Location: Frances M. Maguire Hall, located at 9001 Germantown Avenue

Learn about and discuss American Realism in the Affleck Gallery at Maguire Hall with Woodmere Docent Shelby Haverson, and spend time closely looking at works by Philadelphia artists Larry Day and Edith Neff.

Born in Philadelphia, Larry Day served in the Pacific campaign of World War II, after which he attended college on the GI Bill. He graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 1949, also earning a degree in education there. He began his career as an instructor shortly thereafter, primarily as an anchor figure in the Painting department of the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts) and the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania. His work is in numerous museum collections, including the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Woodmere.

A lifelong Philadelphian, Neff was celebrated for her technical virtuosity and her dramatic figurative compositions. Her subjects often came from her own circle—family, friends, neighbors—whom she rendered with striking attention to detail. She earned her BFA at the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts) and taught figure painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) from 1978 until her death. Her work is in major public and corporate collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and PAFA, and she received numerous honors, among them a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship.