The Art of Reinvention

Presented in collaboration with the Penn Humanities Forum, this exhibition explores the tales of two artists whose political exile occurred fifty years apart. The Prague-born writer Franz Werfel became expatriated with the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. He and his wife, Alma Mahler, eventually settled in California and remained at the center of a vibrant émigré community of European artists, musicians, and writers. The exile of conceptual artist Kinga Araya from communist Poland in 1988 informs her work, which includes performance art, photography, sculpture, video, drawing, and writing. Their stories are juxtaposed through the display of artifacts and creative pieces that interrogate notions of identity and homeland. This exhibition is co-curated by Violet Lutz, Penn Ph.D., and Kinga Araya, an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.