PHILADELPHIA.- In conjunction with the exhibition Reverberations: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Bank of America Collection (On view through September 21, 2008 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), renowned artist Frank Stella will appear at the Academy on September 18th in the Fisher Brooks Gallery of the Hamilton Building (128 N. Broad St.). At 6 p.m., Stella will give welcoming remarks and take questions from attendees. A reception will follow.

Frank Stella has been among the most influential and innovative American artists of the last fifty years. He was born in 1936 and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, MA before receiving his BA from Princeton University in 1958. He moved to New York City after graduation and achieved almost immediate fame with a series of Black Paintings (1958-1960) that are composed of broad bands of black paint separated by thin lines of unpainted canvas. In these early works he established major aspects of his later work: painting as object rather than pictorial representation; use of the shaped canvas that approaches sculpture and architecture; dynamic articulation of painted space and image through the physical boundaries of the painted object.

While integral to the development of minimalism, Stella has never aligned himself with critical labels or movements. In the 1960s he made monumental paintings that employed a wide range of color and movement, including the Protractor series, which includes Damascus Gate II (1968, Acrylic on canvas; 60 x 180 in.), which is included in Reverberations, as is Agua Caliente from the Race Track series (1972, Screenprint on paper; 21 x 81 ½ in.). Stella has been prolific as a printmaker and has made sculpture, murals, architecture, and a wide range of objects that merge all of the above. He has received many honors, and in 1983-84 delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, later published as Working Space. He lives and works in New York.

Bank of America is widely regarded as holding one of the nation’s finest corporate art collections and in conjunction with their Art Exhibition Program, which makes turnkey and customized exhibitions from the Bank of America Collection widely available to museums free of charge, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had the privilege of being the sole curator for Reverberations which includes approximately 80 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by artists including Milton Avery, Roger Brown, John Chamberlain, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, John Marin, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Nevelson, Jules Olitski, Ed Ruscha, Lorna Simpson, Frank Stella, and Faith Ringgold.