Art & Art History   

The first session will show various techniques for painting with watercolor and acrylic paint and include starting a project. Following sessions will feature cardboard art and a recycling mixed media project, and the final project will consist of using one type of material (e.g., index card) to complete the entire project.

Course fee includes $10 for supplies.

Learn two printmaking techniques and use them to create holiday or other cards that are unique to each person who creates them. Participants will walk away with a number of beautiful cards that will delight the artist and recipient alike. Week one will emphasize gelli printmaking, week two will focus on linocut printmaking, and week three will have attendees finishing up their cards with an additional opportunity to learn more in-depth gelli-printmaking techniques.

Special notes: Please wear casual attire and bring an apron or clothing you don’t mind getting paint on. A list of optional supplies to bring to the course will be shared prior to the course. Course fee includes $25 for supplies.

At age 70, Frank Lloyd Wright shocked the architectural world with his audacious Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. This course will explore this extraordinary house in relation to its times, the era of the Great Depression. Fallingwater will also be examined within the context of other Wright buildings of the 1930s, such as his Usonian houses, Broadacre City, Taliesin West in Arizona, Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina, and Wingspread and the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Wisconsin.

Playwright Cindy Dlugolecki will share the inspiration behind her one-woman play, Violet Oakley Unveiled. The play and Cindy's PowerPoint share the story of muralist Violet Oakley (1874–1961). In 1902, Oakley became the first female artist to be commissioned to create murals for a public building: the capitol of Pennsylvania. Following the adage of her Drexel art professor, Howard Pyle, Violet spurned marriage and children to be married to her art. She and two other female Drexel art students—Jessie Wilcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green—created an artistic bond and became known as the Red Rose Girls. All became famous in their own right, but Violet's contribution is local and on display at the Harrisburg Capitol. Cindy will share the secrets, of both the success and sorrow of striving in a man's world, that are embedded in the capitol murals. She will schedule a tour of the capitol and its art for Friday, November 14.

In 1867, Édouard Manet wrote, “Mr. Manet has no intention of overthrowing old methods of painting or of creating new ones. He simply seeks to be himself and not someone else.” This might have seemed disingenuous to the public scandalized by Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1863 or Olympia in 1865, despite both paying homage to Italian Renaissance masterpieces. Even the young artists who admired his contemporary subjects and innovative approach to color and light might have seen this comment as overly modest. This presentation will explore the revolutionary nature of Manet’s modern masterpieces.