Fascinating art at three Philadelphia-area colleges

Overshadowed by the fuss made about major museum exhibitions, subtle yet fascinating shows often take place in college and university art galleries. Swarthmore College, Rosemont College, and the University of Pennsylvania are hosting three such events.

Swarthmore's small display, "Aesthetics of Intimacy," presents three mid-career still-life painters of distinction, all unacquainted with one another's work. One of the area's more discerning recent shows of present-day painting, it features Susan Jane Walp of New York, Mark Karnes of Baltimore, and Don Southard of Chicago.

All focus on their surroundings and firmly assert the truth of a personal vision. Bringing them together here was a good idea, as Philadelphia long ago was the temporal center of still-life painting in America - and tradition matters.

Susan Walp's meticulous, polished style is draftsman-like and intensely concentrated. Her small oils are mellowed by painterly smudges, their muted tones enlivened by the gleam on a porcelain teacup. In contrast to those tabletop subjects, the deliberate absence of drama in Mark Karnes' warmly detailed interiors in oil convey the intimacy of his artist's hand and mind. (Watercolor club members also please take note of his wonderfully vibrant use of that medium.) Exemplifying another strand of still life, often with a suggestion of abstraction, are Don Southard's oils, unrelenting in their colorful directness. His painting process is lucid and strong, with some succulent touches.

"The Pennsylvania Project" - a two-person show at Rosemont College that essentially puts a frame around its subject - features the work of former Inquirer staff photographers Hinda Schuman and Linda Johnson.

After years of covering social experience, the world of events, and actions whose permanent condition is change, their aim in portraying the commonwealth's 67 counties also speaks of human events. And rightly so, as the photographers' concern here is with the interface between active lives and their own takes on them, rather than with picture-making art alone.

Their desire to discover whether they would see the same thing differently led them to take photos simultaneously from different angles, displaying the results in pairs. Ten years into the project, the pairs have gradually come to generate meaning statewide as they bridge the mountainous divide between east and west. Such breadth, rather than antiseptic isolation, is the cherished goal of these photographers. One thing that works powerfully to their advantage: Controversial subjects retain their punch when kept in context. (Test your response to this when you realize the Nazi Girls rally was photographed at Valley Forge.)

What emerges is Schuman and Johnson's deeply personal engagement in this important statewide project. These photos are about much more than the subjects they set out to cover. And open-mindedness is what good photography is all about.

The art collected by the 261-year-old University of Pennsylvania is a floating oasis of more than 6,000 works, and many individual pieces are regularly on display, indoors and out. In a sideways nod to this great resource hidden in plain sight all over the campus, Penn's Arthur Ross Gallery hosts an exhibition called "Naked: The University Collection Unveiled."

It features 42 works examining the nude in various media, from a robust first-century B.C. stone Aphrodite to a flurry of colorful works by contemporary artists. The focus on the human body encompasses athletes, mother-and-child subjects, studies of movement and gesture.

A friend of Ben Franklin's was the source of wonderful anatomical drawings originally used in medical training. A generous dentist in 1867 commissioned a version of Hiram Powers' wildly popular Greek Slave marble and donated it, while Dr. Paul Makler's gift a century later of Jacques Lipchitz's Seated Bather bronze corresponds well with major work the artist was then doing for Philadelphia. And it was so like G. Holmes Perkins, dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1971, to have selected for Penn's collection not work by a great master, but a bronze by then-new faculty member Maurice Lowe, who showed great promise and had been apprenticed to sculptor Henry Moore.

See this, then take a leisurely stroll around the campus.