- Vigil Sunday in Upper Darby for boys injured by car
- 'Everyday art' with a love of color
- Wine theft mystery is a Gallic treat
- Holiday wonders at Headhouse Square
- Thanksgiving Day parades draw thousands to celebrate
- Irish bishops covered up child abuse, study says
- Basil D. Nutter Jr., Mayor Nutter's father, 75
- China says it will cut carbon up to 45% by 2020
- One family's parade ritual of a heckling-hilarity kind
- Interest stirred by commercial-grade composting
- Historic Fairmount homes dressed for holidays
- At North-Frankford game, lots of memories
- If you and your walls are fearless, try black
- Health bills would raise taxes before changes start
- Nutter needs to figure how to get Dad Vail back
- Battered brokerages turn to 'wealth management'
- Censing ocean creatures
- Glitch kicks London exchange offline
- Let the sales begin! Extended hours on Black Friday, this weekend
- To some, Black Friday means 'Buy Nothing Day'
- House sales going up, but it's going to be a bumpy ride
- Research group warns of harmful toys
- The rewards of adopting older kids
- Retailers have high hopes for Web shopping
- Alice in museumland: 2 exhibits offer fresh looks at Carroll's masterpiece
- Martha Stewart: Down-to-earth tips on in-the-air travel
- Joe Sixpack: Beer, parties & pants: It's the holidays!
- Iran grabs Nobel Prize, freezes $ of dissident
- Doc defends 'coma' recovery
RELATED STORIES
'Everyday art' with a love of color
Works by painter/printmaker Jacob Lawrence, an urban master.
Jacob Lawrence loved to make prints. He produced many lithographs, etchings, and silk screens, some of which are reworkings of his paintings, the medium for which he is best known.
Twentieth-century Harlem life is the grand theme of the show "Jacob Lawrence and the Urban Experience: Selected Prints, 1963 -2000" at the University of Pennsylvania. Visitors to the exhibit are reminded that this Atlantic City-born artist, who found his greatest inspiration in cities, also lived in Philadelphia with his family.
Here, he learned to love color, viewing red brick rowhouses against the blue sky, before moving to Harlem at 13 in 1930, arriving just as the vital Harlem Renaissance was winding down.
Whatever Lawrence thought or felt in his homage to city life and recollections of it from childhood, he recorded in his art with perfect candor. And that was whether his subject was a reader (himself) at the public library, subway riders, people on fire escapes, or men with big, capable hands working with tools.
Lawrence, who died in 2000, is remembered above all for exceptionally high 20th-century achievement by an African American artist. And there's no doubt that within his work as a whole, his graphics with their large flattened areas of color and lively patterning occupy an important place.
Moreover, Lawrence's liking for series of episodic scenes full of figures have helped pave the way for the revival of narrative in American art.
One danger of the consistent style that Lawrence developed, however, was that if his work were to lose any edge, it would become too illustrational. But Lawrence never does become too safe, always avoiding a formula quality. And the ability to move us is truly present.
It's not hard to see that there's still urgency in the "everyday art" of this urban master.
University of Pennsylvania's Arthur Ross Gallery, 220 S 34th St. To Dec. 24. Tue-Fri 10-5, Sat-Sun noon-5. Free. 215-898-2083.
Watercolors
The venerable Philadelphia Water Color Society's 109th International Exhibition at Ursinus College's Berman Museum features 80 works in the main room. These were chosen from 450 pieces submitted by 267 artists from 31 states, Canada, and Prague.
Yet a certain predictability commonly associated with competitive watercolor exhibits today continues its foothold here. As a result, we see the breadth of such a valuable show narrowed unnecessarily for the general audience. It's because extreme finesse of technique is so highly valued that more-natural approaches diminish.
How come competitive art shows in other media seldom distance themselves from the mainstream by making their participants overly self-conscious about technique? "Indoctrination" is always counterproductive in a wonderfully fluid medium such as watercolor. Hope springs eternal that the society might soon address this problem.
Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art, Main Street, Collegeville. To Dec. 18. Tue-Fri 10-4, Sat-Sun noon-4:30. Free. 610-409-3500.
Digital photos
Robert Reinhardt's diverting show "Rest in Pixels" at Rosemont College dodges staid notions of what to photograph.
His 46 digital photos of gnarled cemetery sculpture mainly feature portrait heads of identifiable, 19th-century individuals buried in a dozen historic cemeteries in Scotland, plus two local subjects at Laurel Hill and Woodlands.
This Philadelphia resident, a former painter turned photographer, definitely has a feel for his subject. Portrayed are faintly colored, coarse-grained or lichen-covered likenesses carved by noted sculptors and folk carvers alike.
Such stones are documents of the texture of life in another century. Image scavenger Reinhardt has filled these pictures with narrative suggestions. And he extracts abstract and universal beauties from some with a straightforward point-and-shoot approach.
Viewing this show is like visiting a museum, a cemetery, and a Scottish war memorial all in one.
Rosemont College's Lawrence Gallery, Rosemont. To Dec. 6. Mon-Fri 8-8. Free. 610-526-2967.
