War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz

War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz

Rothman Gallery

September 4–December 7, 2018

The exhibition War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz examines the question “How do Americans remember war?” Artist Binh Danh and poet Robert Schultz have used soldiers’ photographic portraits developed onto the flesh of leaves, historic battlefield landscapes photographed using 19th-century technologies, and poems about war to provide intimate reflections on the after effects of war. This exhibition features over fifty original photographs, poetry broadsides, chlorophyll prints, and artist books, drawn from the war poems and prose of Walt Whitman, our nation’s first war correspondent, and upon the Liljenquist Collection of Civil War portraits held in the Library of Congress. A product of an eight-year collaboration between Danh and Schultz, the exhibition takes the viewer on a meditative journey through our country’s history of war, its impact on the land, and our collective memory of events.

Danh received his M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been presented at museums nationally and internationally and are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House. He is Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University and is represented by the Haines Gallery in San Francisco and the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Schultz is the author of three collections of poetry and a work of nonfiction. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry from The Virginia Quarterly Review. He earned his M.F.A. and Ph.D. at Cornell University. Schultz was the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia until his retirement earlier this year. He is represented by Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents in New York.

War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz has been organized by the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia.

Poetry reading: War Poems, October 11, 2018, 7 p.m., Rothman Gallery

L.I.F.T., the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House’s student spoken word performance group, along with the English Department and the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House will co-host a night of poetry in the Phillips Museum of Art's Rothman Gallery. Jonny Teklit ’19 will be the evening’s curator of poems about war, read by students and faculty alike.

Common Hour talk by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials, October 18, 2018, 11:30 a.m. in Franklin & Marshall College’s Mayser Gymnasium, followed by a reception at 1 p.m. in the Phillips Museum of Art’s Rothman Gallery