"Lazy Days of Summer" Party at Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art Celebrates "Sleep" Exhibition

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College hosts a Lazy Days of Summer Party on Thursday, July 24, from 4 to 7 p.m. The community gathering, with music, snacks and beverages on the Museum lawn, celebrates the current exhibition, Sleep, and its artist, Michael Putnam.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, New York-based photographer Putnam captured images of people around the world sleeping in public places. His sleepers —  sprawled in parks, curled up on benches, and contorted into unlikely positions — were photographed and left to sleep on. Putnam’s distinctive photos, which were published in a book, are accompanied by an excerpted DVD presentation of Andy Warhol’s legendary film Sleep (1963). Warhol’s Sleep is an intimate, real-time portrait of the poet John Giorno at rest, a landmark of conceptual cinema.

Putnam, now 77, is celebrated for his visual essays on communities around the globe. His projects have focused on such topics as family life in Tokyo, Hindu customs along the Ganges River in India, and fading aspects of small-town American life. A book of his photographs of old-fashioned cinemas in states of decay, Silent Screens: The Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July2000. Exhibitions of the photographs of movie houses were held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.

Also on display
77 Portraits, on display until Sept. 21, bringing together 77 works across a range of mediums and time periods, all of which feature the human face or figure. The works on display vary from a seventeenth-century oil painting to the earliest types of photographs, by artists both anonymous and universally acclaimed. Together they demonstrate that across the ages, the urge to make pictures of people—to make portraits—endures. Artists include Dali, Man Ray, Giacometti and Lichtenstein.

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and closed Sundays and Mondays through August 25. Starting August 26, the museum will return to its regular hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and noon to 4 p.m. on weekends. Admission to the Berman Museum is always free. It is accessible to visitors with disabilities.