Joan Wadleigh Curran
Joan Wadleigh Curran was an American visual artist, painter, and printmaker active in Philadelphia, known primarily for her figurative paintings and drawings in which she addressed the intersection of the natural world and human intervention. Between 2001 and 2016, Curran served as Senior Lecturer in Painting and Drawing at the University of Pennsylvania.
Life and work
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Curran received a B.S. in art from Skidmore College in 1972 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1974. In 1974, she began teaching studio art at LaGrange College in Troup County, Georgia, where she worked until 1977.When discussing her own work, the artist explained that painting provided her "with an opportunity to connect to the physical world", allowing her in turn to understand "the relationship between the tangible presence of real objects and their ability to trigger an intangible response". According to the art critic Adriana Rabinovitch, Curran "anthropomorphizes what we call garbage in a manner that spurs a deeper investigation into the cycle of life of an object". Writing in a 1989 review for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward J. Sozanski said that Curran's paintings "amplify the 19th-century idea of the painting as a window into the landscape by nesting several layers of perception one inside the other".Throughout her career, Curran received grants from the Independence Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and was twice a finalist in the Pew Fellowship for the Arts. In 2017, Curran completed a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, where she created a series of gouache paintings and drawings inspired by the natural environment and the physical surroundings of the foundation's 15th-century castle, some of which were later exhibited in Curran's solo show titled Instability at InLiquid Gallery in Philadelphia in 2019. She was also the recipient of the 2018 Awagami Print Award by The Print Center in Philadelphia.