American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Residency
Resident[X]
Subdivision
501. Creative Artists[X]
1Name:  Ms. Suzanne Farrell
 Institution:  John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Suzanne Farrell Ballet; Florida State University
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  501. Creative Artists
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1945
   
 
Suzanne Farrell is one of George Balanchine’s most celebrated muses and remains a legendary figure in the ballet world. In addition to serving as artistic director of her own company, she is also a repetiteur for The George Balanchine Trust, the independent organization founded after the choreographer’s death by the heirs to his ballets to oversee their worldwide licensing and production. Since 1988, she has staged Balanchine’s works for such companies as the Berlin Opera Ballet, the Vienna State Opera Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, as well as many American companies. Ms. Farrell joined Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in the fall of 1961 after a year as a Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of American Ballet. Her unique combination of musical, physical, and dramatic gifts quickly ignited Balanchine’s imagination. By the mid-1960s she was not only Balanchine’s most prominent ballerina, she was a symbol of the era, and remains so to this day. She restated and re-scaled such Balanchine masterpieces as Apollo, Concerto Barocco, and Symphony in C. Balanchine went on to invent new ones for her. Diamonds, for example, and Chaconne and Mozartiana, in which the limits of ballerina technique were expanded to a degree not seen before or since. By the time she retired from the stage in 1989, Ms. Farrell had achieved a career that is without precedent or parallel in the history of ballet. During her 28 years on the stage, she danced a repertory of more than 100 ballets, nearly a third of which were composed expressly for her by Balanchine and other choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Maurice Béjart. Her numerous performances with Balanchine’s company (more than 2,000), her world tours, and her appearances in television and movies have made her one of the most recognizable and highly esteemed artists of her generation. She is also the recipient of numerous artistic and academic accolades. Since the fall of 2000, Ms. Farrell has been a full-time professor in the dance department at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. To ensure the preservation of Mr. Balanchine’s legacy, Ms. Farrell founded The Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in 2001. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet evolved from an educational program of the Kennedy Center to a highly lauded ballet company. The Company has performed annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and has toured both nationally and internationally. Committed to carrying forth the legacy of George Balanchine through performances of his classic ballets, the Company announced the formal creation of the Balanchine Preservation Initiative in February 2007. This initiative serves to introduce rarely seen or "lost" Balanchine works to audiences around the world. To date, the Company’s repertoire includes 11 Balanchine Preservation Initiative Ballets including Ragtime (Balanchine/Stravinsky), Divertimento Brillante (Balanchine/Glinka), Pithoprakta (Balanchine/Xenakis) and Haieff Divertimento (Balanchine/Haieff). In addition to her work for the Balanchine Trust, she is active in a variety of cultural and philanthropic organizations such as the New York State Council on the Arts, the Arthritis Foundation, the Professional Children’s School, and the Princess Grace Foundation. Summit Books published her autobiography, Holding On to the Air, in 1990, and Suzanne Farrell - Elusive Muse (directed by Anne Belle and Deborah Dickson) was an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Film in 1997.]
 
2Name:  Mr. Jon R. Friedman
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  501. Creative Artists
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1947
   
 
Jon R. Friedman’s portraits, landscape paintings, and sculptures have been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States. His portrait work is represented in numerous public and institutional collections here and abroad, including the National Portrait Gallery, the U.S. House of Representatives where his portraits of Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Louise Slaughter and Dalip Singh Saund are on permanent display, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the American Philosophical Society, the Carnegie Institute of Washington, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal Society in Great Britain, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the California Institute of Technology; the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, BrandeisUniversity, Wesleyan University, and the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In 2008 Friedman was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a double portrait of Bill and Melinda Gates. In 2014 the museum added his portrait of Ted Turner to its collection. In addition to these works on canvas, over the past decade, the museum has acquired twelve of Friedman’s preliminary studies for various public commissions. In 2013 Michael Bloomberg commissioned Friedman to paint his portrait for the NYC City Hall Portrait Collection. Friedman grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He received a BA in philosophy from Princeton University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He also studied at the Corcoran Museum School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He lives with his wife, the writer Joanne Barkan, in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts. Friedman’s father, Herbert Friedman, a renowned astrophysicist and pioneering rocket astronomer, who passed away in 2000, was a long time member of the American Philosophical Society.
 
3Name:  Ms. Joyce Carol Oates
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  501. Creative Artists
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1938
   
 
Joyce Carol Oates is a leading American woman of letters. As a prolific and elegant writer of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry for over five decades, to the delight and astonishment of readers and critics, she probes a vast range of contemporary issues and themes including poverty, race relations, crime and violence, childhood and adolescence, love, sexuality and the roles of women, the movie industry, the boxing industry, the American city and suburb, and the American university. She has authored sympathetic and satiric fictionalized versions of public figures as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, Ted Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson, and as an erudite critic she has written brilliantly of, for example, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Simone Weil. She is the author of story collections Beautiful Days [2018] and Night-Gaunts [2018]. Her services to literature include co-editing The Ontario Review with her former husband Ray Smith, frequent reviews for The New York Review of Books and other journals, and mentoring a whole generation of younger writers fortunate enough to have been her students at Princeton University where she has been a professor since 1978. Her awards include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Humanities Medal.
 
Election Year
2016[X]