Sculptor Elizabeth King to deliver first Powell-Edwards Lecture at VCU

By Tom Gresham

Elizabeth King, School of the Arts research professor in the Department of Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, will deliver the first Powell-Edwards Lecture in Religion and the Arts at VCU on April 8.

King will speak at 7 p.m. at the Grace Street Theater, 934 W. Grace St. The event is free and open to the public. Reserved seating is available and arrangements can be made by contacting Shirley McDaniel at (804) 827-0867 or srmcdani@vcu.edu. A reception will follow the lecture.

King combines meticulously built figurative sculptures with stop-frame film animation in works that blur the perceptual boundary between actual and visual space. King’s work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet and literature’s host of legends in which inanimate or artificial figures come to life.

Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

The Powell-Edwards Fund establishing an annual lecture in religion and the arts is the result of an anonymous gift to the Religious Studies Program in the VCU School of World Studies, which is part of the College of Humanities and Sciences. The gift was given in honor of Marcia Powell, a longtime teacher in the Richmond area, now retired.

During her teaching career, Powell attended a series of courses with Cliff Edwards, professor of religious studies at VCU, beginning with the very first course he taught at VCU in 1975. Edwards invited Powell to lecture in his courses on her special interest in the relation of the arts and biblical studies. In honor of their common interests and their time in VCU classes together, Powell asked that the gift establishing the lectureship be named the Powell-Edwards Fund. The outstanding creative work in the arts of King, and its probing of the spiritual dimension of human beings, led to the invitation for her to inaugurate the lectureship.

Another distinguished scholar-artist has agreed to continue the lectureship in 2010. Naresh Bajracharya, a Fulbright scholar and head of the Department of Buddhist Studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal, will deliver the 2010 Powell-Edwards Lecture.
 
The Powell-Edwards Fund invites gifts to establish the fund as an endowment that will continue the lecture series and will eventually expand the lectureship to bring international conferences on religion and the arts to VCU. For more information, contact Lois Badey at (804) 827-0856.