On Thursday, October 4, at 6:00 pm, artist Jane Irish, whose work is in the Tang collection and was shown in the exhibition Give a damn., will speak about her work in conversation with Skidmore Assistant Professor of English Jamie Parra.

This dialogue is free and open to the public.

Dunkerley Dialogues are made possible by a generous gift from Michele Dunkerley ’80.

About the Speakers

Artist Jane Irish earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Queens College, City University of New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design; the Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers University, Newark; The Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She has received grants and awards from the New York Council on the Arts, NEA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Independence Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and Pew Fellowships in the Arts. Her work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Women’s Hall of Fame Seneca Falls, New York; and numerous private collections. Recent residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans; Due South, Palermo, Italy; Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; and Klots Residency, Lehon, France. She lives and works in Philadelphia.

Jamie Parra is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore, where he teaches courses in 19th-century American literature and culture. Before joining Skidmore’s faculty, he received a PhD from Columbia University and taught in the American Studies Department at Williams College as a C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2007 to 2016, he wrote about contemporary art, design, and fashion for Whitewall magazine, and he has written book reviews for Time Out New York and Public Books. His recent academic writing includes essays on vision, fictionality, and ethics in Huckleberry Finn; theories of literary character and personhood; and recently republished memoirs by former slaves Charlotte S. Riley and J.W. Loguen. These have appeared in (respectively) J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists, Novel, and American Literary History. He is at work on a book about literary description, visual culture, and race in the 19th-century US, which is currently titled “American Obscurity.”