Instructors at the Barnes
Classes at the Barnes Foundation are taught by an expert group of art historians, curators, conservators, and practicing artists.
Leslie Bowen
Bowen previously taught at Lebanon Valley College, where she received the Nevelyn J. Knisley Award for Inspirational Teaching. A painter, she exhibits extensively and has participated in programs at the Paris American Academy, the Salzburg International Summer Academy, and Southampton College in New York.
Joseph Tokumasu Field
Tokumasu Field earned his MA in curating at Richmond University, London, and specializes in modern, contemporary, and Asian art. He has taught at Brooklyn College, the 92nd Street Y, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, and the Guggenheim Museum, all in New York. He works to provide access to art for all, highlighting marginalized artists and centering people over objects in his teaching practice.
Roksana Filipowska
Filipowska is a researcher, educator, writer, and meditation facilitator interested in the intersections of art, science, and wholeness. Filipowska has a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and developed the methodology behind Being Present with Art while serving as the Wurtele Study Center Programs and Outreach Manager at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is an arts, culture, and equity consultant at Keen Independent Research.
Amy Gillette
Gillette is a research associate at the Barnes. She earned her PhD in art history from Temple University, specializing in late medieval art and architecture. Her publications address the music of angels in Gothic and Byzantine art and the formation of medieval collections in Philadelphia during the Gothic Revival movement.
Al Gury
Gury is chair of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he teaches drawing, painting, and art history. A painter of landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and figures, he exhibits at F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia and other galleries around the country. He is the author of three books on art and numerous articles published nationally and internationally.
Kaelin Jewell
Jewell is a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes. She holds a PhD in late Roman and early medieval art history from Temple University and has worked as a field archeologist. In addition to her work at the Barnes, Jewell is the art historian for an underwater archaeology project near the Sicilian town of Marzamemi.
Kedra Kearis
Kearis is a senior instructor of adult education at the Barnes. She specializes in art and material culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between gender, space, and the visual arts. In addition, Kearis has taught French language and literature for more than a decade.
Martha Lucy
Lucy is the deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes. As an art historian, she specializes in modern European art and visual culture. She is the coauthor of Renoir in the Barnes Foundation and has published articles and essays on topics ranging from the early charcoals of Odilon Redon to contemporary installation art.
Matthew Palczynski
Palczynski is an art history lecturer, consultant, curator, and educator for academic, corporate, and nonprofit institutions. He regularly leads sessions on innovation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, teaches art history at Tyler School of Art and the Barnes, and presents lectures worldwide for Road Scholar.
William Perthes
Perthes is the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes. He has taught courses at the Barnes as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and West Chester and Villanova Universities. His scholarship focuses on American modernism and the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell.
Caterina Y. Pierre
Pierre is a professor of art history at the City University of New York at Kingsborough Community College and visiting associate professor at the Pratt Institute, New York. She has taught about art and crime at CUNY Kingsborough, Pratt, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York. She is currently preparing a book on cemetery sculpture as political art in the late 19th century, as well as a book on Ernest Durig, a forger of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Larry Silver
Silver is the James & Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in old master paintings, he has written about artists such as Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Dürer and organized several exhibitions of old master prints. He previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University.
TK Smith
Smith is assistant curator for art of the African diaspora at the Barnes. His writing has been published in Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and Art Papers. Currently, Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware.
Christine Stoughton
Stoughton is a psychologist, art educator, sculptor, and printmaker. An instructor for the Barnes–de Mazia Education Program, she has also taught with the Violette de Mazia Foundation at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and West Chester University.
Carl Walsh
Walsh recently served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Barnes, where he conducted an in-depth study of the collection’s Egyptian antiquities. Walsh earned a PhD from University College London and has taught at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. His research focuses on reconstructing the sensorial experiences of ancient Egyptian and Nubian peoples.
Michael Williamson
A member of the Barnes faculty, Williamson studied at Yale University and the Milton Avery Graduate School of Bard College. He taught art history and studio art for nearly 30 years at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. Williamson has an active art practice and has shown his paintings locally.