The Thinker, 1880, by Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917). Bronze, 79 x 51 ¼ x 55 ¼”. The Rodin Museum, Philadelphia: Gift of Jules E. Mastbaum. Photo by Graydon Wood.

Get out to the Philadelphia Rodin Museum to see the recently reinstalled and one of Auguste Rodin’s most famous works, The Thinker, which now stands again on its pedestal outside the Museum’s entrance on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Commencing this spring, additional landscaping, paving, cleaning and renovation work will take place throughout the entire park block of the Rodin Museum, based on a design by Olin landscape architects, to renew and improve the grounds in the spirit of the original 1929 plan. The new planting plan for the interior courtyard garden and areas surrounding the museum are being implemented in close coordination with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.   This work is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.  So, if you have not yet been to the Philadelphia Rodin Museum or if you want to see the newly reinstalled The Thinker, now is the perfect time to get out and see Rodin’s masterpieces!

Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, one of the artist’s most famous works and a familiar fixture of Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, will be reinstalled on its pedestal outside the Museum’s entrance on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Wednesday, January 13th. Since June, the sculpture has been on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Great Stair Hall, while the Rodin Museum’s limestone façade, known as the Meudon Monument, underwent restoration.

Modeled after the 18th-century façade of the Château d’Issy, which Rodin had installed at his estate at Meudon, France, the structure was cleaned to remove the layer of vehicular grime and pollution that had accumulated on its surface during the past 80 years. Its façade was also repointed and its stone repaired where necessary. The large French wrought-iron gate and transom, fashioned in Paris in 1926-7 after the gates at the Château d’Issy, designed around 1700, were removed for cleaning, restoration, and coating. During the course of the renovation, the monument’s pediment, roof and flashing system were repaired and two flights of limestone steps leading to the Museum entrance were replaced using new stone quarried in France.

Andrew Lins, the Neubauer Family Chair of Conservation and Senior Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, supervised the restoration of the Meudon Monument, working with Milner + Carr Conservation, LLC, in collaboration with Dan Lepore & Sons Company, Masonry Contractors, and Gooding, Simpson & Mackes, Inc. Specialty Roofing Contractors. Restoration of the wrought-iron gate was performed by Vintage Metalwork, Inc. of Milford, Delaware.

Commencing this spring, additional landscaping, paving, cleaning and renovation work will take place throughout the entire park block of the Rodin Museum, based on a design by Olin landscape architects, to renew and improve the grounds in the spirit of the original 1929 plan. Drawing on the blueprints and correspondence of building architect Paul Cret and landscape architect Jacques Gréber, the project retains key features of its formal Beaux-arts design, while renovating and upgrading circulation and lighting. The new planting plan for the interior courtyard garden and areas surrounding the museum are being implemented in close coordination with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. This work is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

The Rodin Museum and Garden Landscape Rejuvenation Project is part of a broad long-term effort to renovate the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and is facilitated through a partnership between Fairmount Park, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with generous financial support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the City of Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society is coordinating the grant-funded components of the project, for which the Philadelphia Museum of Art must raise matching funds through private donations to renovate the interior courtyard garden and ensure the success of the project for the Rodin Museum’s continued place as a jewel along the Parkway for years to come.

Opened in 1929, the Rodin Museum was the gift of movie theater magnate Jules Mastbaum (American, 1872–1926) to the city of Philadelphia, and contains some 120 works by the French artist.  Mastbaum began collecting Rodin’s work in 1923 and within three years had assembled the largest collection of his works outside Paris, including bronze castings, plaster studies, drawings, prints, letters, and books.

“The Rodin Museum houses one of the world’s great collections of the artist’s work,” Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Restoring these key components of the Museum’s physical structure and reviving the natural beauty of its exterior landscape will have a lasting impact on residents of Philadelphia as well as visitors from around the world.”

“The completed project will make a wonderfully befitting neighbor to the new Barnes Foundation on the Parkway,” Rub added.

Gail Harrity, the Museum’s President and Chief Operating Officer, noted: “This unique partnership among Fairmount Park, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Art Museum continues the successful and longtime collaboration our institutions have enjoyed for many years,” adding that, “It underscores our commitment to enhancing the Parkway and sustaining its role as a vital public thoroughfare and cultural corridor for the City of Philadelphia.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States, showcasing more than 2,000 years of exceptional human creativity in masterpieces of painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts and architectural settings from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. An exciting addition is the newly renovated and expanded Perelman Building, which opened its doors in September 2007 with five new exhibition spaces, a soaring skylit galleria, and a café overlooking a landscaped terrace. The Museum offers a wide variety of enriching activities, including programs for children and families, lectures, concerts and films.

For more information visit www.rodinmuseum.org.

PHILADELPHIA—The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ (PAFA) Art-at-Lunch series of talks on American art and culture take place every Wednesday from Noon to 1 p.m. Visitors are invited to bring their lunch or purchase it in the Academy Café and enjoy discussions and lectures with scholars and artists covering a variety of topics related to PAFA’s exhibitions, collections, and areas of interest. Art-at-Lunch is free to the public, thanks to a grant from the Independence Foundation.

The schedule for the Spring 2010 Art-at-Lunch lectures is as follows:

February

3

Prints and Process: Selections from the C.R. Ettinger Studio

Master Printer Cindi Royce Ettinger has been creating original prints at the C.R. Ettinger Studio in Philadelphia since 1982. This fall, her collaborative work with esteemed artists like Virgil Marti, Astrid Bowlby, and Sarah McEneaney is on view in PAFA’s Hamilton Building and Ettinger joins us for a talk on contemporary print-making practices, especially featuring her work with intaglio and relief processes and the nature of collaboration between artists.

10

Subverting Photographic Vision: Henry Koerner, Honoré Sharrer and the Camera

As a sneak peek into an exhibition in progress, Robert Cozzolino, PAFA’s Curator of Modern Art, discusses how realist artists in the 1940s and 1950s worked from a combination of photography, found newspaper sources, life, reproductions of art, and the imagination to produce uncanny images that look neither photographic nor academic in their presentation of recognizable imagery. Taking liberties with reality and subverting audience expectations of realist imagery, artists such as Henry Koerner and Honoré Sharrer produced images that attempt to overcome the “objective” eye of photography.

17

Behind the Scenes in Painting Conservation

This illustrated lecture by leading conservator Joyce Hill Stoner tells the story of paintings found underneath other paintings using x-radiography, the step by step reconstruction of a painting by Charles Willson Peale, and advances made in cleaning materials designed to remove discoloration due to varnish and nicotine. Stoner’s work at Winterthur and the University of Delaware has also brought her into partnership working alongside living artists, from Robert Motherwell to Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and her talk explains many of the contemporary issues in painting conversation.

24

Bearing Witness to War When all the Photographers are Blinded

Recent PEW Fellowship winner Daniel Heyman talks about his work with Iraqi civilians victimized by war, highlighting the printed and painted portraits of victims of random violence and torture in American prisons. His most recent and metaphorical series of etchings printed on wood constructions concern the impossibility of bearing witness when the hard facts of a war are kept out of public view. Examples of prints and an installation from both series will be on view as part of the C. R. Ettinger Studio Selections from 2000 to 2010 exhibition at PAFA.

March

3

Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student

“Deconstruction” is touted in every visual area from architecture to fashion, yet few really understand what Jacques Derrida’s notorious concept means. Now, PAFA’s own Dr. Kevin Richards has written Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student, a concise and accessible illustration of Derrida’s ideas in practice for the art lover. Dr. Richards talks about this new book and situates the ideas in terms of his own artistic process and creative projects.

10

No Art-at-Lunch (Spring Break)

17

Interchange: Bill Scott’s Paintings and Prints

Bill Scott, an abstract painter and printmaker, speaks about the influence his painting process had on his first attempts at printmaking over a decade ago, and of how the process of printmaking has inspired his more recent paintings. Scott, who teaches in PAFA’s Certificate Program, is represented by Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York. His intaglio prints are included in PAFA’s current exhibition, C. R. Ettinger Studio Selections from 2000 to 2010.

24

Drawing from the Past: The Historic Cast Collection at PAFA

In July 1805, even before land for the first building had been secured, the founders of PAFA wrote to France asking for a collection of plaster casts from Paris. Ever since, drawing from the cast has been an integral part of the education of artists attending PAFA, and Cheryl Leibold, esteemed Senior Archivist, narrates the history of collecting, exhibiting, and studying from the historic cast collection at PAFA over the last two hundred years.

31

The Seen and The Imagined

Michael Gallagher, exhibiting artist at Schmidt-Dean Gallery and Assistant Professor at PAFA, discusses the visual languages employed in painting as an art form, examining particularly the complicated conversation between representation and abstraction on canvas. Using still-life as his major motif, Gallagher pulls from both art historical and contemporary works, as well as his own painting practice, to illuminate painting’s continued relevance in a modern age.

April

7

Demuth, Duchamp, and…Delay

That Charles Demuth and Marcel Duchamp were friends is an undisputed historical fact. Drawing on new research, PhD. candidate Jonathan Frederick Walz argues that their relationship was actually closer than previously thought. “You should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public,” once quipped Duchamp. Taking the artist at his word, this talk illuminates Charles Demuth’s fixation on Duchamp, revealing an interpersonal preoccupation secreted within an aesthetic delay, which has gone unrecognized over the last century—until now.

14

Arthur Dove Paints the Weather

Through his abstract renderings of the natural world, Arthur Dove explored the capacity of painting to depict material phenomena that are not visible to the naked eye, including sound, wind, light waves, and gravitational pull. Rachael DeLue, Professor of Art History at Princeton University, considers Dove’s interest in articulating a pictorial language for translating the unseen into visual form, much as a scientist would translate a hypothesis or a theory, and shows how his artistic project was intimately tied to larger cultural conversations in the early decades of the twentieth century about the subjects and methods of scientific inquiry and the nature of human cognition.

21

Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History

At PAFA, the legacy of the grandfather of American Portraiture, Thomas Eakins, is tied directly into our understanding of ourselves as an institution of American Art. Dr. Akela Reason of Georgia State University shares her recent research and book on this Philadelphia icon, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History, which will be released in January 2010 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

28

PAFA Certificate Students

Graduating certificate students discuss their work and artistic vision, paying special attention to pieces on view in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building.

May

5

PAFA Grad Students

Graduating MFA students discuss their work and artistic vision, paying special attention to pieces on view in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ public programs are funded in part by major grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency) and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (the official history agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania).

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Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is America’s first school of fine arts and museum.  A recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Arts presented by the President of the United States of America, PAFA is a recognized leader in fine arts education.  Nearly every major American artist has taught, studied, or exhibited at the Academy. The institution’s world-class collection of American art continues to grow and provides what only a few other art institutions in the world offer: the rare combination of an outstanding museum and an extraordinary faculty known for its commitment to students and for the stature and quality of its artistic work.

Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Academy is located at 118-128 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. Admission to the Permanent Collection is Adults $10, Seniors & Students with I.D. $8, Youth ages 5-18, $6. Admission to Special Exhibitions (includes Permanent Collection) is Adults $15, Seniors & Students with I.D. $12, Youth Ages 5-18, $8. Admission is free for members and children under age of 5. Admission to Morris Gallery exhibitions is free.

For more information: 215-972-2105 or www.pafa.org.

Pauline Boty, With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo, 1962, oil on canvas

Get out to the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia on January 22 for the opening reception of Seductive Subversion: 
Women Pop Artists, 1958 – 1968, which will run through March 15, 2010. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 – 1968, is the first major exhibition of female Pop artists, and like the work of men in that movement, their work was characterized by themes drawn from popular culture: advertising, comic books, and mundane objects. Yet they are not mentioned in the same conversations with their male counterparts. Is this discrepancy because Pop Art by women didn’t sell in galleries or because the galleries didn’t feature their work because it didn’t sell? Was there some sort of artistic “glass ceiling?” If you’re interested in finding out answers to these questions and want to see some of the fascinating pieces created by these women, then make sure to mark your calendar for the opening reception today!

Opening reception Friday, January 22, 5 – 8 pm

Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg are names synonymous with the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Drexler, Webber, and Chryssa, however, are far less familiar: they are members of the lost legacy of female Pop artists.

Like their male counterparts, these and many other women artists enjoyed long careers creating Pop Art. And like the work of men in that movement, their work was characterized by themes drawn from popular culture: advertising, comic books, and mundane objects. Yet they are not mentioned in the same conversations with their male counterparts. Is this discrepancy because Pop Art by women didn’t sell in galleries or because the galleries didn’t feature their work because it didn’t sell? Was there some sort of artistic “glass ceiling?”

Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 – 1968, the first major exhibition of female Pop artists, will be presented at the University of the Arts January 22 – March 15, 2010, taking aim at these questions in an attempt to more accurately reflect the depth of women’s contributions to Pop Art.

“Traditionally, Pop Art has been defined and dominated by small group of Anglo-American male artists,” said exhibition curator Sid Sachs, who has been developing the exhibition for six years. “This show expands this narrow definition and re-evaluates the critical reception of Pop Art. Many of these artworks have not been shown in four decades.”

Seductive Subversion features Marisol’s “John Wayne” sculpture, commissioned by Life magazine for an issue on movies; Black Rosy, an eight-foot-tall “Nana” sculpture exploring the role of women, by French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle; Rosalyn Drexler’s oil and acrylic works Chubby Checker ,” the basis of which was the poster for the movie Twist around the Clock, and Home Movies, which is broken in to frames from old gangster movies; the Times Square-inspired Ampersand, a multi-layered stylized and illuminated neon ampersand in a Plexiglas cube by Chryssa, one of the first artists to utilize neon in her work; and 17-foot-long triptych by Idelle Weber.

Paintings and sculptures by Pauline Boty, Vija Celmins, Dorothy Grebenak, Kay Kurt, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Mara McAfee, Barbro Ostlihn, Martha Rosler, Marjorie Strider, and Alina Szapocznikow are also featured in the show.

The University has secured loans of artwork from the National Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC) and Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY) and major private collectors.

The University’s director of exhibitions, Sachs has been researching Pop Art, Fluxus, and Minimalism for years and a great number of his exhibitions have reflected this, including Pop Abstractions at the Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts in 1998 and exhibitions of work by Drexler and Robert Crumb at the University’s Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery. But it was a 2002 Yvonne Rainer retrospective at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery that sparked his interest in the lack of acknowledged women Pop artists.

“After the Rainer show, I wanted to know what happened to the rest of this generation of women artists,” Sachs said. “There was an entire missing entire generation of women artists. This exhibition came out of pure curiosity of what really happened. This is the first exhibition in the world to examine this.”

Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 – 1968, was organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts. This project has been funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, with additional support from the Marketing Innovation Program. A documentary film by Glenn Holsten is being funded by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, with additional support from the Marketing Innovation Program. Additional funding for the film is generously provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Quaker Chemical Foundation. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

The show’s main staging will be at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (333 S. Broad St., Philadelphia), with the Hamilton Hall Galleries (320 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia) and Borowsky Gallery (401 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia) hosting the balance of the art work.

For more information visit www.inliquid.com/index.frame.html.

Sarah Steinwachs

Come out to the Bambi Gallery at the Piazza in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia this month to see Sarah Steinwachs’ unique Between Spaces exhibition that is constructed primarily from intricately hand cut paper layers that are superimposed on top, or in front of one another.  Between Spaces will run through January 31^st, so hurry because you won’t want to miss this one-of-a-kind exhibit.

Sarah Steinwachs’ BetweenSpaces series of works is constructed primarily from intricately hand cut paper layers that are superimposed on top, or in front of one another. The influence for this work comes from cities in which she has lived over the past 19 years (Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo, Boston, and New Haven).  The urban landscape for her is an arena of non-stop visual information that is a physical extension of ourselves both individually and as a society. The scope of this visual matter is magnificent: from sky scrapers to sprawling neighborhoods, to the voyeuristic glance into the window of a row home.  Every time there is a scale shift, spaces are created between other spaces that invariably are filled with something else.  The in-between spaces are microscopic versions of larger ones.  These constructions represent those spaces.  Even though the themes for these works come from urban spaces, the inspiration comes from the process itself.  Often times, starting out with a manufactured sheet of graph paper, she cut out the spaces between the lines of the grid, to create patterns.  Since nothing is more perfect than a piece of graph paper, no matter how ordered the work, it will always be imperfect.  The act of making the work simultaneously celebrates the human need for order and the unforeseen forces that allow unexpected things to happen.  It is an acceptance that perfection is transient, and that beauty is not in perfections alone,  but being able to see that something was once perfect.  The gradations of new to old, rational to irrational, controlled and uncontrolled, self conscious and candid that are intertwined in a city, makes one accept that beauty encompasses this contrast and that it is not selective.

Babmi Gallery is located at 1001 N. 2^nd Street Suite 7, Philadelphia, PA 19123 in Northern Liberties at the Piazza at Schmidt’s.  For more information visit www.bambiproject.com/.

PAFA is one of five venues presenting the exhibition The Graphic Unconscious in conjunction with Philagrafika 2010, Philadelphia’s international festival celebrating the print in contemporary art. Philagrafika 2010 will focus on artistic practices that engage the visual, intellectual, and creative frontiers in printmaking and how these approaches relate to social and political issues in the public sphere.

The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of the festival, is curated by José Roca, Artistic Director of Philagrafika 2010, with John Caperton, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Print Center; Sheryl Conkelton, for Temple Gallery, Temple University; Shelley Langdale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Lorie Mertes, Director/Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design; and Julien Robson, Curator of Contemporary Art at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Exhibited in the Morris Gallery, in the museum’s Historic Landmark Building, and in the majestic Fisher Brooks Gallery in the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, PAFA’s participation in The Graphic Unconscious brings contemporary art into the midst of the museum’s collections. PAFA’s School of the Fine Arts is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the world, with a program whose history, while grounded in figuration, emphasizes both tradition and innovation. Addressing this commitment to craft-based practices, at PAFA, The Graphic Unconscious presents the work of seven international artists who take conventionally recognized mediums and treat them in new and imaginative ways. Working with woodcuts, Christiane Baumgartner and Orit Hofshi realize the woodcut’s potential on an immense scale, while the Indonesian artist group Tromarama turns each cut of the wooden panel into the frame of a stop-motion animation. Mark Bradford collages together found posters and then sands this surface to excavate other forms of information hidden underneath, while Pepón Osorio prints on confetti in a work that turns two-dimensional print into three-dimensional sculpture. Kiki Smith collages lithographs on handmade paper into large-scale poetic works, while Qui Zhijie carves traditional Chinese calligraphy from concrete blocks that, after being printed, stand as sculptures in their own right alongside the wall-hung images.

Dates: January 29 – April 11, 2010

Press Day: January 27, 2010, PAFA 9.30 a.m.
VIP Opening Events: January 28, 2010
Public Opening: January 29, 2010, 10.00 a.m.
PAFA Public Reception: January 30, 2010, 6.00 – 9.00 p.m.
PAFA Curator and Artist talk: January 31, 2010, Julien Robson and Orit Hofshi, 1.00 – 3.00 p.m.

Location: Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building
Morris Gallery, Historic Landmark Building

For more information visit www.pafa.org/.

WHERE: The Mill Studios

123 &126 Leverington Ave.
 Manayunk, Philadelphia, PA    directions

WHEN: Saturday and Sunday, November 7th & 8th  2009             12 noon- 5PM

More than 50 local artists, in our two adjacent buildings, will open their studios to guests at the annual open house

ADMISSION: Free

PARKING: Free at the Mill.

Since its first Open House in 1992, the Mill Studios has attracted more than 2,000 visitors each year to this event. The Mill has given both full and part time artists a community environment in which to create their work. The Mill houses artists who are known locally as well as nationally and internationally. Selected artists offer classes to the public.

More that 50 artists will be available to speak with guests and to show where and how their artwork is produced. Drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, crafts, jewelry, fashion design, and music will make up the 12th anniversary celebration at the Mill. This event offers a unique opportunity for the public to view artwork in a non-gallery setting.

The Mill buildings have a unique history that can be felt by visitors as they wind their way through the halls and studios. Originally, the Mill I building was a textile building and served as a warehouse for a family business until its conversion to artist studios in 1990. In the forties and fifties, Mill II was the home of a poplular Philadelphia boxing club. Many of the architectural features, including the boxing ring gallery are still intact.

Free Parking & refreshments.

For more information visit www.millstudios.org/

Get out on Friday, November 6^th from 6-8:30 to the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia to help celebrate the opening of Paul Oberst’s show Ceremonial Objects, Devices & Forms.  The solo exhibition will run from November 3 through November 28 so there is plenty of time to see his symbolic architectural sculptures.

PAUL OBERST

Ceremonial Objects, Devices & Forms

November 3 – November 28, 2009

Opening Reception, First Friday November 6, 6:00pm – 8:30pm

Please join us on Friday November 6 to celebrate the opening of Ceremonial Objects, Devices & Forms, a solo show by Paul Oberst at Bridgette Mayer Gallery.

Paul Oberst’s current body of work represents a significant conceptual shift from his previous ritual-like iterations of symbolic architectural forms. Featuring fifteen human scale sculptures, in Ceremonial Objects, Devices & Forms, Oberst departs from his strict meditation on the temple form, instead conceiving of the show as a collection of “objects removed from within the imagined temple interior.” Surfacing on a number of sculptures, 23K gold leaf distinguishes these objects as artifacts of consequence that link our lives and culture to those of the past.

Ceremonial Objects, Devices & Forms will run from November 3 through November 28, with an opening reception First Friday, November 6 from 6:00 – 8:30 pm.

About the Artist: Paul Oberst

Paul Oberst received his BFA from Center College in Kentucky in 1977 and was awarded a residency Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA) in 1982. Solo shows include Roots and Tendrils Gallery (Belfast, ME), AEGON Gallery / Jones Visual Arts Center, (Danville, KY), Waterfall Arts Center (Belfast, ME), and Stux Gallery (New York, NY & Boston, MA), among others. Paul Oberst lives, works and teaches in Belfast, ME.

Bridgette Mayer Gallery

709 Walnut Street 1st Floor Philadelphia PA 19106

tel 215 413 8893 fax 215 413 2283

For more information please visit www.bridgettemayergallery.com

Fifty years ago, the City of Philadelphia was home to a groundbreaking idea.  For the first time ever, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the City of Philadelphia required that certain urban renewal projects use one percent of their construction budgets to commission original and site-specific public art. This was the beginning of the Percent for Art programs, which represent the first government legislation requiring art in public places as a means of humanizing and enlivening the urban environment.  Partly as a result of these efforts, Philadelphia’s public art collection is recognized as one of the largest and most renowned in the world.  Overall, more than 600 works of public art have been commissioned through the Redevelopment Authority’s and the City’s Percent for Art Programs.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 29, 2009

FIFTY AT FIFTY

Reception from 5-6:30pm

The Art Institute Gallery

1622 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia

ON EXHIBIT OCTOBER 29, 2009 THROUGH JANUARY 8, 2010

For more information about Philadelphia’s Public Art program visit www.phila.gov/public art/

The Art of Lace Making: Friday, Nov. 13 – 15 @ Philadelphia University
Weekend-long lace making master class featuring Holly Van Sciver
in conjunction with the exhibition, Lace in Translation

WHEN:             Friday, November 13, Saturday, November 14 and Sunday, November 15

Master class in session between 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. daily

WHERE: Kanbar Student Center Performance Space at Philadelphia University

4201 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 
                        (across the street from The Design Center)

INFO: Admission is free, and the event is open to the public. For more information: (215) 951-2860 or visit www.philau.edu/DesignCenter. Lace in Translation runs through April 3, 2010 at The Design Center.

WHAT: In November, The Design Center (TDC) at Philadelphia University, in collaboration with the Liberty Lacers, will offer The Art of Lace Making, a three-day master class featuring Liberty Lacers and special guest Holly Van Sciver, a bobbin lace-maker. Lace and crafts enthusiasts are invited to observe, close-up, lace making techniques in-progress as expert lace instructor Holly Van Sciver offers valuable critique and insight into the pieces being crafted before the visitors’ eyes. Visitors are invited to observe as often and as long as they wish. During the weekend, a member of the Liberty Lacers will be available to answer questions, discuss various lace-making techniques, and talk about lace. The free series will be held at Philadelphia University’s Kanbar Student Center Performance Space November 13, 14 & 15, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. daily. The Art of Lace Making runs in conjunction with the groundbreaking exhibition Lace in Translation, which is now on view at the Design Center through April 3, 2010.

Liberty Lacers has a membership of over 30 advanced bobbin lace-makers and students of lace-making in the suburban Philadelphia area. Other techniques the members practice include: tatting, knitting, spinning, weaving, crocheting, and making needle lace. Members of the Liberty Lacers offer various workshops, demonstrations, and beginners’ classes throughout the year in addition to their own twice monthly meetings. For more information about the Liberty Lacers, visit www.libertylacers.com.

An expert in lace-making, Holly Van Sciver has been a lace-making instructor for over 35 years and is a purveyor of quality lace-making supplies. Van Sciver has taught courses throughout North America at all levels, in a variety of world-wide lace techniques and resources.

The Design Center at Philadelphia University recently unveiled Lace In Translation in September 2009. The exhibition explores the crossroads of traditional lace and modern industrial manufacturing techniques. Internationally-recognized artists and designers Cal Lane, Tord Boontje, and Demakersvan have created site-specific installations located throughout the Center’s grounds and galleries, on the campus of Philadelphia University. Their work fuses classic hand craftsmanship with modern-day production techniques. The Design Center’s historic Quaker Lace Company collection is the inspiration for the artists’ present-day reinventions of lace.

ABOUT THE DESIGN CENTER:

The Design Center at Philadelphia University is a rare institution solely devoted to design, illustrating how design shapes everyday life. Through its presentation of gallery exhibitions, enrichment programs, lectures and special events – such as DesignPhiladelphia – the Center reflects Philadelphia University’s extensive design curriculum: encompassing architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, graphic design, textile design, fashion, interactive media and industrial design.

The Design Center at Philadelphia University is located at 4200 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144 and is open Monday through Friday 10 am – 4 pm and Saturdays 11 am – 4 pm. TDC is closed on all academic and national holidays. Admission is free. For more information, call (215) 951-2860 or visit www.philau.edu/DesignCenter.

The Art of Lace Making is presented by The Design Center at Philadelphia University in conjunction with its exhibition, Lace in Translation. The exhibition will be open to visitors during this special event.

Lace in Translation has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative with additional support from the Marketing Innovation Program. Support has also come from The Coby Foundation, Ltd., the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Philadelphia University.

Bacchanal!

Saturday, November 14, 2009

6 p.m.

Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad Street

For the eleventh consecutive year, PAFA will host the Bacchanal! Wine Auction and Gala. The event features the food and wine of Chile and will recognize the great accomplishments made by the 2009 Jefferson Award honorees Aurelio Montes, proprietor Viña Montes and Alfonso Larraín Santa María,Chairman of Viña Concha y Toro.

PAFA is authorized to host Bacchanal! by Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board .

Since Bacchanal!’s inception, the event has raised nearly $2 million towards student scholarships and education programs. This vibrant support has been invested in the Philadelphia community, and in promoting American art in the United States. Bacchanal! 2009 will include wine tastings, silent and live auctions of unique items and travel destinations, a gourmet dinner, and dancing. Hugh Hildesley of Sotheby’s, NY, will be the auctioneer for the evening. Rosemary and Gerry Barth chair the planning committee.

For more information visit http://www.pafa.org/.

About the Academy

Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is America’s oldest continually operating school of fine arts and museum.  A recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Arts presented by the President of the United States of America, the Academy is a recognized leader in fine arts education.  Nearly every major American artist has taught, studied, or exhibited at the Academy. The institution’s world-class collection of American art continues to grow and provides what only a few other art institutions in the world offer: the rare combination of an outstanding museum and an extraordinary faculty known for its commitment to students and for the stature and quality of its artistic work.

Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Academy is located at 118-128 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. Admission to Permanent Collection is Adults $10, Seniors & Students with I.D. $8, Youth ages 5-18, $6. Admission to Special Exhibitions (includes Permanent Collection) is Adults $15, Seniors & Students with I.D. $12, Youth Ages 5-18, $8. Admission is free for members and children under age of 5. Admission to Morris Gallery exhibitions is free.