Fine Arts

The Neshaminy school board has decided that its music students can share sheet music and play worn-out instruments for another year in order to save the full-time services of the district's fine-arts supervisor. Fine-arts supervisor Ray Boccuti was scheduled to become a part-time administrator for budget reasons. However, the school board reversed itself Tuesday night in response to a public outcry that began in April when more than 700 students, parents and teachers packed the board meeting to protest the proposed cut. The contested plan was to combine Boccuti's duties with a lead teacher position.

Not every arts student in the Bensalem School District is participating in the weeklong Fine Arts Festival that begins today - only those considered the best musicians, vocalists and visual artists. "It's something to strive for," said Linda Tus, the district's fine-arts coordinator. "By showcasing the cream of the crop, it makes the others work harder. " More than 1,000 students from grades 1-12 are participating in the festival. They were picked from among the 2,000 who study music in the district's 10 schools.

Mary Frank is best known as the creator of fragmented clay figures that are frequently included in such craft-art surveys as "The Eloquent Object" and "American Ceramics Now. " Yet Frank is not a ceramic artist as the term is commonly understood, nor is she exclusively a sculptor. Her work also has found its way into various theme exhibitions, but she shouldn't be classified as belonging to one movement or another. Frank has always gone her own way, and it's only coincidence when her work occasionally bumps into current trends.

Samuel T. Freeman & Co., a Philadelphia auction house operated by the same family for 183 years, has merged with the Fine Arts Co. of Philadelphia, the city's other major auction gallery specializing in arts and antiques, the firms announced yesterday. The agreement to form a new auction house, trading under the name Freeman/ Fine Arts and in Freeman's building at 1808 Chestnut St., was the result of nine months of negotiations. The talks began after Fine Arts' president, Alexis C. Manice, found that he would lose the lease on the firm's premises at 2317 Chestnut St. and approached Freeman's president, Samuel M. Freeman 2d, with a proposal to combine their operations.

Horses and other live animals have been modeled in classrooms at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts since the 1880s, when Thomas Eakins introduced the practice. Fortunately, classes no longer feature dissections of horses and cats for study of their skeletons. One day this month, second-year students of various disciplines attended class with Prince, a 1,700-pound carriage horse. Word was, he was perfectly polite during his visit.

In 1996, when New Jersey spelled out the seven broad subjects that all public-school students would be required to master, the list included the fine arts but not the so-called "practical arts," including wood shop, home economics and, lately, higher-tech courses such as computer networking. Originally, the seven subjects, called standards, were to be fully phased as high school graduation requirements by next year. But when shop teachers mounted an emotional protest last week, State Education Commissioner David Hespe temporarily extended the status quo: For the next two years, students can meet graduation requirements with either type of art, fine or practical.

Last year, curators at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts began planning an all-female art exhibition. Organizers hoped it would facilitate a debate about whether feminism is still needed in modern art, but they weren't sure audiences would find the topic worthy of debate. Then came Ken Johnson, a New York Times art critic who in only six sentences sparked an impassioned controversy that has played out for months on his Facebook page, arts blogs, an online petition and, on Sunday evening, a sold-out panel discussion at PAFA on the very topic the curators wanted to discuss all along.

Music, dance and drama are woven deep into the fabric of Anzer Kirkland's life. From September to June, Kirkland is the fine-arts director for the Chester Upland School District, helping resurrect a music program in the schools that until recently had virtually disappeared. Afternoons and evenings, he is the executive director of the nonprofit Chester Fine Arts Center East, which instructs about 60 students - both children and adults - in instrumental music, piano, voice, dance and community theater inside a former Rambler dealership on East Seventh Street.

One of the finest collections of privately owned American art began 49 years ago, when Vivian and Meyer Potamkin bought a black, brown and orange lithograph on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. It cost $10, frame included, and it matched the color scheme of their first apartment. The Potamkins, who now live on Rittenhouse Square, still display that sentimental purchase made shortly before their wedding day - along with works by Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Joseph Stella, Maurice Prendergast, Red Grooms and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Jimmy C. Lueders, 66, a Philadelphia artist and teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, died last week at his West Mount Airy home. Mr. Lueders' body was found Friday by friends who broke into his house when they were unable to reach him by telephone. "Both his art and the impact of his teachings on many other artists contributed greatly to the character of contemporary art in Philadelphia," said Larry Day, a fellow artist. "He was a pillar of the faculty," said Frederick Osborne, dean of the Pennsylvania Academy, where Mr. Lueders had taught since 1957.