Elizabeth Olbert will visit Penn State as part of the John M. Anderson Endowed Lecture Series in the Penn State School of Visual Arts (SoVA). During her visit, Olbert will collaborate with Associate Professor of Art Jean Sanders to present a collaborative lecture and demonstration titled “Kropotkin, Horses & Collaboration.” These events are a product of Sanders and Olbert’s recent collaborative book project "The Tendency of Nature." In this project, the two collaborate to investigate contemporary understandings of social structures in animal groups. Using the work of 19th-century anarchist and naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin as a starting point, Olbert and Sanders examine the social lives of horses in photographs and in text.
The first event, a combined lecture and demonstration, will take place on from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, in 102 Patterson Building on the University Park campus of Penn State. Olbert will explain the impetus for the project and Sanders will demonstrate the photogravure platemaking and papermaking techniques used to create the book pages.
In a second event, the artists will print laser-cut type blocks on hand-made paper. This informal demonstration will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, in 238 Theatre Building on the University Park campus of Penn State. Students and the public are encouraged to drop in for this working demonstration and conversation with the artists. Both events are free and open to the public. For a complete listing of Anderson events, visit http://sova.psu.edu/anderson.
Elizabeth Olbert is a painter, printmaker and writer known for her paintings of fantastical creatures who are protagonists in a sci-fi mythology created from her own imagination. Olbert earned a bachelor of fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a master of arts from New York University, studying both painting and critical theory. Olbert was a 2006 recipient of a Pollock Krasner grant and has had numerous solo exhibitions at Caren Golden Fine Art, New York, N.Y., among many others. She is currently adjunct professor of painting and critical theory at the University of Maine, where she is pursuing investigations in critical writing from a Marxian perspective.
For additional information, contact Ann Tarantino, series coordinator, adt116@psu.edu