Over the course of his four-decade career, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, Rohrer’s paintings became larger and more abstract, but his modernist progression remained consistently engaged with tradition. His abstractions evoke the fields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where his family farmed for nine generations, while his mark-making recalls the meticulous, repetitive labor of farming and craftwork. Jane Rohrer’s poetry offers narrative context and emotional depth to the experience of her husband’s paintings, registering ambivalence about the relationship of modern artists to tradition and reflecting on the links between painting and poetry.

Featuring some fifty works, including paintings and works on paper, Amish quilts, and examples of Pennsylvania Dutch painted crockery and furniture, Field Language invites us to consider issues of land use, the sustainability of rural communities and cultures, and our own relationships with agricultural landscapes, seasonal change, labor, and human need and desire.

Curated by Joyce Robinson, Assistant Director of the Palmer Museum, in collaboration with guest curators poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Professor of English, and Christopher Reed, Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture, the exhibition is accompanied by a multi-author illustrated catalogue available now through Penn State Press or at the Museum Store.

Click here to check out the online companion to the exhibition. This virtual resource includes informative videos, short thematic essays, audio clips of poems, and suggestions for further reading.

Funding for the exhibition was provided through Penn State’s Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost as part of the University’s Strategic Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Creating art is in many ways about making marks: brushstrokes on canvas, ink or graphite dashes on paper, lines incised on a sheet of copper or drawn on a lithographic stone. The postwar decades in American art witnessed the primacy of mark making in the calligraphic gestures of Abstract Expressionism, the calculated grids of the Minimalists, and the dizzying striations of Op art. For many artists coming of age in the mid- to late twentieth century, the process or act of making marks was as integral a component of the final work of art as recognizable content or perceived meaning. “My subject is the STROKE,” commented artist Warren Rohrer, who confirmed his vocation as a painter at Penn State in the 1950s and whose abstract work from the following decades is featured in the spring exhibition Field Language.

Drawn largely from the Palmer Museum of Art’s permanent collection and the distinguished collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mark Makers: The Language of Abstraction brings together paintings, drawings, and prints by a number of notable mark makers, including painter Alma Thomas, who, like Rohrer, drew inspiration from the surrounding landscape even as she moved beyond representational subject matter. Also on view are works by twentieth-century artists who continued to engage with the natural world as they explored abstract mark making, including Leonard Nelson, Mark Tobey, Henry Pearson, and Alan Gussow, and contemporary artists Mary Judge and Jo Margolis.

The presentation of Mark Makers: The Language of Abstraction is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative.

A prolific illustrator, Lucille Corcos (1908–1973) depicted American life with an incomparable verve during the mid-twentieth century. Her work became highly sought after by numerous magazines beginning in the 1930s, and she regularly exhibited at galleries and museums into the 1950s. This exhibition, organized by the Palmer Museum and curated by Adam Thomas, Curator of American Art, examines these pivotal decades of Corcos’s career through her small-scale, semi-naïve tempera and watercolor paintings. Featuring recent acquisitions to the Palmer as well as loans from several museums and private collections, The Wit and Whimsy of Lucille Corcos is the first exhibition devoted to the artist in more than twenty-two years.

The Benjamin and Lillian K. Snowiss Galleries feature American painting and sculpture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Displayed in three galleries, this core collection of the Palmer Museum’s holdings surveys the major artistic developments in the United States, especially portraiture from the Early Republic, Hudson River School landscapes, genre painting before and after the Civil War, and various cosmopolitan styles of the Gilded Age.

Currently on view in the Snowiss Gallery, you can view a rare and new acquisition for the museum, Grafton Tyler Brown’s Hot Springs at Yellowstone. Read about the important artwork here: https://news.psu.edu/story/650334/2021/03/09/arts-and-entertainment/palmer-museum-art-acquires-rare-and-important-work

The Harold L. and Edythe B. Tonkin Gallery showcases the Palmer Museum’s impressive holdings of contemporary studio glass and ceramics from around the world. On view are objects of dazzling variety and techniques by pioneering artists in the field of studio glass, as well as artists working in glass today from North America, England, Italy, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, and Japan. The museum’s ceramics collection includes examples from ancient Andean cultures, from historical China and Korea, and from twentieth-century Europe and Japan.

The Morton B. and Mary Jane Harris Gallery features selections from the Palmer Museum’s collection of Old Master paintings. The majority of works on view are from the Baroque, a term that refers to an array of artistic approaches practiced throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Paintings from Italy predominate, but the gallery also includes work by French and Flemish artists. Typical of the period, the paintings are mostly religious in nature, depicting narratives from either the Old and New Testaments or the Golden Legend.