Whether you take the "Penn Gallery Hop" or explore on your own, be sure to spend some time savoring the cultural life of the University. The Penn Gallery Hop includes a director/ curator-led tour of exhibitions at ICA, Arthur Ross Gallery, and Kroiz Gallery of the Architectural Archives. Alumni are also invited to tour the galleries on their own. The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and the Penn Graduate School of Education have interesting exhibitions to view as well.

- PENN GALLERY HOP -
Begin at the Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archives, Lower Level of Fisher Fine Arts Library, 220 South 34th Street

· Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archive
Speaker: Julia Moore Converse, Director
The Beaux-Arts at Penn: Selected Works by Paul Philippe Cret and His Students
Celebrate the legacy of Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), Penn's first Director of Design, at this exhibition of drawings by the Beaux-Arts educator and architect whose best-known works include Philadelphia's Rodin Museum and the Barnes Foundation. On view are 45 original renderings representing Cret's work and the outstanding designs his students produced during his tenure at Penn, including a cadre of students who came to Penn from China in the 1920s.

Only Controversial and Not Detrimental: The Legacy of Modern Design in Chestnut Hill, PA
World-renowned local architecture takes center stage in this exhibition of drawings, photographs and models by Louis I. Kahn BArch'24; Robert Venturi HON'80; John Lane Evans BArch'24 MArch'25; Thomas A. Todd MArch'59 MCP'59; Mark Ueland BArch'61 MArch'64; and G. Holmes Perkins HON'72, among others, representing Chestnut Hill modernism from the late 1940s through the 1980s.

Hours: Friday and Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm; Sunday, Noon - 4 pm
Phone: 215-898-8323

· Arthur Ross Gallery
Speaker: Dilys Winegrad, Director/Curator
Master Drawings (1800-1914) from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Drawings and watercolors by European masters selected and curated by Jon Whiteley, Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean. Rarely seen outside of the U.K., these works were the subject of a graduate art history seminar at Penn this fall. Featured artists include: Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Jean-François Millet, Auguste Rodin, Charles Paul Renouard, and many more.

Hours: Friday, 10 am - 5 pm; Saturday and Sunday, Noon - 5 pm. Closed Monday.
Phone: 215-898-2083 (general info)
Web: www.upenn.edu/ARG
The Gallery is free and open to the public.

· Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
Speakers: Johanna Plummer, Curator of Education, and Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator
The Big Nothing
This group exhibition is part of a citywide initiative, lead by ICA, focusing on ideas of nothing, nothingness, and negation. Profound and ironic, nothing is one of the driving themes of modernism: one thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction; Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects; Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime; Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. At ICA, The Big Nothing will survey the legacy of these (and other) manifestations of absence made manifest incontemporary art.

Yun-Fei Ji
Yun-Fei Ji creates beautiful ink and pigment-based works on layers of fine mulberry paper. Ji uses traditional techniques and styles of Chinese painting as a point of departure.The surprise element comes when seductive ink-stain landscapes are revealed to be scenes of industrial, environmental disasters: gas stations, pickup trucks, tanks, and other objects. The compelling aspect of this work is its use of traditional Chinese style and mythology to confront contemporary issues.

Ramp Project: Judy Pfaff
Judy Pfaff is well known for installation environments that draw paint, plastic, glass, metal, wood, found objects, fabric, resin, steel…anything that comes to hand, into spiky vortexes of pictorial abstraction. Initially urban and artificial in feeling, but increasingly organic, all of her work over the past three decades transmits a generosity of spirit. As an artist who typically works on a public scale and setting, Pfaff's work is essentially collaborative and, in this commission, students from Penn's School of Design will assist Pfaff in her production.

Hours: Friday, Noon - 8 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am - 5 pm. Closed Monday.
Phone: 215-898-5911/7108
Web: www.icaphila.org

- UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM -
Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (Special Engagement!)
Highlights from UPM's blockbuster traveling exhibition of ancient Sumerian treasures, including the famous "Ram in the Thicket"sculpture and the ornamental jewelry of Lady Puabi, circa 2600 B.C. from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), return for a limited engagement. The exhibition, much of which was last seen in the Art of the First Cities exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will travel to several new sites in the fall of 2004.

Hours: Friday and Saturday, 10-4:30 pm; Sunday, 1-5 pm
Phone: 215-898-4000 (general info)
Web: www.museum.upenn.edu
Alumni are admitted free Alumni Weekend with an Alumni PennCard.

- UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY -
Composing: The Work of Harry Mathews, 20th Century American Writer and Stylist
Kamin Gallery, 1st Floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

Petrarch: Commemorating the 700th Anniversary of his Birth: Featuring Treasures from the Libraries of Penn and Cornell Rosenwald Gallery
Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 6th Floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

- GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION -
A Wonderful Life: A Daughter's Tribute to a Family of Educators
Graduate Student of Education Lounge
This digital art and archive collection, on permanent display in the Graduate Student Lounge of the Penn GSE building, was created by area artist Joan Myerson Shrager, ED'60, to celebrate those who dedicate their lives to teaching. The 17 composite prints reflect the lives of Joan Shrager's parents, Adolph Myerson, W'29, GED'32, and Ruth Meyers Myerson, ED'30 - both of whom devoted their careers to teaching in the Philadelphia public schools.