Art School

The Tyler School of Art, Temple University's premier art institution, will move to the university's campus in North Philadelphia from its present location in Elkins Park. A new, four-story building will be built on the site bounded by 12th, Marvine, Norris and Diamond streets. The university hopes to open it in September 2006. Mayor Street hailed the decision by Temple as another example of a reversal of the decades-long trend of institutions and businesses leaving the city.

Temple University administrators are considering moving the Tyler School of Art from Elkins Park to Temple's main campus in North Philadelphia as part of a plan to consolidate several college arts programs in one building. Temple vice president James Hilty said Thursday that as part of the university's plan to develop the eastern portion of the main campus - a section that stretches east of Broad Street - administrators have considered combining Tyler's program with others offered at the main campus.

Richard H. Reinhardt, 77, of Newtown Square, a silversmith and jewelry maker who spent more than 50 years at the University of the Arts as a student, teacher of crafts, and school official, died of bladder cancer Dec. 29 at Paoli Memorial Hospital. During the 1950s, Mr. Reinhardt founded the jewelry and metalsmithing programs and was chairman of the crafts department at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. When the school became the Philadelphia College of Art in the early 1960s, he was chairman of the industrial design department.

With the unfurling of a green school banner and a rousing feminist speech at an outdoor convocation at Logan Circle yesterday, students and administrators at Moore College of Art and Design reaffirmed their commitment to retaining its status as a school for women only. Officials of the 146-year-old school formally announced that they had, at least temporarily, abandoned discussions begun last spring of a possible merger with the University of the Arts. The discussions provoked an outpouring of sentiment among students, faculty, alumna and staff, who organized over the summer in opposition to the plan.

For more than a half-century, it has stood as a symbol of culture in eastern Montgomery County. With its sprawling buildings tucked among 13 acres of verdant hills in the Elkins Park section of Cheltenham, Temple University's Tyler School of Art offers prospective artists a setting that's serene - yet minutes away from the hum and buzz of Center City Philadelphia. "It's easy and carefree to work while you're out here," said Jeff Mitchell, 29, a graduate student at the campus who hails from Seattle.

Stella Elkins was a lucky bride. For her spring wedding to George F. Tyler in 1905, her parents built her a cottage in their apple orchard in Elkins Park. A 50-room cottage. Named Georgian Terrace, it was designed by Horace Trumbauer, architect to Philadelphia's Gilded Age potentates. Mom and Dad - Stella and George Elkins - lived next door at Chelten House, a stone-and-timber estate also by Trumbauer. Grandfather William L. Elkins, a onetime grocer who smartly plowed his profits into oil, gasoline, streetcars, and railways, built an even more sublime Trumbauer creation, Elstowe Manor, just a robust croquet stroke away.

Jack Cowart, chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, had an unusual perspective on the 97th annual exhibition staged by the fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Cowart was one of two jurors who selected the show; the other, Gregory Gillespie, is an artist who lives in Massachusetts. The Corcoran, like the Pennsylvania Academy, is an art school as well as a museum. Writing in the exhibition checklist, Cowart observes that he often wonders what happens to art students after they leave "structured academics and studios" behind.

A year since a move was first proposed, the fate of Temple University's Tyler School of Art campus in Elkins Park remains unknown because a task force assigned to review the pros and cons missed its April 30 deadline for reporting to university president Peter Liacouras. The task force will be about two weeks late with its report, said Rochelle Toner, Tyler's dean and a task force member. "We're still deliberating," Toner said yesterday. "There are a number of scenarios being considered, and the cost estimates are time-consuming.

Despite questions raised by its grant administrator, the Delaware River Port Authority has awarded $250,000 in bridge-toll proceeds to a new Philadelphia art school run by an internationally famous artist whose portraits of the rich and famous fetch six-figure fees. The grant is the largest single award given to an institution by a DRPA fund aimed at boosting arts and cultural organizations in Philadelphia and its suburbs. It will nearly double the school's budget for the next two years.

Gov. Ridge comes to Philadelphia today bearing a big gift: $15 million to help fund a major expansion of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Ridge will announce the award this morning at a news conference at the nearly 200-year-old art school and museum, housed in a landmark 1876 Frank Furness building at Broad and Cherry Streets. The money, from the state's capital redevelopment assistance program, will be used to renovate an 11-story office building on Broad Street, just across Cherry Street.

HARRISBURG — State-owned colleges and universities confront crushing cuts in state funding. Students face higher tuition, along with hikes in interest rates for subsidized federal loans. Meanwhile, private liberal-arts schools are holding their ground, even growing. Dickinson College is the latest to announce a major expansion. Projects totaling $46 million make up the school's largest upgrade plan. It seems an astonishing outlay, especially now. Higher education increasingly is perceived as an extravagance.

Haddonfield artist Natalie Italiano is painting a documentary. Her "100 Portraits of American Teenagers" is a kinetic collection of close-ups - on canvas and online - of local high school students. "I plan to do a gallery show and a book as well," says Italiano, 57, whose subjects also write about themselves. Their musings, and digital images of her portraits, can be seen at www.natalieitaliano.blogspot.com . I met Italiano at Repenning Fine Arts in Audubon, a school and studio that has supported the project since she started it in September 2010.

Stella Elkins was a lucky bride. For her spring wedding to George F. Tyler in 1905, her parents built her a cottage in their apple orchard in Elkins Park. A 50-room cottage. Named Georgian Terrace, it was designed by Horace Trumbauer, architect to Philadelphia's Gilded Age potentates. Mom and Dad - Stella and George Elkins - lived next door at Chelten House, a stone-and-timber estate also by Trumbauer. Grandfather William L. Elkins, a onetime grocer who smartly plowed his profits into oil, gasoline, streetcars, and railways, built an even more sublime Trumbauer creation, Elstowe Manor, just a robust croquet stroke away.

Temple University's latest art installation is drawing quite a few quizzical stares from students taking lunch breaks at the food trucks lining Norris Street. Against the crisp lines and white facade of the Tyler School of Art, a hut of mismatched wood and Plexiglas has become a gathering place for the university's most creative. Fortunately for the student who called it "ugly," the hut will be dismantled Saturday. For the students who've embraced its eccentric design, this week has meant an effort to keep it standing beyond the weekend, starting with a petition attached to the outside.

After she moved into the Beaumont at Bryn Mawr retirement community in its early days, Helen Stephens took into her hands the first repairs to a deteriorated organ there. "She climbed up into the organ loft," her son, Richard, recalled, "and handed down the pipes to strong men below. " Some of them had declined to go with her, he said, "the ceiling partly having fallen down. " But, her son said, "for the three or four years that project went on, she was one of the organizers.

THERE IS AN expanding genre of movies about women who can't remember the men who can't forget them. "Away From Her," "The Notebook," "Fifty First Dates," and now "The Vow," starring Channing Tatum as Leo, a man whose crash-victim wife Paige (Rachel McAdams) can't remember their four years of marriage - in fact, can't remember him at all. Her mnemonic clock has been reset to law school, when she was single, dating a rich guy (Scott Speedman), living happily as a pampered sorority girl.

THE WHITNEY Biennial in New York claims to take the pulse of the country's art scene every two years, but the mother of all American art exhibits rarely digs deeper than New York or Los Angeles. For the radical "People's Biennial" now at Haverford College, curators looked elsewhere. The exhibit eschews work from major art centers in favor of five regional outposts (including Philadelphia) chosen through a jury process open to all. Organized by artist Harrell Fletcher of Portland, Ore., and curator Jens Hoffmann of San Francisco, People's Biennial originated when the two brought their idea for a nontraditional biennial to Independent Curators International (ICI)

The most exciting art season in years is upon us, with the opening this weekend at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of a major survey of Henry Ossawa Tanner's landmark career and an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's nature paintings just around the corner at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Art Museum will follow van Gogh with another monumental subject: how three artistic giants - Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin -...

Henry Ossawa Tanner isn't a giant of American art on the order of Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer, yet he's a significant figure in this country's art history. That might sound contradictory until one considers that more than a century ago Tanner proved to white America that a black painter could measure up to the highest standards of his profession - even if he had to move to France to do so. Tanner was honored in racially tolerant France as he was not, and never could have been, in his native country.

Shawnee's Emily Arnot has been painting pretty pictures with her field hockey stick on South Jersey landscapes natural and artificial over the last four years. The midfielder is an artful dodger and passer who can place the ball on the sticks of forwards in the circle, resulting in scores and prompting Shawnee coach Renee Phelps to call her an "unsung hero. " Arnot has only two assists so far because there have been multiple touches on the ball she sends into the circle before it goes in the net. However, she has a way of finding the back of the net on her own - she has scored five goals in eight games.