Career Summary - Lynn Blackwell Denton
Lynn Blackwell Denton is a painter, installation and performance artist, ceramicist, and filmmaker who investigates the nature of creativity and its sources. In her installations at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she explored the genesis of creativity in Western creation myths. In subsequent installations, performances and large-scale paintings she has continued to identify and mine her personal icons and archetypal imagery, exhibiting in numerous solo shows at Nexus Gallery and other venues.
In recent years Lynn Denton has initiated collaborations with untrained artists and children to transform city environments. In 2001, facilitating the first project of the Arts and Spirituality Center, she worked with recovering addicts in a North Philadelphia program to create their designs in a huge wall-sized mosaic, Recovering World. The following summer neighborhood children were enlisted as well to create a sculpture garden; today the entire corner of 20th and Norris Streets has become an oasis that includes dazzling ceramic mosaics, trees and flowers in a struggling neighborhood.
Denton has orchestrated nine additional large-scale tile/mosaic projects in public places in Philadelphia, including the Susquehanna/Dauphin Subway Station, a SEPTA commission, for which she raised an an additional $40,000, collaborating with 160 children from the surrounding neighborhood and expanding the project to include installations on both sides of the concourse and special lighting.
In the most recent of these public projects, sponsored by the Mural Arts Program and the Eagles Youth Fellowship, she invited 36 students from Edward Heston School to design 6’ x 9’ panels for the facade of the school, and with their participation installed over 12,000 mosaic pieces to produce a 65’ wall and 6 playground benches, the largest mosaic community collaboration ever completed in Philadelphia. The result is an environment of reflecting light and color which has permanently transformed the block of 54th Street between Landsdowne and Lancaster Avenues.
Lynn Denton has received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, two residencies from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and an Independence Foundation Fellowship. In 2004 she was awarded a studio residency at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, where she painted in a wonderful garden studio and filmed the mosaics of Andalucia.
Since 1995, Denton has worked with a 16 mm camera to make short experimental films and fictional narratives. Her most recent film, Scumbling (34 min., b/w), which premiered this month at International House, examines the psyche of a young woman who wants to be an artist.
Denton lives in Center City, Philadelphia, in a rowhouse she renovated. She currently teaches at Moore College of Art and Design, serves on the Board of the Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association, and shares leadership of the Philadelphia Artists’ Conference Network, a national organization for artists’ empowerment.