SCHOLARS AND ARTISTS TO CONVENE FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY "PICTURING WOMEN" SYMPOSIUM

Scholars and artists from across disciplines and around the world will convene at Bryn Mawr beginning Friday, March 19, for "Picturing Women: a Cross-Disciplinary Symposium." The three-day event is co-sponsored by Bryn Mawr's Center for Visual Culture, the William Penn Foundation and the Women's Caucus for Art of Philadelphia. Lectures and panel discussions will offer the insights of historians of art, music, science and technology, as well as literary scholars, sociologists and journalists, among others. A "slide share" and screening co-sponsored by the Women's Caucus for Art of Philadelphia will present the work of artists representing a full range of media. Noted feminist art historian and curator Ann Sutherland Harris will deliver keynote remarks at a special evening session on March 20.

The symposium is part of an ambitious exhibition, education and outreach project organized by Susan Shifrin, Ph.D. '98, a fellow at Bryn Mawr's Center for Visual Culture, curator of education at Ursinus College's Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art and a visiting professor of art history at Ursinus. The Project includes a three-venue exhibition now installed at Bryn Mawr College, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Rosenbach Museum & Library. According to Shifrin, the call for papers for the conference sparked worldwide interest. "The response was overwhelming," she said. "We had a wealth of options, with more than 200 submissions."

"The symposium will explore in more scholarly depth and breadth than the exhibition is able to do the intersections of representation, gender and identity across a wide range of disciplines, geographies and chronologies," said Shifrin. "Its aim is to question and rethink what a portrait can be — what women were historically and are today pictured to be — in the vocabulary and imagery of various fields."

The symposium's sessions are divided into four broad themes — fashioning, figuring, portraiting and telling — which serve as the framing themes of the exhibition.

A session devoted to "fashioning," beginning at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, March 19, will explore how women's identity is fashioned by drapery, dress, and women's physical and societal attributes. The session will open with a presentation by Harvard University graduate student Sharrona Pearl, a historian of science, followed by a panel discussion titled "Conjuring, Constructing, and Concealing: Fashioning Female Identity Across Cultural Boundaries." The final talk in this session will be presented by historian of technology Heike Weber, from the Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology.

A special evening session on Friday, March 19, from 7:30 to 10 p.m., will present contemporary artists whose work treats the symposium's themes. The short film "Mirror Mirror" by guest artist Jan Krawitz of Stanford University will be screened.

Art historian Liana De Girolami Cheney of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, will kick off a session on "figuring" on Saturday, March 20, from 9 a.m. to noon. The session will look at exemplary, allegorical and ideological representations of the female form and identity. Four panelists will present talks under the rubric of "Figuring and Disfiguring Race, Culture, and Body in Representations of Women," and the session will conclude with a presentation by Paul Marchbanks, a graduate student from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in British Literature.

The afternoon session on Saturday, March 20, from 2 to 5 p.m., will take on "portraiting," challenging the assumptions we make in looking at individual portraits and how we read the portraits we see. Northwestern University graduate student in the history of art Sarah Gordon will open the session, which will continue with the panel "'Portraiting' for Posterity: The Afterlives of Portrait Images and Texts," and conclude with historian Rickie Solinger's reflections on her recent exhibition of photographs in "Who Has the Right to Be a Mother? — A Curator Challenges the Public Portrait."

A special evening session on Saturday, March 20, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., will offer Ann Sutherland Harris' keynote remarks and a panel discussion on representations of women in the popular press and other widely circulated publications in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Sunday, March 21, session, dedicated to "telling," will examine narratives representing various aspects of gender, from 9 a.m. to noon. It will open with remarks by cultural-studies scholar Maggie Humm of the University of East London, continue with a panel titled "Telling Lives: Looking, Reading, Writing, Reflecting in Representations of Women," and conclude with a talk by Alexandra Halkias '88, M.A. '91, a sociologist teaching at Panteio University in Greece.

To obtain more information, to view the presenters' paper abstracts, or to register, visit the symposium's website: http://www.picturingwomen.org/symposium.php.

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