Joan Wadleigh Curran, prolific artist, mentor, and longtime senior lecturer at Penn, has died at 72
She created countless works in paint, charcoal, and other elements over a 50-year career that often evoked emotion. "I seek a correlation between visual and felt experience," she said.
Joan Wadleigh Curran, 72, of Philadelphia, prolific painter and drawer, juror and curator, printer, mentor, and longtime senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, died Wednesday, March 29, of complications from metastatic cancer at Waverly Heights retirement community in Gladwyne.
Inspired to draw and paint nature with what she said was “a sense of human intervention or human touch,” Ms. Wadleigh Curran created countless works that feature themes of regeneration, the cycle of life, and the coexistence of disparate objects. She worked in charcoal, paint, and other media for more than 50 years, and her pieces have been displayed in hundreds of exhibitions, galleries, and private collections around the world. She never really retired.
“My goal is to make a painting that questions assumptions and habitual ways of seeing,” she said in a 2017 interview on the blog “Painting Perceptions.” “For me, drawing is a way of thinking.”
Edward J. Sozanski, former art critic for The Inquirer, called her work “complex visually and conceptually” in a 1989 review. “They amplify the 19th-century idea of the painting as a window into the landscape by nesting several layers of perception one inside the other.”
A 2003 review in the Daily News said she had “original expression combined with excellent technique.” Art historian Michael Lewis said in an essay for the National Academy of Sciences that she “asks us to find beauty in the hateful and the abject.”
Ms. Wadleigh Curran had cerebral palsy since birth, and her physical challenges, coupled with the joy she found in life, were often reflected in her art. She constantly balanced struggle and happiness, career and family, and the coexistence of such contrasts appear in her work as colorful vines entwined in old chicken wire and beautiful flowers placed amid the debris and wreckage of industrial life.
“I confront issues of beauty and loss, strength and vulnerability, and change over the passage of time,” she said on her website. Most recently, she was turning woodcuts into collages, a permutation she described as an artistic “language.”
Ms. Wadleigh Curran held solo exhibitions at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, Wagner Free Institute of Science, and many other galleries in Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. She was featured in more than 100 group exhibitions, including those at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Woodmere Art Museum, and Michener Art Museum.
Thoughtful, encouraging, and honest, she embraced her role as a teacher and mentor at colleges around the country, and was a senior lecturer in the School of Design at Penn from 2001 to 2016. She taught previously at Moore College of Art and Design, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, and other colleges in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Georgia.
“I was moved by how much compassion and excitement she had for students to learn drawing for the first time,” a former colleague said. “She enjoyed seeing them spark with awareness of concepts that were new to them.”
Ms. Wadleigh Curran was on the board of governors of the Print Center in Center City and co-curated its well-received 2002 art exhibition “Imprint: A Public Art Project.” She spent time as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, and won, among other awards, the 1985 Tobeleah Wechler Award from the Cheltenham Arts Center.
“She was always searching for new ways to think about the world, painting, and what it meant to make art,” a former student at Penn said. Another former student said: “Joan’s way of carrying herself with grace, humor, and stunning honesty was an art form.”
Joan Ellen Wadleigh was born April 27, 1950, in Paterson, N.J. Her family moved to Needham, Mass., when she was 5, and she spent idyllic hours watching birds in the nearby woods and collecting rocks and starfish on the beach.
She was encouraged by her parents, a junior high school art teacher, and others to explore her talents, and she earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Skidmore College in 1972 and master’s degree in fine arts at Yale University in 1974.
She married Walter Curran Jr., and they had daughters Maris and Mia, and lived in Philadelphia. They divorced later.
Ms. Wadleigh Curran was an avid gardener and liked British TV shows and public broadcasting documentaries. She always made time for her daughters, sons-in-law, grandson, and brother Jim, and wasn’t afraid to break a bothersome rule or two if the opportunity presented itself.
She liked to read and chat with her daughters on the phone, and she made art as recently as two months ago. “The more I look, the more amazing, complex and strange the world becomes,” she said in 2017.
“She had the most formative impact on how I am,” said her daughter Mia. “Her strength, resilience, humor, and love served as a model.”
Her daughter Maris said: “She had incredible curiosity about life. It’s at the core of how we were raised. I feel so grateful she was my mom.”
» READ MORE: Nature has long been the subject of Joan Wadleigh Curran’s paintings
In addition to her daughters, grandson, brother, and former husband, Ms. Wadleigh Curran is survived by other relatives.
A private memorial service is to be held Sunday, April 30.
Donations in her name may be made to Recycled Artist in Residency, 7333 Milnor St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19136.