Sculpture

The exhibition of sculpture by the late Henry Mitchell that fills both the Paley and Levy Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design pays homage to an artist whose creations adorn a number of public spaces in the city. Mitchell's pieces, like the impala fountain at the zoo and the cat fountain at the Betsy Ross House, are highly visible; Mitchell is less well known. This exhibition of 59 pieces, the majority of them maquettes for public commissions, seeks to offer Mitchell some belated recognition for enlivening the city's public landscape.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fourth and final Challenge exhibition at the Fleisher Art Memorial is not only the best of the 1989-90 series but is also one of the most impressive shows of recent years there. The artists are Syd Carpenter, who makes ceramic sculpture; Judith Schaechter, who works in stained glass, and Nicholas Kripol, a Tyler School of Art ceramics professor whose sculptures for this show are made of stabilized adobe. For the last few years, Carpenter's sculpture has evolved from table-top pieces closely tied to craft antecedents to large, complex wall pieces.

Phoebe Adams' sculptures, like myths bearing the germ of truth, seem to emerge fully formed from an intuitive, subconscious understanding of the way the world fits together. An overview at Beaver College of her work since the mid-1980s illuminates the gradual evolution of her ideas. Adams has been aptly compared with the 20th-century artists Jean Arp, Joan Miro and Louise Bourgeois, but some of her work also bears a resemblance to the 16th-century paintings of Hieronymous Bosch.

Steve Riedell didn't invent the shaped painting, but he has given it an unusual twist. He creates the painting and its support separately, then combines them. The method is demanding, but the result is an object that, paradoxically, accentuates its "painted" quality. Riedell's exhibition at Larry Becker Contemporary Art contains 12 such paintings made over the last several years. Some are essentially flat, while others project from the wall like sculptures. Each piece is a wood construction derived from an architectural source covered with painted canvas.

From Israel to Mexico to New York From Israel to Mexico to New York to Berlin, N.J., the Ascalon family has traveled and lived as artists who specialize in religious works. The Ascalon tradition of sculpture and crafting began with Maurice Ascalon, whose hammered bronze sculpture dominated the Palestine pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Later, in Israel, Maurice Ascalon operated a metal works that popularized a green patina finish often associated with the Israeli crafts industry.

Fritz Dietel's sculpture has always displayed a consistent dedication to process. The viewer can't help but marvel at the way he coaxes wood into improbable configurations by bending, laminating and steaming. Yet while these processes and the labor they entail is always evident, it's the forms themselves that command the viewer's attention. In his show of new work at Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Dietel moves in unexpected directions. A large globular shape woven of white oak slats, open at the bottom and dyed yellow-green, resembles a huge ball of yarn - not exactly what we have come to expect from this artist.

The past has come back to haunt us at the Barnes Foundation, big time. It returned this weekend in the form of a monumental mural by painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly called Sculpture for a Large Wall . Kelly created the mural in 1956-57 as a commission for the former Philadelphia Transportation Building at 17th and Market Streets. It's a landmark work of art, the first abstract sculpture in Philadelphia and a piece that looks as fresh and lively today as it did when it was installed in the building's lobby 56 years ago. The sculpture left Philadelphia in 1998 under circumstances that shocked the city's cultural community.

LIKE A LOT of folks, I almost never buy art. Yeah, I'm cheap. I also find the process totally intimidating. There have been times when I've spotted something I like, but when I take a glance at the price tag I immediately go into a Michael Jackson-style moonwalk, backing right out of the gallery. Yet there comes a time in your life when your tastes evolve past generic, mass-produced stuff that you could pick up at Target. You hunger for one-of-a-kind pieces that would make your chest puff up with pride - even if they didn't match your sofa.

The remains of a woman found in Burlington County last year revealed little about her life - or death. Officials hope an emerging portrait of what she may have looked like could generate new leads. This week, officials released a sketch that puts a face on the body found by two motorcyclists riding trails in a wooded section of Pemberton Township last summer. After months passed with no significant clues to who she was or how and when she died, forensic experts created what they think she looked like, giving her brown eyes, brown hair, and common features.

Partners in life and art, Marilyn Keating and Debra Sachs also are joint curators of the South Jersey Museum of Curiosities. The name they chose for their online gallery could describe their Gloucester City home as well. It isn't open to the public, but it's nearly as impressive as a museum - and probably more fun. "Wow," I say at the sight of a striking display of tall, urn-like sculptures in the front hallway. It won't be the last time I'm bowled over during my visit. "These are all my work," says Sachs, 59. "Except for the cat and the Trojan horse.

New art often comes with a backstory, which can be useful in helping identify a point of entry into otherwise-enigmatic work. The genesis of Daniel Arsham's sculpture at the Fabric Workshop and Museum is particularly dramatic, to the point where the story implants itself so firmly in the viewer's consciousness that it biases one's evaluation of the artist's efforts. Arsham makes sure this happens by including in his installation, "Reach Ruin," a sculpture incorporating sound, light, and music that re-creates a cataclysmic event and his enduring memory of it. The event was Hurricane Andrew, one of the most powerful and destructive storms in U.S. history, which struck Florida in late August 1992.

A story Thursday about a dance performance and sculpture exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum misidentified its author, Merilyn Jackson. The Inquirer wants its news report to be fair and correct in every respect, and regrets when it is not. If you have a question or comment about news coverage, contact assistant managing editor David Sullivan (215-854-2357) at The Inquirer, Box 8263, Philadelphia 19101, or e-mail dsullivan@phillynews.com .

An exhibition of wall sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly - including a large piece that once graced the old Greyhound terminal at 17th and Market Streets - will be presented at the Barnes Foundation from May 4 through Sept. 2, Barnes officials announced Thursday. It will be the first show of non-foundation works at the new Barnes on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The initial special exhibition included foundation works not regularly on public view. "We are thrilled to inaugurate our program of contemporary exhibitions with a presentation of works by Ellsworth Kelly, an acknowledged master of the 20th and 21st centuries," said Derek Gillman, Barnes president and director.

Having a taste for Butter depends almost entirely on whether you find the comedy of condescension and ridicule a hoot or a very cheap form of amusement. This satire on self-righteous, homily-spewing red-staters and the cutthroat world of butter carving trades almost entirely on making jokes at the expense of others, most of all an obsessed, venal woman who could pass as a kissin' cousin to two prominent female Republicans of the preprimary season ( Butter was made in 2011). Decidedly not a critics' picture, Butter brandishes the sort of snide humor that plays well with a large public, but a fair slice of that audience could well be put off by the whiff of an agenda that's hard to miss.

Making art that serves the people is a noble goal, yet as both the Bolsheviks and the Mexican muralists discovered in the last century, it's not easy to accomplish. The art of the Russian avant-garde proved to be too radical aesthetically, that of the muralists too extreme politically. With a "light-sculpture" project on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway called Open Air , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has succeeded in bridging the considerable gap between aesthetic ambition and public taste.

THE PEELING paint and uneven floors of an old industrial building are not for everyone. But Globe Dye Works, an old textile-dye factory in Frankford, is the perfect backdrop for 17 sculptors in the new show "Catagenesis. " Leslie Kaufman, president of Philadelphia Sculptors, pegged Globe for her group's 2012 show. Currently being converted to a mixed-use building for artist studios and small businesses, Globe is full of history and just funky enough to hold a great art show. Philadelphia Sculptors, a nonprofit with 250 members, was founded in 1996.