Welcome to the Visual Studies program website.

We live in an increasingly visual culture. New technologies and philosophies of vision influence how we see ourselves and our world, and how we think about seeing itself. The Visual Studies major was created in 2003 to allow students to directly engage these developments through a multidisciplinary course of study, connecting the theory, practice, and culture of seeing.

VLST in the News:
Daily Pennsylvanian, 11/01/09, "Painting Penn | Penn Mixes Ivy Rigor with Arts Presence"
by Darina Strakhman

Upcoming Lectures:
Thursday, November 5: Barbara London "New Media in the Museum"
5-6:30pm, Slought Foundation
Barbara London is a curator of media at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; she has held this position since founding that institution's video program in 1974. Her discussion at Slought Foundation will focus on how artists in the late 1960s spirit of counter-culture and revolution experimented with alternatives to traditional art making. Intangible, time-based practices became options, best suited to seat-of-the-pants-style, artist-run events and venues that were sprouting up in metropolises everywhere. The early media pioneers inventively found their way and set the stage for the do-it-yourself spirit of today’s gamers, hackers, and web designers. Media as an inter-disciplinary field is still ripe with invention. more>

Tuesday, November 10: Jody Patterson "Modernism for the Masses: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in New Deal New York"
5pm, 138 Fisher Bennett Hall
Jody Patterson recently received her PhD from University College, London; and is currently Terra Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Institut national d'histoire de l'Art in Paris; and contributed an essay to the catalogue of the Arshile Gorky exhibition opening soon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Thursday, November 19: Jonathan Lopez "Vermeer: True and False"
2-4pm, 212 Moore Building
Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren became a folk hero at the end of World War II when he confessed to selling Hermann Goering a fake Vermeer. Hear author Jonathan Lopez discuss the extravagantly sordid life of the world's most notorious art forger and what he did to the image of the Vermeer we all know and love.

Thursday, November 19: 2nd Visual Studies Career Roundtable w/ Neil Perry
4:30-6pm, Room 138 Fisher Bennett Hall
Join us to hear about XLNTads--an innovative marketing and advertising firm located in Philly. CEO Neil Perry will also have a q&a session about jobs in advertising. (For the sophmores & juniors--XLNTads takes interns!)

Tuesday, December 1: Michelle Foa "To Paint in Depth: Seurat, Monet, Helmholtz,
and the art of Visual Perception. 5pm, Claudia Cohen Hall, Room 402
Few artists are as closely associated with the subject of visual perception as the Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat. Yet the precise nature of Seurat’s interest in perception remains a surprisingly underexplored topic in art history. This lecture will suggest a specific scientific and philosophical context for interpreting Seurat’s work, namely, the writings of one of the nineteenth century’s most important scientists of optics, Hermann von Helmholtz. Analyzing the work of Seurat in relation to Helmholtz, and comparing his work to that of the leading Impressionist artist Claude Monet, will help us understand Seurat’s paintings as a remarkable exploration of how we come to make sense of the world around us.

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Announcements: Congratulations to our 2009 graduates, and especially to Lizzie Frasco and Rebecca Starr, winners of the Charles Willson Peale Prize for outstanding Visual Studies theses! > Visit the seniors' project websites