Sculpture Garden

Lily Yeh, China-born Philadelphia artist, stands outside the cyclone fence and gestures at the small park along Germantown Avenue where it swerves towards 10th Street in North Philadelphia. The park is located on land partly owned by the adjacent Ile Ife Center for the Arts and Humanities, partly by the city. Facing the center is the shell of another building. Across the park are two rows of unpainted, two-story houses, several boarded up and abandoned. "Before, it was a dumping site," she says, her English tinged with the accent of her native China.

Outside the Abington Art Center last week, Mary Ann Unger and a helper unloaded six rust-colored forms from her Dodge Caravan. In a shady spot near some flowering shrubs, they carefully laid out the parts in three groups and reassembled her 1977 sculpture, Benchmarks. Down a long slope to the end of the lawn, sculptor Alice Aycock watched as her assistant, Larry King, planted wisteria next to Fantasy Sculpture II. They want the fast-growing vine to wind its way up to the trellis atop the 20-foot- high wood-and-metal sculpture.

The African-American Hall of Fame and Sculpture Garden was little more than one man's dream and three bronze busts when it was first made public in September 1984. Civic leader Samuel Evans unveiled the busts at a well-attended dinner sponsored by his American Foundation for Negro Affairs. They were of Mayor Goode, City Council president Joseph E. Coleman and K. Leroy Irvis of Allegheny County, speaker of the state House of Representatives. Evans has indicated that a bust of himself will not be included in the proposed sculpture garden.

The Uwchlan Municipal Authority at its meeting Tuesday agreed to study a proposal by a Main Line developer to buy the Cornog Quarry and turn it into a $10 million sculpture garden. Authority members, who got their first look at the quarry proposal, warned that they were far from giving their OK but said they would be willing to look at more information about the project. Plans call for an amphitheater, a swimming pool, a restaurant, parking lots, artificial waterfalls, croquet courts, sculptures, a maze, an oriental garden and a wedding pavilion.

In the dark and cloistered confines of the Locust Club, Mayor Goode and a dozen other members of the Fairmount Park Commission met over lunch yesterday to discuss ways to "expedite" the controversial proposal for an African American Hall of Fame and Sculpture Garden, according to sources. Park Commission sources who attended said the talks at the private club were informal and "not unusual," even though they came a day before the group is scheduled to discuss the sculpture garden issue at its monthly public meeting.

I love Fairmount Park, I love its trees, its grass, its scenic beauty, its streams and, above all, I love its unfettered freedom so I, as a citizen of this city, and a taxpayer, can enjoy the entire park every day. Fenced-in sculpture gardens belong in fenced-in settings; the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum would be a great place to commemorate worthy black people for their contribution to American life. Fairmount Park is for the enjoyment of every citizen of this city, without encumbrance of any kind, and surely there should never be a fee set for any place in the park.

When sculptor Christopher Cairns, professor of art at Haverford College, walked around the Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill to assess its potential as a sculpture garden, he realized that if he placed his life-size statues in that setting, they would be up against some serious competition. They would be dwarfed by the trees. Some of the trees in the arboretum have been there for more than 100 years and are more than 100 feet tall, about 16 times the size of Cairns' bronze figures.

On a dreary wet day a month into its new life, the sculpture garden at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has a still feeling, more like a remote clearing in the woods than an urban hilltop. There are no longer only five stone Noguchi sculptures set in rhythmic sequence upon the upper grassy level, as there were on opening day, Sept. 15. Now Gordon Gund's curvy bronze Flukes greets a visitor walking up toward the western terrace. Scott Burton's Rock Chair, chipped from creamy marble, and Thomas Schutte's Steel Woman II, a nudelike form with molten head, command a gravelly eastern corner.

Sculpture, always prominent at the Locks Gallery, is now outdoors as well. The gallery has created a sculpture garden on its roof, believed to be the first of its kind in Philadelphia, which overlooks the southeast corner of Washington Square. The centerpiece of the inaugural display is George Segal's animated circle of four life-size dancers, a homage to Henri Matisse's celebrated painting of the theme. Cast in bronze with a white patina, the Segal is the only sculpture on the roof with sufficient presence to overpower a group of four dazzlingly white sofas and side chairs, there to be sat in. A sprawling Anthony Caro abstraction of welded steel, painted red, makes a less forceful statement because it hugs the floor.

On a warm summer day, a tightrope walker teeters 12 feet above a pleasantly landscaped courtyard wedged between a small woods and a row of campus buildings at Burlington County College. As a wind whips up, he leans precariously to the right. He saves himself, with the help of the balancing rod he grips tightly with both hands. Upon closer inspection, you see the deception. A nylon cord is threaded through his left foot and anchored to the 30-foot-long tightrope. Two black wires, invisible against the backdrop of the dense woods behind the Pemberton campus, steady his shoulders as he gingerly attempts a step.

Since its opening in 1999, the Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum in Powelton has featured the work of the late, great African American painter hanging next to that of her thriving, adoring survivors: husband Joseph, daughter Ellen, sons Gabriele, Latif, and Raphael. It would be enough to say that "the Ellen" is filled to the brim with the family's efforts. Three-dimensional murals, sculptures, and large-scale paintings ripe with elongated limbs, exaggerated glances, and sociopolitical and religious references are on display throughout the complex's five buildings.

It dangled high in the air, a connector seeking a connection, before slowly being lowered into the waiting earth. At 11:45 Wednesday morning, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was at last plugged in. After hours of maneuvering and digging and pondering, the museum installed the latest addition to its outdoor sculpture garden, a gift from the collector and philanthropist David Pincus - Claes Oldenburg's Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A ...

It dangled high in the air, a connector seeking a connection, before slowly being lowered into the waiting earth. At 11:45 this morning, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was at last plugged in. After hours of maneuvering and digging and pondering, the museum installed the latest addition to its outdoor sculpture garden, a gift from collector and philanthropist David Pincus - Claes Oldenburg's Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A, a nearly 10-foot long...

A public park, an al fresco restaurant, a sculpture garden, and a gateway to the city's cultural treasures - the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and city planners hope to wring all this from 200 feet of street to be closed to traffic next year. The expectations are great for the half-block of Cherry Street just west of Broad, where a $3 million plaza is planned to unite the two parts of the academy and pull visitors into the city's museums along the Parkway. If City Council legislation is passed today as expected and signed by Mayor Nutter, academy officials will start designing a plaza, with construction beginning in the summer and a March 2011 completion date - just in time for the scheduled opening of the newly expanded Convention Center.

A public park, an al fresco restaurant, a sculpture garden, and a gateway to the city's cultural treasures - the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and city planners hope to wring all this from 200 feet of street to be closed to traffic next year. The expectations are great for the half-block of Cherry Street just west of Broad, where a $3 million plaza is planned to unite the two halves of the academy and pull visitors into the city's museums along the Parkway. If City Council legislation is passed Thursday as expected and signed by Mayor Nutter, academy officials will start designing a plaza, with construction beginning in the summer and a March 2011 completion date - just in time for the scheduled opening of the newly expanded Convention Center.

On a dreary wet day a month into its new life, the sculpture garden at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has a still feeling, more like a remote clearing in the woods than an urban hilltop. There are no longer only five stone Noguchi sculptures set in rhythmic sequence upon the upper grassy level, as there were on opening day, Sept. 15. Now Gordon Gund's curvy bronze Flukes greets a visitor walking up toward the western terrace. Scott Burton's Rock Chair, chipped from creamy marble, and Thomas Schutte's Steel Woman II, a nudelike form with molten head, command a gravelly eastern corner.

Cherry Hill police yesterday recovered the remnants of a bronze statue that thieves stole from the former Garden State Park racetrack and sold for scrap. Primitive, the 12-foot statue of an American Indian riding a galloping horse, had been reduced to more than 1,000 pounds of pieces. "You can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together again," said Cherry Hill Detective Sgt. Joseph W. Vitarelli. "The value is gone. It's like . . . if you cut up the Mona Lisa. It's sad this piece of art is gone.

The Fairmount Park Commission gave its blessing yesterday to a sprawling public sculpture by Tom Otterness that will transform the look and feel of Logan Square, one of Philadelphia's most iconic landscapes. Largely inspired by Edward Hicks' famous series of paintings The Peaceable Kingdom, Otterness' piece will consist of cast bronze groupings - large Lenape Indians meeting with diminutive Quakers, and gatherings of lions and lambs, oxen and wolves - set throughout what is known as Aviator Park, the underused acreage that stretches between the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Alexander Calder's Swann Fountain.

At Locks Gallery, in her new multicolor wood-block monoprints of arrangements of flower shapes, Polly Apfelbaum gives a nod to Matisse, Marimekko, and the Eameses' "House of Cards" sets. Not only are many of these works huge for prints (79 by 79 inches), they're printed on Hiromi triple-thick handmade Kozo paper, which gives each of Apfelbaum's brilliantly colored flowers the look of having been stamped into cookie or pastry dough. That these large works are displayed here studio-style, unframed and hung from clips, makes them all the more likable.

To many, for a very long time the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been an institutional manifestation of everything its classical architecture was meant to convey. August. Stalwart. Serious. Sitting a bit aloof on Fairmount above the rest of the city, the museum has always required you to make the first approach. Nothing about the opening this month of the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building - the first public addition since the opening of the neoclassical temple in the 1920s - makes the mission less serious.