Judaism and art intersect as meta-language in Ruth Feldman's "Counting the Omer"

JEWISH EXPONENT
By Rachel Kurland

“Tzfat” is one of several paintings in Ruth Feldman’s exhibit, which will be on display at Gratz College. | Ruth Feldman Art © 2018

MELROSE PARK, PA---When it comes to counting the omer, Ruth Feldman isn’t so concerned with numbers. Instead, she focuses on the growth of self rather than the growth of barley. Feldman, who lives in Lower Merion, paints acrylic and oil abstracts of nature and landscapes. Her paintings explore physical and spiritual growth. Curated by Bryant Girsch, her solo exhibit, called Counting the Omer, will be on display at the Gratz College Leona P. Kramer Gallery from April 15 to May 30. Feldman will lead the artist’s reception April 15 at 1:30 p.m. “I paint from my soul,” she explains on her website. “I believe that creativity is a spiritual response to living in the natural world. I paint not what I see, but rather what I don’t see — I try to paint what I feel.” [More]

Philadelphia art exhibit presents fabrics from Jewish tradition

JEWISH EXPONENT
By Selah Maya Zighelboim

Pillows for a Passover Seder by Ricki Lent | Photos provided

PHILADELPHIA---A burning bush, Elijah’s cup and the Red Nile — all made of mosaic — decorate clay pillows in a piece for the upcoming exhibit, The Needle’s Trail, at the Temple Judea Museum. Ricki Lent, the artist behind Pillows for a Passover Seder, said museum curator Rita Rosen Poley invited her to reinterpret the idea of fabric for a piece in the exhibit. The exhibit focuses on fabric, but Lent took it in a different direction. The Needle’s Trail will run at the museum at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel from Jan. 19 to March 23. The exhibit will showcase about 100 pieces, including textiles from the museum’s collection and artwork from members of the Temple Judea Museum Artists’ Collaborative and the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework’s local chapter. [More]

La Salle University to deaccession 46 works from the university's art museum collection

ARTDAILY

Jean‐Baptiste‐Camille Corot's "Baptism of Christ (1844-45); Study for the painting in the church of St. Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. Oil on canvas, 21 x 16 3/4 in.

PHILADELPHIA, PA---Today La Salle University announced that its Board of Trustees has approved the deaccession of 46 artworks from the University’s Art Museum collection of over 5,000 pieces. Proceeds from the deaccession will help fund initiatives from the University’s five-year strategic plan—a blueprint for La Salle’s sustainable and vibrant future, and a pathway to enhanced student experience and outcomes. The Art Museum will continue its robust pedagogical mission across a wide array of academic disciplines, as well as its service to its neighbors in the surrounding community and throughout the region. Christie’s has been selected by La Salle to handle the sale of the artworks at auction which is tentatively scheduled to occur from March 2018 through June 2018. [More]

When Jamie Wyeth painted Andy Warhol's dachshund

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Brett Sokol

Jamie Wyeth at his country home with a recent portrait of Andy Warhol holding his dog Archie. Credit 2017 Jamie Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

CHADDS FORD, Pa. — “He’d come down here for the weekend, but I don’t think he was too crazy about the country,” the painter Jamie Wyeth recalled, wryly, of Andy Warhol’s visits to the bucolic southeastern Pennsylvania farm where Mr. Wyeth still lives. Each had come to represent a warring camp within the art world: Mr. Wyeth was a proxy for, and inheritor of, his father’s status as the paragon of realist traditions, with their emphasis on technical skill and a reverence for the rural terra firma; Mr. Warhol was the standard-bearer of an urban demimonde, with an aversion to anything smacking of “flyover country.” [More]

Philadelphia Museum of Art announces recent acquisitions

ARTDAILY

Jean Chastellain's "The Adoration of the Magi," (1529)

PHILADELPHIA---The Philadelphia Museum of Art today announced a number of new acquisitions that will significantly enrich its collection. Among the works that have been recently acquired are: a group of contemporary films and videos; Japanese ink paintings mounted as handscrolls, hanging scrolls, and folding screens; nine pieces of early American furniture that illuminate the artistic achievements of cabinetmakers in colonial New England and Pennsylvania; and a major work in stained glass dating to the 1520s commissioned for a church in Paris. These works have come to the Museum variously as gifts, promised gifts, and purchases. Some will be placed on view in the galleries in the coming weeks. [More]

On a day like today in 1859, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859 - 1937) was born

ARTDAILY

Tanner,Henry Ossawa (1859-1937) The resurrection of Lazarus, 1896 Canvas, 95 x 215 cm R.F. 1980-173 Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 - May 25, 1937) was an African American artist. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim. In this image: Michael Gibbons, left, Jason Kourkonis, David Bruce, and Mark Knobelsdorf, preparators with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, hang Henry Ossawa Tanner's painting the Resurrection of Lazarus after it arrived from Paris' Musee d'Orsay at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 in Philadelphia.

Art Review: Philadelphia Museum of Art's new South Asian galleries

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
By Thomas Hine

Dancing Ganesh, c. 750, India

PENNSYLVANIA---“But what did they change?” That was the unexpected question a friend asked me after seeing the completely revamped South Asian galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which opened to the public last fall. Stone sculpture, most of it fragments from older temples, has long been at the heart of this collection, and it is well-represented here, as it should be. Visitors who know the collection will find their favorites. New lighting and labeling—along with a new installation of temple fragments against a large photograph of a temple wall—illuminate the sculpture as never before. And that is as it should be. It is, after all, a permanent collection, and a distinguished one at that. [link]

Pennsylvania-based painter finds love, beauty, humility in classical figurative art

THE EPOCH TIMES
By Sarah Le

"Agony in the Garden," oil on birch, 2016, by Eric Armusik. (Courtesy Eric Armusik)

PENNSYLVANIA---As a boy growing up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Eric Armusik loved to draw. He won his first art contest at the age of 10 and went on to participate in numerous competitions and receive awards. On Sundays, he stared at the walls and ceilings of his community’s large, ornate Catholic churches, filled with elaborate murals and colorful stained glass windows. The painter also hopes to show the full-scale exhibit in the United States and possibly in Europe for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021. [link]

ArtNet's Daily Pic: Andy Warhol’s Christ as a 90-pound weakling?

ARTNET NEWS
By Blake Gopnik

Detail of THE DAILY PIC (#1660) is part of the Last Supper Series (1996)

PITTSBURGH---This is probably the touchstone piece in the important show called “Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body” that opened Friday at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh. Incredibly, it is the first exhibition to bring Warhol into contact with the corporeal issues that have been hot in the art of the last several decades. Warhol comes off, as he should, as the first of the great postmoderns. Today’s Pic is part of the Last Supper series that Warhol worked on in 1986, only months before his unexpected death. The painting in today’s Pic, for instance, was actually executed with glow-in-the-dark paint. [link]

Reimaginging the Divine Art of Asia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jon Hurdle

An image of the god Shiva. Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times

PENNSYLVANIA---The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s renowned collection of South Asian art had a problem: Despite a dazzling array of artifacts that thrilled scholars and absorbed curators, it made no sense to the general public. The result is the reimagined, re-lit and in some places rebuilt series of galleries that reopened on Oct. 2 after an 18-month, $2.7 million makeover, the first for 40 years. The approximately 200 objects on display in the new galleries are presented in two major themes: “Art and the Divine” and “Art, Power, Status,” showing how different civilizations have used art to relate to God and to assert wealth and power. [link]

Broad Spectrum of African Continent Offered in Art Museum's 'Creative Africa'

DELAWARE COUNTY NEWS NETWORK
By Brian Bingaman

Altar Head, 16th century Benin Kingdom, Nigeria Bronze, copper alloy Height: 8 1/8 inches University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia: Purchased from W. O. Oldman. Image courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #250922 Photograph by Gary Ombler for Dorling Kindersley

PENNSYLVANIA---“The human story begins in Africa,” remarked Julian Siggers, the Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Speaking at a preview event for the five-part “Creative Africa” exhibition that’s taken over the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building, Siggers added that the Penn Museum’s oldest artifacts are from Africa. An intriguing selection from that museum’s collection can be found in “Creative Africa”’s centerpiece, “Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art,” which is in the Special Exhibitions Gallery through Dec. 4. [link]

And Then There Is Using Whatever Happens: Quentin Morris’s ‘Untitled’

HYPERALLERGIC
By Stan Mir

Quentin Morris in his studio, Philadelphia, PA - March 28, 2007

PENNSYLVANIA---When Quentin Morris begins a painting the only thing he knows is that it will be black. This has been true for him since 1963. Like much monochromatic work, Morris’s only appears to be so. In his current exhibition at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, a powdered pigment and Rhoplex painting from December 1980, and another from December 2015, made with silkscreen printing ink and polymer acrylic, reveal traces of blue and green underneath the black. Morris, who is African American and practices Nichiren Buddhism, lives and paints in the Point Breeze section of South Philadelphia where he was raised. [link]

Pennsylvania Arts Center Hosts First Juried Exhibition, 'Framing Religion'

THE SENTINEL
By Joseph and Barrie Ann George

Jeanne Douphrate's "Conflicting Desires" won Best of Show

PENNSYLVANIA---The Carlisle Arts Learning Center has on exhibition its first juried show, “Framing Religion: Connections and Conflicts.” Artists locally and across several states responded to the theme of the exploration of faith. The intent of each artist is as varied as the media and techniques on view. The common thread is the continuation of mankind’s ancient thirst for answers, our desire to honor and hold sacred, and the conflicts that arise when beliefs collide. [link]

Pope Francis makes surprise stop to bless sculpture symbolizing Catholic unity with Jews

FORWARD
By Dotty Brown

Joshua Koffman's “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” is of two women seated next to each other, much like two sisters.

PENNSYLVANIA---Nearly 50 years after the Vatican officially proclaimed Jews free of guilt in the killing of Jesus, Pope Francis made a surprise change to his schedule on the final day of his U.S. tour to convey his own message of respect for the Jewish people. In an unannounced event, the pontiff stopped Sunday to bless a sculpture commissioned by the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia that repudiates a centuries-old anti-Semitic image. [link]

The National Constitution Center's "Religious Liberty" exhibition is free to all visitors

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

PENNSYLVANIA---Explore the role religious liberty played in early America and learn how freedom of religion became a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "Religious Liberty and the Founding of America," at the National Constitution Center is open now thought January 3,, 2016. The interactive display focuses on religious liberty in the colonies and the Constitution and the legacy of religious liberty. The historical materials on display, all lent for this show, include a 1741 Benjamin Franklin printing of Pennsylvania's Charter of Privileges, and writings by George Mason and Thomas Jefferson.

The Green Collection's "God's Word Goes Out to the Nations" on display in Philadelphia

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

PENNSYLVANIA---The Vatican has arranged an exhibition at the Convention Center during the week of pope's visit to Philadelphia. "Verbum Domini II: God's Word Goes Out to the Nations" will be on display through Saturday. First shown at the Vatican, it consists of more than 80 artifacts from the Museum of the Bible, a $400 million structure now going up near the Mall in Washington, DC. The exhibit from the Museum of the Bible's Green Collection includes 80 rare texts, including Papyri from the third and fourth centuries.

"Pope Up," Pope inspired artworks at Globe Dye Works in Philadelphia

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

PENNSYLVANIA---Just in time for the Pope’s visit, and part of this year’s Fringe Festival, Philadelphia Sculptors will present “Pope Up,” an exhibition of 2D and 3D works centered around all things “Popish.” From the traditional to the offbeat and humorous, the show will present contemporary artists’ approaches to religion and its meanings and interpretations. The exhibition is free. [link]

Pope Francis’ popularity bridges great divides

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Vivian Yee

Photo Some of the tens of thousands of handwritten messages in the "Knotted Grotto," a temporary art installation outside the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

He may be the world’s foremost Catholic, but to his fans, Pope Francis is more Martin Luther King Jr. than Pope Benedict XVI. He speaks, and millions listen — whether they are Muslim or Baptist, Hindu or atheist. The breadth of his appeal can be traced, in part, to the role he has carved out as a champion of causes beyond the scope of church doctrine. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in early September found that 45 percent of respondents saw Francis more as a leader and humanitarian spokesman for all people, regardless of their religion, than as simply the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. [link]

Philadelphia prepares for the pope with a festival of cultural offerings

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
By Stephan Salisbury

"St. Francis - The Piazza" by Benton Spruance is in "Woodmere Welcomes Pope Francis: Biblical Art from the Permanent Collection" at the Woodmere Art Museum to Oct. 18.

PENNSYLVANIA---As Philadelphia prepares to welcome Pope Francis this week, its museums and cultural institutions are offering visitors opportunities to engage with religion - and, sometimes, not just one. On view, not surprisingly, are historical documents of the Catholic Church and treasures from the Vatican. But Dead Sea Scroll fragments, an ancient illuminated Quran, a Sumerian tablet, and George Washington's assurances to the Jews of Rhode Island also are out there. [link]

Exhibit unveils religious artwork of the incarcerated

THE PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE
By Arlene Edmonds

PENNSYLVANNIA---“Art for Justice” is an exhibit of religious art by prisoners that is now available for viewing at the St. Vincent’s Catholic Church at 109 E. Price St. in Germantown. Those who attended the opening reception on Aug. 28 marveled at the painting of Pope Francis, another drawing of an African Jesus Christ, and conversion moments for those in the criminal justice and correctional systems. [link]