Chiango - like most of the organizers, he is a childhood friend of Cortale - plans to donate a piece for the exhibit's silent auction and gala Saturday evening. He and another artist, Alfred Ortega, hope to raise additional money by devoting the evening to doing pastel or charcoal portrait sketches.
For Chiango, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the show is not only a way to help an old friend but a necessary venue.
Like other sculptors who don't produce huge Clothespin or LOVE-type pieces suited to the outdoors, he is always on the lookout for new exhibit spaces.
He also likes to get out of the studio. A tall, gangly man who has the mournful look and exaggerated features of some of his own sculpture, Chiango thrives in the company of other artists.
His home in East Coventry overlooks a cornfield and easily blends in with the neighborhood of farmettes and ranch homes - except for the life-size plaster figure of a nude woman standing in Chiango's barn.
``I guess what I do with my sculpture is suppress the realism,'' Chiango said recently in his basement studio, where a cluttered arrangement of work extended from one end of the room to the other.
The work included two busts of Chiango's young daughters, Rose and June, ages 5 and 2; and a heavily modeled, reclining dog, curled like a seashell but with the ancient look of an object excavated from Pompeii.
Another bust depicted a narrow-faced man, his beard shaped and drawn down as if pulled by gravity into long grooves.
Chiango said it was a portrait of Karl Karhumaa, his old academy teacher and friend, who taught him the art of simplification and exaggeration.
