Now, the university is celebrating the last half-century since it became an independent college in 1959 with a big, rambling, three-part show on both sides of its South Broad Street campus.

The centerpiece of this display is the "Silver Star Alumni Award Exhibition." Its purpose is to show the significance and diversity of work by alumni of the university's College of Art and Design since the '50s. These awards were conferred individually each year since 1955. Work by all 60 recipients is featured in this show and its accompanying catalog.

Work in graphic, industrial, and advertising design and by metalsmiths and glass and ceramic artists is well-represented. Painters Charles Sheeler, Sidney Goodman, Elaine Kurtz, and Paul Keene Jr. are aboard, as are sculptors Wharton Esherick and Tom Butter; photographers Irving Penn, Sol Mednick, George Krause and Deborah Willis; and Kathy Rose for film.

Illustrators hold their own - from the merriment of Al Bendiner and Janice and Stanley Berenstain, and continuing with Boris Drucker, Al Gold, Jerry Pinkney, Henry C. Pitz, Arnold Roth, Charles Santore and, more recently, Richard Amsel, to the brooding disquiet of the Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy. Smooth renditions of prints and book arts by Ed Colker, Eugene Feldman, Ruth Fine, and Frances Lichten round out the alumni display.

It's very good to see these scatterings of work brought together. But quite properly, they remain no less scattered until deeper research can be done to evaluate achievement of the University of the Arts' several generations of distinguished graduates, here and abroad.

More informally shown are works by several of the university's professors emeritus. Stars among them are Bill Daley, whose large clay vessels show grace and gusto; Richard Stetser's serpentine rhythms in wood; and nearly 50 bracing, often superb sketches made over a 30-year period of speakers during lengthy faculty meetings by printmaker/sculptor Robert McGovern.

The adjacent Solmssen Court, meanwhile, is displaying student art.

The verdicts are in

Julien Robson, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' contemporary art curator, judged the Betsy Meyer Memorial Exhibit at Main Line Art Center. It's the sixth annual juried show in a series very closely watched by ambitious artists. Robson, a Scot trained in London, came to the Academy in '08 from the Speed Museum in Louisville, Ky.

One clue that venturesome artists once again have flocked to enter this display, enticed also by its unusual single prize of $1,000, is that artists of serious intent from as far away as the Hoboken artists' colony and Bethlehem are rubbing elbows here with fresh local talent. In fact, Karen Steen of Bethlehem won the show's only prize.

The result is a show in which nearly everything on view is worthwhile. Nineteen artists are featured, each showing one to four works. The exhibit has a very "now" look about it.

Another jury

That's because participation by this show's judge, Helen Meyrick, Projects Gallery owner/director in Philadelphia, very often attracted the best efforts of artists submitting work that they thought would pass muster with her. This is a strong show.