Art: At the Barnes, life and learning go on

After it closed on July 3, the Barnes Foundation in Merion locked down tighter than Guantanamo. Until the new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway opens next summer, the fabled art collection is inaccessible.

This doesn't mean, however, that the entire Barnes organism will hibernate during the hiatus. The education program, the foundation's raison d'etre, will continue through the 2011-12 academic year, albeit in a modified form. In fact, fall classes begin in just nine days, on Sept. 6.

But where? Well, the horticulture program is less affected by the closure because the arboretum building on Lapsley Lane, which houses its classroom, library, and herbarium collection, is outside the lockdown perimeter, the fence that encircles the main portion of the Merion property.

Arboretum director Jacob Thomas says students in the three-year horticulture program will still be able to work in the greenhouse, which is inside the fence, but not in the 12-acre arboretum that surrounds it.

To compensate, the foundation has arranged for its second-year horticulture students to study woody plants at the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College and herbaceous plants at Chanticleer, a 47-acre public garden in Radnor.

Closer to home, horticulture students also will be able to study plants on the adjacent St. Joseph's University campus and in nearby Merion Park.

Loss of the Barnes arboretum for security reasons forced Thomas to make one other adjustment to the three-year curriculum. The "Garden Appreciation" course, which involves studying plants in situ, had to be shifted from the first year of the curriculum to the second year, when the arboretum again will be accessible.

The art and aesthetics curriculum - comprising the three yearlong core courses of the certificate program and three single-semester courses that might be called "electives" - required more extensive adaptations.

Since the foundation opened in the 1920s, students have always been taught in its galleries, in front of the art. There isn't a better method than exposure to the real thing, but for 2011-12 that tradition had to be modified regarding location and media.