2017 ELIZABETH GREENFIELD ZEIDMAN LECTURE

This lecture held on October 11, 2017 and moderated by Academic Dean Patti Phillips was a wonderful opportunity for the Philadelphia community to learn more about and interact with the two 2017 Visionary Woman Award honorees – sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard and photographer Andrea Baldeck. The lecture took the form of a discussion with questions covering the path the honorees took to become distinguished professional women artists, the decisions they made (and didn’t), the opportunities and challenges they encountered, and what they still hoped to accomplish. URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD Ursula Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. Recently she has cast sculptures in bronze from full-scale cedar models. She deliberately uses cedar boards milled into 4" by 4" widths with varying lengths, which create a neutrality or "blank canvas" which enables her to dip into many different possibilities often within the arena of the psychological and emotional. As she explains this approach: "If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I'm not sure that's what I do or even if that's what I want to do), it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. The more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention." AND