Art History

In the late 1960s, Nessa Forman would show up at 7 a.m. in the composing room of the Evening Bulletin, the only woman there. As the first-edition deadline neared, she directed the men who moved columns of metal type into the forms that produced that day's feature pages. Though not long out of graduate school, Ms. Forman was already respected. On Saturday night, Ms. Forman, 68, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs at WHYY Inc. from February 1983 to July 2007 and arts and leisure editor of the Bulletin when it closed in January 1982, died of pancreatic cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse.

A new scholarship this fall at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts honors the late Selma Burke, a Bucks County sculptor whose work is familiar if you've ever studied your change. That picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the dime? It bears an uncanny resemblance to a bas-relief that Burke formed of FDR. Until her death 16 years ago at age 94, Burke would tell visitors to her Solebury Township studio of the presidential commission she won over 11 other sculptors. Lewis Tanner Moore, the Warrington collector of African American art, said Burke often recalled the day in 1944 when she unrolled a sheet of butcher paper across the Oval Office and sketched Roosevelt for 45 minutes in charcoal, while reminding him to sit still.

Jane Swan had a remarkable eyewitness source for her 1989 book, The Lost Children: A Russian Odyssey. Her first husband was Alfred P. Swan, a Red Cross worker who helped guide 800 Russian children far from the revolutionary chaos of St. Petersburg, starting in 1918. Alfred Swan, her music history professor at Swarthmore College, was the prime source for her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Decades later, the book was based on those papers.

Lars Vilks, a conceptual artist from Sweden with a $100,000 bounty on his head, could be found secreted away in a room at the Rittenhouse Hotel Thursday morning, receiving carefully screened visitors from the media. Vilks is on a weeklong tour of the United States and Canada, speaking about freedom of expression. He had been scheduled to hold forth at the Union League Thursday, but late Wednesday, the event was abruptly called off. Craig Snider, a Union League member who was hosting the speaker, said that after he realized the visit would require extraordinary security measures to protect Vilks, his associates, and anyone in attendance, "I voluntarily canceled it. I was not prepared to ask the league to take that kind of risk.

The Woodmere Art Museum, the idiosyncratic collection housed in a rambling Victorian structure on six acres at the top of Chestnut Hill, has a new director/chief executive officer. William Valerio steps down Friday as assistant director for administration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to take the leadership of the 70-year-old museum, whose focus is artists of Philadelphia and the region. "It's hard to leave, because of course I love the Philadelphia Museum of Art and it's one of the special places on the planet," he said.

Poised at the intersection of food and art history, an enchanting Texan beckons with her fork. Maite (My-tay) Gomez-Rejon, 39, with a graduate degree in art history from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Grande Diplome from the French Culinary Institute in New York City, worked as a museum educator and private chef until two years ago, when she started a company called ArtBites to integrate her passions. Now the Los Angeles-based chef and teacher crisscrosses the country conducting one-day adventures for folks who also find fascination in the fusion of food and art. Last week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gomez-Rejon guided a group of seven women (and her male cousin)

Some people spend their lives going through the motions, sleepwalking from one indistinguishable day to the next. Michelle Rein, 44, wasn't one of them. There appeared to be no end to the adventures that the Center City resident crammed into her life, no matter how far-fetched or dangerous they seemed. She was an animal lover who rescued hedgehogs. She fought for women's rights in Iran and spent a week in jail there for her efforts. She lived abroad in Morocco as part of a Fulbright fellowship, and once studied in Saudi Arabia.

Wherever Michelle Rein went, Taz, her black Chihuahua, went, too. Taz was trained to nudge her mistress and offer emotional support when bouts of disabling pain washed over her. On Friday, at the Bryn Mawr train station, Rein reacted as one who considers a dog as family. Taz had become agitated and strayed onto the tracks, and Rein stepped off the platform. Before she could cradle the dog and stand up, the train was on her, a witness said. Rein, 44, of Center City, a student of Islamic art and architecture, died instantly of massive injuries, police said.

After the "slippery bachelor" broke her heart by dumping her for a former flame, Leslie Ehrin, mortified, took a break from her job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she ran the art sales and rental gallery, and fled to Europe. In Tuscany, she rented a scooter and rode on the back roads of hill towns, absorbing the countryside. She hiked and stayed in farmhouses and convents, and took photographs and painted. She fell in love with the vivid, quiltlike landscape, the brilliant fields of poppies, the lavender sky. "It agreed with my soul and spirit," she says.