It's the former Sabine Rose Gallery location.

A conservation studio, vintage 1981, in Collegeville became Gratz Gallery & Conservation Studio in New Hope. Depending on an instinctual feel for kinds of art featured rather than on styles or trends, the gallery has displayed 19th- and 20th-century oil paintings - particularly works by Bucks County and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts artists. Living artists are shown less often.

It's refreshing when Gratz's occasional large solo exhibits don't settle for restatement but instead take a full retrospective look at an artist's work, as in its recent handsome show "Leon Kelly: An American Surrealist."

Such exhibits are part of the maturation process of an ambitious art gallery and can establish it as a major participant and innovator in a region. From that show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired a pivotal Kelly oil painting, Primordial Landscape (1940).

This autumn's main event at Gratz will be a "Pennsylvania Painters" show opening Oct. 24. An "Annual Appraisal Day" and a Jan Lipes painting solo also are planned.

The family team of managers - Paul and Harriet Gratz, ninth-grade daughter Maggie, and Paul's twin sister, Marge - is expected to continue its close support of Michener Museum activities in Doylestown as it did in New Hope, while Michener briefly had a branch there.

Something to say

Lung has gathered used-clothing donations to use for her "performance/sculpture," titled Hired Out. The piece relates to this museum's earlier history as a prison, from 1884 to 1984, and is a reminder that all kinds of companies in America today look upon prisons as a source of cheap labor.

The prison/industrial business is now a multibillion-dollar juggernaut with lobbyists, trade shows, and conventions. The inner workings of that labor market are very complicated and subject to abuses, Lung notes.

A lecturer on fashion at California State University-Los Angeles, Lung uses a framework approximating an actual jail cell as a "loom" to weave a colorful mix of a huge bin full of clothing discards. A sermon in cloth? Hardly. Instead, I'd call it a worthy conversation piece.

Meanwhile, Grothusen, a Philadelphia sculptor, questions similarities among commemorative vessels of all kinds. Whether it's simply a sports trophy or an architectural monument, he navigates between popular art and erudite art.

Steffy solo

I suppose Steffy, as a saver of things, is impulsive, acts quickly, forgets herself. She doesn't prove anything, but probably isn't aiming to. Yet in her seemingly casual reveries with dyed cloth, I sense what might be the rare giftedness of a phenomenal quilt maker. Has Steffy missed her calling?