" The Synapse of Art: Metaphor and Audience"

• Speakers
• Background
• Focus
• Accomplishments

Suzi Whitmer

• Title: Curator of Education, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
• Background: Ms. Whitmer develops and implements all educational programs at the ICA, such as art history lecture series, docent programs for adults and high school students, and family workshops. Before coming to the ICA, she was Curator of Education at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Ms. Whitmer received her Masters from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992, and her B.A. in Art History from Vanderbuilt University in 1988. She is incredibly perceptive, inquisitive, and dynamic.
• FOCUS for symposium: Whitmer will present a series of slides of works throughout the ICA's history which many have deemed inaccessible- either isoteric, too simplistic, etc.. "In my work as a museum educator, I begin with the assumption that all art is accessible- whether metaphorical or not. However, viewer's cultural, social, and/or political backgrounds will flavor or affect the insights they gain from works of art."

Brigham Dimick

• Title: Painter, Fine Arts instructor at Penn
• Background: Brigham has received several honors and awards for his highly realistic paintings which have been featured in several exhibitions from the East to the South, to the Midwest of the United States. Among the awards he has received are the Individual Artist Grant from the Georgia Council of the Arts (1993). Brigham Dimick got his M.A. from the School of Fine Arts, Indiana University Bloomington, IN (1981-5).
• His Painting: According to Dimick, the works he will show fall into two distinct categories: one which synthesizes images from different sources into still-lives that include body parts (limbs, organs, x-rays, etc..). The second portrays fish in different situations.
• Statement About His Own Painting: "My work tends to reference the human body even when the subject matter seems to be about something altogether different. I am drawn to complexity and refinement without closure, in which opposing forces (such as beauty/repulsion, inside/outside, systematic/intuitive) create a tense atmosphere ripe with ambivalence "My work has involved employing a realist vocabulary into an investigation of modernist concerns. I have rejected illusions for their own sake along with narrative thinking for discreet paradoxes in spatial construction as well as exploring the fine line in which beauty and repulsion co-exist. Expression and meaning arise from the subtle relationship of the things within a picture and of the picture as it relates to other pictures."
• FOCUS for Symposium: Brigham will address the success and failure of metaphor in his own works by contrasting his intentions with the responses he has received, and through an explanation of how his conscious search for metaphor can be hidden or irrelevant to the audience.

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Dr. David Brownlee

• Title: Chair of the Graute Group in the History of Art, UPENN
• Background: Dr. Brownlee received a PhD, Masters, and B.A from Harvard in 1980, 1975, and 1973 respectively, all of which covered the study of architecture as an art form. He has been teaching at Penn since 1985. Beyond teaching, he has curated over 20 architectural exhibits, written tens of articles for architectural reviews, and published/ editted several books on architecture.
• Books written and edited/ areas of interest: Dr. Brownlee has written numerous articles which, like his books, deal with architecture in London and Philadelphia. His most recent attention has been to Modern architecture. Currently in press is his book Making a Modern Classic: The Architecture of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and currently in Progress is the book Modern Means and Modern Meanings: An Intellectual and Social History of Nineteenth-century Architecture. For his book Louis I Kahn: In the realm of Architecture, Dr. Brownlee received the International Book Award, from the American Institute of Architects, in 1992. The book has gone on to be translated in three other languages and made into a second, compact edition.
• FOCUS for Symposium: Architectural Metaphor
• Statement: "All art is metaphor, I think, in that it makes us think of things that lie beyond itself. But metaphors in the visual arts are rarely as overt as their literary cousins, and the variety of metaphorical means availabel to visual artsits makes the analysis of visual metaphor very challneging.
  "The special case of architecture is even more complex than that of the other visual arts, for architecture's metaphorical function is often very heavily disguised and come architects even try to deny its validity. This problematic situtaion arises because, unlike the other visual arts, architecture also functions in the "real" world, where it may seem to be self sufficient, needing to make no references to anything outside itself in order to do its work."