Guest Scholar Lecture – Nov 9th
Wednesday, November 9th at 5:30PM in CAS 303A , GSHAAA presents Rosamond Purcell, “Things are Not as They Seem: A Lecture In Honor of Robert Seydel”. (Please note that the room number has been changed from prior communications.)
Ms. Purcell is an internationally acclaimed photographer, artist, collector and author. Her traveling installation Two Rooms, a recreation of Ole Worm’s early Wunderkammern from ethnographic objects and specimens, has been installed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Harvard Science Center. Her photographic work has been exhibited at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Fine Art, and The High Museum in Atlanta. Amongst her many publications are Bookworm, in which Purcell photographed ancient, weathered books; Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, which examines William Buckminster’s eccentric collections in Maine; and a collaborative project with Ricky Jay entitled Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck which includes Purcell’s photographs of Jay’s decaying dice collection. Purcell, who’s been called the “doyenne of decay,” has also collaborated three times on books with the late paleontologist and acclaimed science historian Stephen Jay Gould,
including on Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors and Crossing Over where Art and Science Meet.
An alum of Boston University, her lecture examines the correspondences between her own work and the work of the late Robert Seydel, an artist, collector and author – whose recent work The Book of Ruth, was released in May. Seydel, who taught photography, collage and theory at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA was a former long-time Director of
Exhibitions at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.
This lecture is a part of the Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture’s annual Lecture Series and concludes with a reception and Q+A. We look forward to seeing many of you at this exciting event and hope that you will spread the word!