Nona Hershey lived and worked in Rome from 1967 until 1990. She began her distinguished career as an educator at the Rome outpost of Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. In response to the city’s palpable quality of light Hershey developed a powerful body of work that led to her first museum exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Morris Gallery.

Rome’s ancient and golden Travertine limestone walls line the narrow streets and above the street level, windows cut into the facades are fitted with metal shutters that ingeniously pivot and coil to allow air flow while blocking some of the Mediterranean sun. Hershey has given us views of shuttered windows and cast shadows. What happens within the walls remains mysterious.

Not one to shy away from complex problem solving, Hershey intuitively identified aquatint as the method to create graduated tones of grey and black to express the intoxicating sensation of light as it rakes across and caresses the textures of formed metal and stone. Compositions are tightly cropped and inform us that we are seeing windows from above or below and never head on, never looking into the windows, but keeping us teetering on the cusp of seeing or knowing something about what is within. 

The quality of light as it falls on the facades or filters through the shutters became Nona’s subject and the darkened interiors invite curiosity about what is shuttered—the mystery of unseen lives lived within doors and above the bustle of the streets of Rome.

“My aesthetic viewpoint was amped in Rome, Italy where I lived for many years and where I was influenced, most particularly, by the strong contrast of the Mediterranean light and shadows. There, my imagery was concerned with architecturally related subject matter: windows, shutters and the rich wall surfaces which are so much a part of the texture of Rome. My visual passion was to capture that ephemeral moment when a form is animated by light, conveying the sensually of its dialogue with cast shadows”. Nona Hershey