MADE in PA
Palmer Museum of Art
The Pennsylvania State University
650 Bigler Road
University Park, PA 16802
MADE IN PA
June 1 – December 1, 2024
Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Galleries, Level 1, and Jason D. Kogan Gallery, Level 2
In celebration of the opening of the new Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, the museum is organizing a major inaugural special exhibition, MADE IN PA. This ambitious show signals the museum’s revisioning of its mission, vision, and values grounded in Penn State’s land-grant mission of educating students from around the world and supporting individuals and communities across the Commonwealth and beyond.
MADE IN PA highlights post-1945 paintings, sculpture, mixed-media assemblages, and installations by artists who hail from Pennsylvania or who have made their homes and sustained their careers in the Keystone State. The three generations of artists included in the exhibition speak to the Commonwealth’s long history of academic training and innovative artistic practice, the complicated legacies of its varied geographies and socio-political realities, and the hybrid identities and potent cultural exchanges through time and space that characterize the work of Pennsylvania artists today.
MADE IN PA features works of art drawn from the Palmer’s permanent collection along with selected loans from private collections, galleries, and museums across the Commonwealth. The approximately thirty-two works in the exhibition are organized into five thematic sections: Rooted in Realism, Pennsylvania Modern, The Land and its Legacies, Pop and Politics, and PA NOW.
MADE IN PA opens in the spring of 2024 in the Museum’s new state-of-the-art facility at the Arboretum at Penn State and is curated by Erin Coe, director, and Joyce Robinson, assistant director of the Palmer Museum of Art.
MADE IN PA is supported by, Kish Bank, Exhibition Lead Sponsor
The Land and its Legacies
The Land and its Legacies serves as the central core of the exhibition and appropriately anchors MADE IN PA. The very name of the Commonwealth suggests the importance of natural resources and the ongoing relevance of the state’s sylvan forests, rural landscapes, and mountainous terrain for artists who call—or once called—Pennsylvania home. Two imposing works—Creek by Scranton studio glass artist Karen Reid and Forest by the late ceramic artist Barbara Diduk—demonstrate the power of waterways and woodlands in Pennsylvania’s history and sprawling geography. Equally powerful and compelling is Delaware Nation Holly Wilson’s Bloodline, a monumental homage to the original, ultimately displaced, inhabitants of the lands that became the Commonwealth. Warren Rohrer’s abstract ode to his Mennonite origins and the farmlands of southeastern Pennsylvania provide a bucolic counterpoint to Philadelphia painter and activist Diane Burko’s Unprecedented, a recent foray into the cultural landscape of climate change and the global pandemic. Pittsburgh-born Cy Gavin’s bold, vibrant canvases invite us to reconsider the territory of race and racism in the familiar panoramas of the Hudson River Valley.
