Download Image: Web
How can we make sense of the current state of public art, with its endless variability?
Visiting scholar Ken Lum will deliver a talk entitled “The Perils of Public Art” on Tuesday, March 4, at 4:30 p.m., in Trogner Presentation Room, Krapf Gateway Center, on the Lycoming College campus. The event, co-sponsored with the Art History program and Humanities Research Center, is generously funded by Barbara Lovenduski Sylk ’73. Lum’s talk is free and open to the public.
Lum, who is currently the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, will present a “crash course” on the history of public art, citing in-depth examples that will help attendees understand the alternations of public art today. He will explore public memory and the complex narratives of memorial landscapes and monumentality, stemming from his experiences as co-curator of “Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project,” a city wide art public art exhibition in Philadelphia in 2017. The exhibition dealt with the ways in which space is engaged in terms of a city’s monumental landscape.
Since the mid-1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines in Switzerland, Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto, and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck, and Kansas City.
Lum holds an M.F.A. from University of British Columbia and a bachelor’s degree from Simon Fraser University, which later awarded him an honorary doctoral degree. Additionally, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hnatynshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is a Penn Institute of Urban Research Fellow.
The Humanities Research Center enhances educational opportunities for students majoring or minoring in any of the humanities by supporting collaborative student-faculty research, internships, guided scholarship, study abroad opportunities, education certification, digital humanities, graduate school placement, and fellowships.