The Tyler connection: Temple's art school has revived the N. Philly cultural scene

ON A CLOUDY Thursday in October, outside the gleaming new building for the Tyler School of Art, students huddled in small groups, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and leaned casually against well-worn bikes.

At the heart of Temple's main campus and just a few blocks from the bustle of Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, the students seemed a natural part of the collegiate fabric, like the crepe truck down the block and the Tomlinson Theater 150 yards away.

Tyler's 1,500 students migrated to 12th and Norris streets just last spring, from the bursting-at-the-seams Elkins Park location that had housed Tyler since its founding in 1935.

"We were a victim of our own success - we overgrew the Elkins Park campus," said Therese Dolan, a Tyler art history professor who served as the school's interim dean during the move.

The 234,000-square-foot, $75 million building features floor-to-ceiling glass windows; a grand entryway; wide, well-lit hallways; private studios for all seniors and graduate students; large white-box gallery spaces for student and professional exhibitions; and new equipment, including a room of kilns (an upgrade from the single kiln at Elkins Park).

"If you're talking about Rembrandt etchings, now you can walk right into the studio and demonstrate how an etching is made," Dolan said.

Students have added their own touches: a lawn mower mounted sideways on a green-painted wall, a pile of free-for-all material scraps, a windmill-like sculpture made of buckets and wood.

"The walls of Tyler change constantly," Dolan said. "You can't go to a classroom three weeks in a row without seeing something exciting."

But the excitement over Tyler - ranked 14th among art schools by U.S. News & World Report - has not been limited to the activities inside the new building. The school's move to main campus had been a long time coming.

Elkins Park, a quiet, suburban enclave, was not the ideal spot for students who wanted to interact with the rest of the university and be closer to Philly's diverse art scene.

In an effort to reach out to Tyler's new community, Shayna McConville, Tyler's exhibitions coordinator, founded the North Philadelphia Arts and Culture Alliance, a consortium of the area's cultural groups.

"We're in a different neighborhood now, and we want to retain a public presence," McConville said. "It's been a great way to work with the organizations here and promote each other's programs."

The alliance now has more than 30 members, including Mural Arts, the Uptown Theater and the Philadelphia Doll Museum. Its biggest event so far was an open house last April, which encouraged people from all over the city and the suburbs to explore North Philly's cultural offerings. (A second open-house event is in the works for this spring.)

Tina Rocha, co-director of Cerulean Arts, supported the idea of a neighborhood cultural alliance.

"It's been a little difficult getting people to know that we're here," she said, bemoaning the lack of pedestrian traffic at her Ridge Avenue gallery. "I was really happy to have someone else working toward the same goals as us: making North Philadelphia a destination."

Rocha was not alone in supporting Tyler's efforts in the neighborhood.

"The nice thing about it is that it creates a way of connecting the various cultural and arts organizations across a pretty diffuse portion of the city," said Susan Glassman, director of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, on 17th Street and Montgomery Avenue. "There's a lot up here.

"The neighborhood is changing," she added. "We were seen as outside the boundaries of where people went to do things, but now [the Alliance] puts in people's mental maps that there are things going on here."

In February, the North Philadelphia Arts and Cultural Alliance and the Avenue of the Arts will co-host a symposium at Tyler to highlight the architecture along North Broad.

"Some people feel Temple is a big university that doesn't support the neighborhood, but they've shown that that's not true," said Avenue of the Arts director Karen Lewis. "Their outreach to the neighborhood has been great."