Galleries: At last, the spotlight shines on sculptor Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle is not the sort of artist who craved success, but it seems to have found him anyway.

Prestigious awards and fellowships have been bestowed, commissions have come his way, and his sculptures have been included in major museum shows. Of late, however - and probably much to his amusement - the 87-year-old Roxbury, Conn., sculptor has become something of a cult figure.

First, in 2008, came a rambling, insidery interview in the Brooklyn Rail with its publisher, Phong Bui, in which, among other things, Doyle recalled his 1957 arrival in New York after studying with Roy Lichtenstein at Ohio State University. He rubbed elbows with Franz Kline and Saul Steinberg at parties; was friends with his Bowery neighbors Robert Ryman and Sol Lewitt; was married to and divorced from the painter and sculptor Eva Hesse, and had shows at the fabled Martha Jackson and Allan Stone galleries.

The next thing you know, Doyle has a gaggle of solo exhibitions in Connecticut and New York, one after the other.

And now he's having his first one-man show in Philadelphia, at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, of small bronze tabletop sculptures cast from carved-wood sculptures.

Even with many of the same attenuated forms as Doyle's large outdoor sculptures, which impress with their looming, deliberately awkward unions of large pieces of carved oak and cherry (imagine a more rustic, more organic Mark di Suvero), they're surprisingly different. Where the large works in wood suggest off-kilter tripods, prehistoric creatures, and dancing figures, Doyle's cast-bronze "mini" pieces are literally more grounded and bring to mind unusual rock formations or aggregations of fallen tree trunks.

The gallery is displaying these works in small groups on white, waist-high tables, affording discerning eyes views from all angles. Seeing them up close and together, as I'd never seen his large works, I was struck by the diversity of the compositions and the physical interactions they bring to mind installed in such close proximity, but also by the lifetime of experience that has so clearly coalesced in each of these individual sculptures.

Uncoincidentally, Doyle's wife, Jane, has a concurrent exhibition of her colorful, geometrically patterned rag rugs three doors north at Gallery 51 (through July 15), made using a weaving technique called taqueté, or "summer and winter on opposites."

Seraphin Gallery smartly asked one of its artists, Hiro Sakaguchi, to organize a summer show.

The result, "Debris," was likely initially inspired by the work of two other Seraphin artists, Joan Wadleigh Curran, who paints still lifes of debris she finds in Philadelphia, and Kelly Wallace, an artist based in London, Ontario, whose pencil drawings depict real and imagined landscapes that appear composed of mountains of rubble and houses in the process of ruination. But with the additions of Brent Wahl, Sherif Habashi, and himself, Sakaguchi offers a broader view of the stuff that piles up, including memories.

Wadleigh Curran's four paintings, all from 2015, show her using more colors together, painting more expressionistically, and portraying odder perspectives of windblown trash.

I'd seen Wahl's photographs of debris arranged on black surfaces before (they're all from 2012), but they certainly belong in this show. His careful organizations of the trash and refuse he finds and collects at various sites in the city elevate these castoffs to a mysterious beauty.

At first, Sherif Habashi's calligraphic paintings on paper struck me as the least debris-related of the works in this show, because his lines are so delicate and reminiscent of Sufi painting. But the expressionistic doodles he paints also have something in common with hobo symbols and graffiti. And his faint Self-portrait with cinderblock motif looks like an impression, something left behind.

Sakaguchi's paintings hadn't ever made me think specifically of debris until I saw his painting and drawing in this show, both titled Preparation for Spring. In both, what appear to be cherry trees wrapped in burlap waiting to be planted are plonked atop an urban landscape reduced to a rubble of infrastructure that includes children's toys. It suggests a child's memory of an event as revisited years later in a nightmare. The atmosphere is Pepto-Bismol pink, thick with dust, and undoubtedly toxic.

Though tiny and rendered in pencil, Wallace's similarly ominous drawing of imploding rowhouses, Sticks n stones, also seems to have emanated from a child's view of a long-ago event.

You have to make an appointment to see Mount Airy Contemporary's "Speed, Still, Sway" - a three-person show of works by Mark Price, Joe Manuse, and Justin Bursk - but that also means you may luck out and have the gallery to yourself.

"Speed" is for Price, whose collages of fragments of graphic elements evoke the rapidity with which such images are made - and made available to be seen in the digital age.

Manuse's gestural abstract paintings are the embodiment of stillness, the painted equivalent of quiet contemplation in nature. I'd like them even more at a larger scale, on stretched canvas instead of panel.

Bursk is the provisional tinkerer, a descendant of Calder. His painted wall pieces sway off the walls like ship's sails. A group of small sculptures on a table also bring sailboats to mind, with masts fashioned from pipe cleaners and cotton balls. Or maybe they're clowns.