Opening reception set for 'Gertrude Käsebier: The Complexity of Light and Shade'

11:59 a.m., Feb. 21, 2013--An opening reception for the exhibition “Gertrude Käsebier: The Complexity of Light and Shade” will be held from 5-7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 21, in the University of Delaware’s Old College Main Gallery.

The event is free and open to the public.

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June 5: Blue Hen 5K

University of Delaware graduates planning to attend Alumni Weekend are encouraged to register for the annual Blue Hen 5K walk and run, which will be held Sunday morning, June 5.

June 6-9: Food and culture series

The 20th annual June Lecture Series at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UD in Wilmington will be held June 6-9. Titled 'June a la Carte,' this year's program focuses on great political documents, feminism, world politics and a Newark cuisine sampler.

• June 6-9: Food and culture series
• Through June 30: 'Saving White Clay Creek'
• July 22: WWE Heatwave Tour
• Through Sept. 16: Women of color in academia

Käsebier (1852-1934) was among the most important American pictorialist photographers and a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession.

Her moody portraits and her expressive studies of mothers and children won critical acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, fetching record prices for artistic photography at the turn of the 20th century.

Stieglitz championed her work, devoting the first issue of his deluxe journal Camera Work to her photographs in 1903 and featuring her in his newly opened Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1905.

Famed British modernist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn came to study with her in New York. In France in 1905, she stayed with Edouard Steichen and visited the studio of Auguste Rodin, befriending the great sculptor and making an important series of photographs of him.

Through gifts from the artist’s family and others, UD holds a significant collection of the artist’s work and papers.

This exhibition, curated by Stephen Petersen, presents a selection of her works, ranging from formal and family portraits, to landscapes, to photographs from her private albums. Also presented are selected materials from the University of Delaware Library. 

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of the late William Innes Homer, the H. Rodney Sharp Professor Emeritus of Art History at UD who died July 8, 2012. A nationally recognized scholar, teacher and connoisseur, Dr. Homer was a specialist in the art and photography of the United States from the late 19th century to the present and was the author of books on Käsebier, Stieglitz, Robert Henri and Thomas Eakins.