Yolanda Lopez, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,1978.

Appalachian State University presents a public lecture by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, arts and humanities scholars and authors of Junctures in Women's Leadership: The Arts. This lecture will take place at 5:30 pm on Thursday, November 21, 2019, in the Table Rock room at Plemmons Student Union. This event is free and open to all. 

Through stories and images, the authors will present a historical perspective on feminist arts leadership. Brodsky is distinguished professor emerita of visual arts at Rutgers University and Olin is distinguished professor emerita of library science at Rutgers University. Their co-authored book, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts, profiles diverse female leaders in music, theater, dance, visual art, and the museum world. Published by Rutgers University Press, this book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on women and leadership. As Brodsky has noted, “there are virtually no case studies of women leaders. Harvard Business School, the primary publisher of case studies on leadership, has published thousands on men, and almost none on women. This series, while aimed at the general public, is also intended to fill that gap and provide meaningful biographies of women to inspire students to take on leadership.”

Public Event

Junctures in Women's Leadership: The Arts

Presented by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin

Thursday, November 21, 2019, at 5:30 pm

Table Rock Room at Plemmons Student Union

Free and open to all 

About the Authors

Judith K. Brodsky, immediate past chair of the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts (2015–2019), is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Visual Arts, Rutgers University; founder of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor; founder with Ferris Olin of the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities and the Feminist Art Project, a national program to promote recognition of women artists; organizer and curator, again with Ferris Olin, of The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society (2012); founder and chair of the international citywide print festival Philagrafika (2010); past national president of ArtTable, the College Art Association, and the Women’s Caucus for Art; and former dean, associate provost, and chair of the art department, Rutgers campus at Newark. 

Brodsky has organized and curated many exhibitions and written essays for many catalogs. She has raised millions to support arts projects at Rutgers University and elsewhere. The Brodsky Center had published more than seven hundred printmaking and handmade paper projects by its thirtieth anniversary in 2017, and work published at the center has entered the collections of major museums worldwide. As a participant herself in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, Brodsky was a contributor to the first comprehensive history of that period, The Power of Feminist Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1993). A printmaker/artist, Brodsky’s work is in more than one hundred permanent collections. 

Ferris Olin is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Rutgers University, where she was an art historian, curator, women’s studies scholar, librarian, and archivist. She was the cofounder and co-director (with Judith K. Brodsky) of Rutgers Institute for Women and Art (now known as the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities) and the Feminist Art Project, an international effort to make visible the aesthetic and intellectual impact of women on the cultural landscape. She was the founding head of the Margery Somers Foster Center, a resource center focused on documenting women’s leadership in the public arena, and served as executive officer of the Institute for Research on Women and the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women’s Studies and, earlier, director of the Art Library. She was the curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers from 1995 to 2006 and later (with Judith K. Brodsky) from 2006 to 2013, the oldest exhibition space in the United States showing work by emerging and established contemporary women artists, founded in 1971. 

Olin has curated more than fifty exhibitions and headed many research projects funded by more than $4 million she raised while on the Rutgers faculty. She is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics ranging from women’s material culture to art librarianship, as well as many exhibition catalogs for the extensive art shows she curated.  With Brodsky, Olin created the Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND), a digital directory of archives where the papers of women artists active in the United States since 1945 are located. Olin has served on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations and was vice-president of the College Art Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the College Art Association Committee on Women’s Annual Recognition Award (now known as Distinguished Feminist Award).

Sponsors

This event is sponsored by the Humanities Council, University Forum Committee, Smith Gallery, Department of Art, College of Fine and Applied Art, Student Engagement and Leadership, Belk Library and Information Commons, Program in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Blowing Rock Art & History Museum and the Honors College. 

Location

Table Rock Room is located in the Plemmons Student Union on the Appalachian State University Campus. Plemmons Student Union is located at 263 Locust St, Boone, NC 28608. To contact the Union about parking or directions, please call (828) 262-3030 or visit their website at: https://studentunion.appstate.edu/.