LANCASTER, PA.- Phillips Museum of Art has announced a new Spring 2024 exhibition season that celebrates Pennsylvania’s cultural heritage with the exhibition PORTALS by contemporary visual artist Stass Shpanin, which will open on February 23rd, and continue through April 25th, 2024.

This exhibition includes paintings and installations presenting artistic simulations of alternative history and the result of visual conversations between the artist and image-generating Artificial Intelligence programs. Shpanin uses AI technology to digitally fragment graphic elements selected from the pictorial and textual manuscripts from 18th and 19th century American folk art. Imagery from the collection at the Phillips Museum directly influenced several of the works found in PORTALS. The exhibition also includes an intervention of one of Shpanin's paintings in the adjacent gallery that features material culture and artwork from the Lancaster region.

Stass Shpanin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and received his BFA from the Hartford Art School and an MFA at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Fascinated by, but unfamiliar with, the social and cultural traditions of American history, Shpanin selects imagery used in the Northeast’s regional arts as resources to contextualize the intersections of immigration, mythology, nature, and the evolution of Americana. Now a Philadelphia resident and Assistant Teaching Professor of Art at Rutgers University–Camden, Shpanin continues to examine the culturally and politically charged visual remains of American history.

This exhibition is co-curated by Lindsay Marino, Director and Collections Manager, and Janie M. Kreines, Curator of Exhibitions & Engagement at the Phillips Museum of Art. The Phillips Museum of Art, part of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is an academic museum that highlights the work of local and global artists through traveling exhibitions and a permanent collection of over 10,000 objects.