Sculpture

W earable art is a term I first encountered some years back at a craft show. It struck me then, and it strikes me now, as a marketing gloss designed to enhance the prestige of handmade clothing and jewelry. Now Italian designer Roberto Capucci breezes into town with a collection of garments that confers legitimacy on the concept. Certainly the 80-year-old Capucci believes himself to be as much an artist as a couturier. At least half the approximately 90 designs in his first American museum exhibition, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are designated "sculpture dresses"; a handful at the end of the installation are identified simply as "sculptures.

When he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts, Steve Sears made sculptures small enough to hold in his hand. Almost 20 years later, he fabricates large sheet metal designs for other sculptors in his Bucks County workshop. Because he basically operates a one-man shop, he limits the size of the work he handles to 3 tons and 20 feet, Sears said during a recent interview. His transition from artist to artisan began even before Sears received his master of fine arts degree in the late 1960s.

Philadelphia unveiled its newly redesigned Sister Cities Park yesterday on Logan Square at 18th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just across from the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul. Though the ribbon cutting to the 1.3-acre, $4.9 million park took place Thursday, the grand opening is Saturday. The park is part of a $20.9 million makeover of public spaces on the Parkway, coinciding with the opening of much-anticipated Barnes Foundation. The park, once mostly grass and trees with a few stone monuments, now offers a children's garden, stream and boat pond, a Milk & Honey Cafe, and a satellite office of the Independence Visitor Center.

Sculptor Peter Rockwell, a 1958 graduate of Haverford College, is an artist-in-residence there this semester. With the help of nine student apprentices, he has been carving a "climbing sculpture" from a 5-ton block of Indiana limestone. Earlier this month, the unfinished sculpture was loaded onto a pickup and driven from the foundry to a spot near the campus library, where it was installed with the help of a crane. Rockwell, who is the son of Norman Rockwell, and his students will continue working on the statue, which was designed for children to clamber on, climb over and crawl through.

In another "smash and grab" incident, an award-winning sculpture valued at $5,000 was stolen from an Old City art gallery. The piece, by Arlene L. Borow of Philadelphia, is a realistic polychromed bronze sculpture, about 24 inches by 16 inches, of a man reading a book in an easy chair. Borow said she called it Harry, after its model, the late Harry Vulk of Margate, N.J., a friend of hers. "He was a very special person, and it was a very special sculpture," she said. In 1989, the sculpture won the grand prize at the annual Atlantic City Boardwalk show and a gold medal in the annual competition of the Knickerbocker Artists of New York.

The idea to do a plaster-of-Paris sculpture of himself for a special art project, Craig Culley recalls, came to him in December during a sudden burst of inspiration. "The feeling was very strong and inspirational," he explained. "It was a feeling that God is really a part of me, as he is a part of everybody. It was a feeling full of love and compassion. " Culley, an 18-year-old resident of Brookhaven and a senior at Sun Valley Senior High School in Aston, created the six-foot-wide and eight-foot-high sculpture with plaster of Paris and called it "My Sunday Mourning.

Ceri Collins stood in front of an 800-pound white steel object on the lawn in front of College Hall on the campus of Montgomery County Community College. Collins was asked what she thought of the object, which wasn't there until two Fridays ago, when it was put in place by six men and the artist who created it. "I love it. I was thinking about it the other day. I love it," said Collins, 18, of Hatboro, a freshman at the college. Collins was commenting on a piece of abstract sculpture titled Sentinel II, executed by C. Michael Smyser, associate professor of fine art at the college in Blue Bell.

For the first time since 1975, there won't be an outdoor-sculpture exhibition in Philadelphia this summer. Marsha Moss, who has single-handedly organized the shows, held for the last three summers at the arboretum in Fairmount Park, has canceled this year's edition. Moss said she took the action because the city was unlikely to help defray the expenses of an outdoor show, which it has done in the past. She has turned back an $8,000 grant she received for the show from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she said, and has notified about 150 artists who responded to a call for proposals that the show will not take place.

The small park at the southeast corner of Front and Chestnut Streets was empty near noon yesterday, but for a woman running her dog on a well-trod patch of grass. Yes, she had heard about what is coming there. "Do you know that they may be tearing up the dog park?" she asked, declining to be identified. In September 2002, the vision of the late Philadelphia historian Dennis Clark - a huge $800,000 memorial to Irish immigrants - will be dedicated there within sight of the Philadelphia waterfront.

Storm King Art Center is a 350-acre sculpture park nestled among wooded mountains in New York's Hudson Valley. All right, you've seen wooded mountains before. (But these plunge dramatically into the wide blue Hudson River! Yes, it really is sort of blue up here, an hour north of Manhattan.) Getting here is half the fun: the drive along the Palisades Parkway is beautiful and the view from scenic overlooks around West Point is breathtaking. Picture a meeting of a hundred brightly colored extraterrestrials from many planets gathered on a golf course.

What do you get when you combine edgy scientific ingenuity and the beautiful sensibility of art, or maybe cross Marie Curie with Pee-wee Herman? I don't know exactly, but it might look like some entries in Saturday afternoon's sixth-annual Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby, folded into the seventh-annual Trenton Avenue Arts Fetival. The event has a lot in common with the Mummers — it pulses up from the community, it's in the street, it's in your face, it has color and music and laughs.

Philadelphia unveiled its newly redesigned Sister Cities Park yesterday on Logan Square at 18th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just across from the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul. Though the ribbon cutting to the 1.3-acre, $4.9 million park took place Thursday, the grand opening is Saturday. The park is part of a $20.9 million makeover of public spaces on the Parkway, coinciding with the opening of much-anticipated Barnes Foundation. The park, once mostly grass and trees with a few stone monuments, now offers a children's garden, stream and boat pond, a Milk & Honey Cafe, and a satellite office of the Independence Visitor Center.

Carol Cole's sculptures, of several kinds, have always differed more in mood than in style. They are not meant to be understood so much as apprehended, through their maker's intense confidence and enthusiasm. The work, featured in a large Villanova exhibition, is characterized by modest precision, obsessive elegance, and a dislike of grandeur. Cole, of Bala Cynwyd, has followed her own creative path with a seriousness and scope that led her from early-childhood awareness of the native arts of the American Southwest, to studies in art, history, and anthropology, to the present, when she scavenges found manufactured items - bottle caps, wooden spoons, junk, seashells - then combines them with handmade paper, textured paper pulp, and paint.

Three solo and three group shows hold sway currently at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, in a roundup featuring many Philadelphia artists. A degree of spontaneity stamps the double shows "Under Construction, Parts I and II," which display work by 10 regional artists currently involved in combining various aspects of construction, architecture, design and sculpture. Some use ordinary building materials, others construction-site discards. Especially compelling are robust sculptural works Acanthus Model and The Movement of Objects by Wilmington's Joe Netta, both subtle essays in texture, structure, and composition - energetic, evocative pieces that establish definite mood and atmosphere.

The wonder of Brian Dickerson's recent rugged 3-D paintings on wood in his solo "Constructed Paintings and Drawings from Ballinglen" at Seraphin Gallery is the immediate sense of quiet and mystery they impart. While he was, of course, informed by the remote, artist-friendly locale in northwest County Mayo, Ireland, which he expects to visit again next fall, Dickerson's original inspiration was the excavation of an Owasco Indian settlement he watched at age 13 near his childhood home in upstate New York - the colors of the layered soil, the wooden grids, the hidden artifacts.

Back in 1872, a diverse group of industrialists, financiers, artists, and just plain folks decided that Philadelphia, the industrial hub of America, was veering too far from its roots as the artistic and cultural center of the country. They formed the Fairmount Park Art Association, and set about commissioning and placing sculptures wherever they could around the city, but particularly in Fairmount Park, which was increasing in popularity with the coming of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition.

The artist Ellsworth Kelly was there. Joseph Neubauer, the Barnes Foundation vice chairman and donor extraordinaire, was also there. So were dozens of skilled movers, installers, crane operators, and art handlers. A swarm of project managers and members of the Kelly entourage talked and looked on in the shadow of a giant yellow crane angling from the parking lot of the Barnes' new gallery on the Parkway. They had all turned out Monday morning, waiting, as the artist put it, to "bring something back to Philadelphia" - a monumental sculpture by Kelly, his 40-foot-high, eight-ton, stainless steel The Barnes Totem . The Neubauer Family Foundation made the acquisition possible for the Barnes and, as Joseph Neubauer said, for "everyone in the city passing by. " It is the first public work installed here by Kelly, 88 and an undisputed master of American art, since his massive Transportation Building Lobby Sculpture was quietly removed from the old Greyhound office building on Market Street and sold in 1996.

IN "BEYOND THE BONES," a performance by the renowned Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers dance company, bones are seen as the most basic form of human consciousness, the place where one's deepest desires reside. Choreographer Lin draws upon an Asian-American perspective for inspiration, focusing on the immigrant experience and questions of where one belongs culturally and politically. As such, his work uses contrasting elements of specific Western dance technique and Eastern abstractions to convey the duality of the two cultures.

After a few brief words of praise, the city Art Commission gave its unanimous blessing Wednesday to a soaring Ellsworth Kelly sculpture proposed by the Barnes Foundation for its new site on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. "This was an easy one," said the architect Emanuel Kelly, a commission member (and no relation to Ellsworth Kelly). The commission's chairman, the painter Moe Brooker, lauded the Barnes for bringing high-profile attention to contemporary art. "I find that very exciting," he said.