January 8, 2015

We hope you enjoyed the holidays and are now rested up from your festivities.  After the always busy fall term, we enjoyed the break with time for family and friends and are excited for the many events and initiatives that will unfold in the coming months.

Next week The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery will open the show Are We There Yet? featuring artist Chakaia Booker’s sculptures which are laden with  racial and social themes. Ms. Booker exhibits widely and her art is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This spring, the Gallery will exhibit the works of Ray Bartkus, whose illustrations and paintings have been in the pages of the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine and have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. The graduate Arts Administration program will host Michael Kaiser, the long-serving President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a world renowned arts management expert who has worked with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre and Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Ballet, the Philadelphia Theater Company and the Mural Arts Program. The Kal & Lucille Rudman Institute will host a special event with journalist and historian Charles Spencer, 9^th Earl Spencer. In February the Architecture & Interiors Department’s Arfaa Lecture Series will present Witold Rybczynski, a prolific and acclaimed writer on architecture, landscape and design. Our Co-op Theater has two exciting productions: Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead which parodies the Peanuts comic strip to address teenagers’ realities, and the acclaimed rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which portrays our nation’s 7^th President  as the country’s first rock star politician. Our student-run record label, MAD Dragon Records, recently signed two bands and will release new digital and 7” EPs. And, as always, our many Senior Shows will be the highpoint of the year.

We’re nearing approvals to launch the College’s first PhD program which will be in Digital Media, an innovative undergraduate Art History major, and an online version of our graduate program in Television Management, all of which will begin in September 2015, and we’re in the middle of a number of national searches seeking to bring notable new faculty on board.

We greatly appreciate your interest in the doings of our students and faculty and hope you’ll come and join us at events in the coming months; almost all are free and open to the public. Finally, all of us wish you and yours a happy, healthy and creative New Year!