In the article, Weeks references many of his influences, including the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, from which the photo series title is taken; the work of photographer Harry Callahan; and classic jazz. He also outlines the practice he uses to create his images, from the cameras and film used to the darkroom process, and describes his current projects in both photography and film. Analog photographs have the ability to describe three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane more successfully than digital output,” Weeks says in the article. “This is what I became enamored with about photography back when I was 16 years old, and it is still the most magical aspect of the medium.”