"It was always kind of a closed private party in Chestnut Hill," says painter Stuart Shils, whose impressionistic work was among hundreds of pieces donated or promised to the museum in the past year by local collectors wanting to engage with the Valerio-defined Woodmere. "It had kind of an old-fogey profile."
And while you can still peek into the carriage-house studio and find bluebloods staring at easels, their Lexuses parked outside, they are only a reminder of how much Woodmere has changed.
Since the fall of 2010, Valerio, a curly-haired 47-year-old with a Yale doctorate and and a Wharton MBA, has maintained a steely focus on a mission that encompasses rigorous enthusiasm for both Philadelphia's contemporary painters (Bill Scott! Jane Piper!) and restorative paint colors (Benjamin Moore's Stuart Gold! for the walls of the faded Founder's Room).
"This is a beginning of a contemporary scene in Woodmere, something that has not been there in my lifetime," Shils said. "It's no longer where people go on Saturday or Sunday to see dead Bucks County landscapists. Now you can see work by a hipster who lives in West Philly."
The artists themselves feel it - established artists such as Scott, whose own work is exhibited there but who also donated pieces by others from his collection and has persuaded other collectors to do the same.
And the new Woodmere has left its mark on younger artists, among them Jonathan Eckel, 31, a graduate of Temple's Tyler School of Art. Eckel has a painting in the current "Flirting With Abstraction" show and found himself mesmerized by the art of generations of Philadelphia painters around it, including Equinox II by Elizabeth Osborne, 44 years his senior, which Valerio cunningly placed next to Eckel's own untitled work. (You can see the links, in color, horizontal black lines, and energy the pieces share.)
