Artist Talk | Eileen Neff: Through That Which Is Seen

Philadelphia artist Eileen Neff will be at the Arthur Ross Gallery on Thursday, October 22, for a talk about her ongoing photographic project, Through That Which Is Seen. The evening is presented in conjunction with At Liberty, the gallery's current exhibition.

Through That Which Is Seen grew out of Neff documenting the 2018 restoration of two dioramas at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the nation's first natural history museum, founded in 1812. While there, she watched conservators deal with the arsenic-based preservatives used in the taxidermy—a process refined by the painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, whose collections she has researched for more than two centuries. That research eventually led her to Moses Williams (1777–1825), an African-American artist enslaved by Peale, and to the Peale family themselves, whose 1785 portrait of Benjamin Franklin hangs in the At Liberty exhibition.

Neff has worked with photo-based images and installations since 1981 and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and an NEA Grant. The talk is presented by the Arthur Ross Gallery, a free public learning lab founded in 1983.

The talk runs from 5 PM to 7 PM at the Arthur Ross Gallery, located in the Fisher Fine Arts Library Building at the University of Pennsylvania, 220 South 34th Street. It's free and open to the public.