There's no telling who studied with whom in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' "Legacies: Twelve Former Students of Elizabeth Osborne and Sidney Goodman" - and apparently no point in guessing, either.

According to PAFA curator of modern art Robert Cozzolino, who juried this enjoyable companion exhibition to Goodman's and Osborne's retrospectives with curator of contemporary art Julien Robson, a few of these works could easily trip you up. Still, it's hard to resist looking for clues.

Considering that Osborne and Goodman are painters of recognizable images - though Osborne's painting has become increasingly abstract - it's not surprising to see a show made up mostly of paintings and drawings, and of predominantly representational and figurative work. Some of the strongest in this vein are Elena Peteva's four charcoal drawings of Innocent X, simultaneously reminiscent of Velazquez's portrait of the pontiff, Francis Bacon's "Screaming Pope" paintings (which borrowed from Velazquez), and Goodman's unflinching portraits; and Edgar Jerin's huge, confrontational charcoal drawings of people in domestic scenes fraught with ambiguity.

Bo Bartlett and Vincent Desiderio, both of whom would seem to have been influenced by Goodman (and Bartlett by the Wyeths as well), are represented by somewhat atypical paintings, a good idea since both artists' oeuvres are more familiar than those of many in this show.

The three abstract painters are, like Osborne, brilliant colorists. Anne Seidman, whose compositions of awkward, conjoined, semi-architectural shapes rendered in puddles of thick, glossy paint she pulls off with exquisite balance, are accompanied by a colored-pencil drawing of a teetering stack of color bars. Each of Barry Goldberg's large, Pop-inflected oil-and-encaustic paintings of lozenge-like and rectangular shapes within minimal backgrounds uses only two colors, but his lemon yellows, oranges, creamy whites, and bottle greens are mixed and juxtaposed to perfection. By contrast, lyrical abstractionist Stephen Estock conjures atmospheres and mystical experiences through soft gradations of muted colors.

I'm still wondering which artist taught Kate Kaman, the exhibition's sole sculptor, whose two rejiggered carnival games seemed at first to have come out of the blue. Then, later, the dark, Orwellian humor of her Test-a-Bunny and The Clone Corporation, struck me as entirely Goodmanesque. So I'll guess she was an Osborne student.

"Legacies" also includes paintings by Michael Bartmann, Kate Javens, Ruslan Khais, and Wade Schuman.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 118–128 N. Broad St., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org. Through Sept. 20.

Wet behind the ears

Every summer in recent history, the Abington Art Center has celebrated its newest additions to its sculpture park with an exhibition. This year's celebration, "Endurance: Visualizing Time," features the outdoor efforts of Robert Gero, John Kalymnios, Stacy Levy, Winifred Lutz, Stephen Reynolds, David Schafer, and Bill Schuck. All seven also are represented by smaller works in the center's gallery.

Some of the outdoor pieces are clearly going to need time to define themselves in this woodsy environment, most obviously Schuck's when fire turns to rain and rain into ice, a deep hole the artist dug with a backhoe, in which he then planted a red maple sapling that for now looks none too happy in its dark pit.

The rain has not helped. Stacy Levy's Melting Point, a piece uniting flasks of various oils inside a Plexiglas tube, was filled with condensation and not looking its best in this unusually damp weather.

And the pieces that compose Winifred Lutz's Sorting the Residue of Years - all realized within the Alverthorpe estate's derelict tennis courts, utilizing moss and other natural materials retrieved from the courts - have suffered from weather and robins (which are now prevented from pecking for worms and deconstructing Lutz's circle of moss in one court).

The rain has had a positive effect on only one piece I saw, Robert Gero's Energia and Dissensus, a sculpture intended as a multidimensional "drawing," in which soil and seeds have been wrapped in burlap around a metal armature. The sprouting has begun in earnest.

The two best survivors of this early monsoon season are John Kalymnios' Mirror (Skyscape) (2009), a sculpture whose aluminum panel mounted on stainless-steel tripods reflects the changing sky, and David Schafer's Untitled Expression (2008), a powder-coated aluminum scaffolding-like structure mounted with a loudspeaker through which the voice of an anonymous speaker reading an essay on sculpture can be heard loud and clear.

The smaller pieces these sculptors are showing in the center's "dining room" gallery shed light on their various practices and should not be missed, particularly Lutz's photographic documentation of her tennis court pieces in March and April.

Abington Art Center, 515 Meetinghouse Rd. Gallery hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays (Thursdays to 7 p.m.), 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Sculpture park open daily, dawn to dusk.