Paintings by Associate Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li are featured in“Sacred Land: Paintings from Where St. Francis Lived,” running April 6-May 6 in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 6 from 5-7 p.m. in the Gallery, and Li will give a Gallery Talk Tuesday, April 17 at 4:15 p.m.

For her third show at the Gallery, Ying Li presents landscape and landscape-inspired paintings from the last three years. Most of the paintings in the show were painted in Italy in a small Umbrian hill town high above the Tiber River close to Assisi.

Li works in the zone where abstraction and representation shade off into each other, using bold colors, earthy textures, and calligraphic lines. Her training in Chinese painting and calligraphy helps her to form a brushwork that is both free and disciplined. Color is the core of her painting. She uses it to convey mood and memory and to express particular feelings and a sense of place and time.

Her work has been summarized by the New York art critic and curator David Cohen:“She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness . . . Ms. Li's best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.”

Born in Beijing, China, Ying Li studied at Anhui Teachers University and earned an M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, N.Y. She has been on the summer faculty of the International School of Art, Montecastello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy, since 1999. She has been a visiting artist and critic at the M.F.A. program, University of Pennsylvania; the M.F.A. program, Brooklyn College; the M.F.A. program, Syracuse University; Maryland Institute College of Art; Swarthmore College; Dartmouth College; Bates College; and Western Carolina University, among others.

Her one-person exhibitions include The Painting Center, N.Y.; Elisabeth Harris Gallery, N.Y.; the ISA Gallery, Italy; Marie Salant Neuberger Campus Center Gallery, Bryn Mawr College; Bowery Gallery, N.Y.; and Enterprise House, Ireland. Group exhibitions include the Museum of the National Academy, N.Y.; Tibor de Nagy Gallery, N.Y.; Lori Bookstein Fine Arts, N.Y.; Chris Naptune Fine Arts, N.Y.; Korous Gallery, N.Y.; Denise Bibro Gallery; The Westbeth Gallery, N.Y.; Museum of Rochefort-en-Terre, Brittany, France; Pennsylvania Academy of Art; List Gallery, Swarthmore College; Hermitage Foundation Museum, Va.

Li is the recipient of the Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for painting in 2004 from the National Academy Museum, New York; two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships; an Art Colony Fellowship, Enterprise House, Ireland; a French Government Art Grant, Rochefort-en-Terre; an Aspen Institute Scholarship; and a Lindback Faculty Research Grant. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Sun, Art Cricital.com, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. On Wednesday evenings, the Gallery will stay open until 8 p.m. For more information, call (610) 896-1287 or visit www.cantorfitzgeraldgallery.org