Studio

THIS MONTH, Philadelphia Open Studio Tours has opened the doors to 300 studios and art venues in neighborhoods across the city, allowing visitors to go behind the scenes and see where the work gets made and how the tools get used. In 1999, POST began with a network of 13 artists. It's grown so large it now spans two October weekends (Oct. 6-7 and on Saturday and Sunday). Last year's event attracted 37,000 people. The tours introduce artists to the community and may result in sales, but that's not the main goal of the event, said Ann Peltz, who heads up POST, which is run by the Center for Emerging Visual Artists.

For arts aficionados who find First Fridays' treks through galleries lacking in scope, proximity, and intimacy, Philly's Center for Emerging Visual Artists has a proposition this month that reaches beyond the arcade setting into the artist's own lair. The center marks its 13th anniversary of peeking into private work spaces - not just the warehouse enclaves of Northern Liberties, or Old City's tony environs, but also the entire town - with POST: Philadelphia Open Studio Tours. Three hundred studios are participating in 14 neighborhoods across two weekends: this one for venues west of Broad Street, and Oct. 20 and 21 for those east of Broad.

SCARBOROUGH, Maine - The studio where painter Winslow Homer derived inspiration on Maine's craggy coast and produced some of his most notable seascapes isn't heated with wood or illuminated by oil lamps as it was in Homer's day. But in most other ways, the studio has now been restored to what it was like when Homer lived there, from 1883 until his death in 1910, following a multiyear, $2.8 million restoration by the Portland Museum of Art. ...

IN "Roy Lichtenstein in his Studio," the Gershman Y offers Philadelphia a glimpse into the private life of one of the 20th century's most iconic artists, all through photographer Laurie Lambrecht's lens. The exhibit's photographs featured were captured while Lambrecht worked closely with Lichtenstein, from 1990 to 1992. Lambrecht had the rare experience of assisting Lichtenstein in New York and South Hampton before his 1993 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. The photographs on display show Lichtenstein's studio, magazine scraps and cutouts scattered against black and white outlines, and the artist himself standing in front of blank and incomplete paintings.

Michael Johnson isn't your usual University of the Arts music teacher. At 35, the native Floridian, during his time in our fair city, has been many things, from a member of the Lilys (a Philly shoe-gaze legend) to the one-man band that is Ape School. As an Ape, he has made deeply psychedelic music that has gone from absurdist electronica (as in the 2009 album Ape School ) to glam-laced love songs (the newly released CD Junior Violence ) and, in the process, taken advantage of his university's ownership of the fourth modular synthesizer Robert Moog ever made.

No official box office figures this weekend. In an unprecedented gesture of compassion, the major studios agreed not to release weekend grosses in light of the Aurora, Colo., shootings, which took place at a Century 16 Theater and had, at the time of this writing, claimed 12 lives. Warner, home studio of The Dark Night Rises, was first to go mum; it also canceled red-carpet Dark Knight openings in France, Japan, and Mexico. Other studios followed suit and withheld box office numbers.

THERE COULD BE no "Dance City" without "Bandstand," which is why Romeo King is shooting the pilot of his new teen-dance show at the old "Bandstand" location, the former WFIL studios at 46th and Market. King, executive producer of "Dance City," says he wants to help teens focus energy on their talents, not on teenage pressures. The show tapes on July 28 and will be hosted by Mix 106.1 FM's Brian Soscia. For more info on the show, visit dancecitytv.com. The potential program is the latest in a sudden resurgence of teen-dance shows.

What about Cipher Prime's business operation seems normal? Is it normal to do what the video game company's cofounders did on a recent Wednesday when they invited their competitors to their office, plied them with rum and then collaborated on product development? (Would financiers get together and show off their cool credit swaps?) Would Campbell Soup Co. find it normal to describe a new curried cauliflower soup online and then ask for donations to underwrite its recipe testing?

During the 68 years that Andrew Wyeth worked in his Chadds Ford studio building very few people aside from models got to see the room in which he painted. Signs at the entrance informed casual passers-by that they could not impose: "I am working, so please do not disturb. I do not sign autographs. " And, to show he meant business: "Beware of the dog. " But now anyone with $8 and an hour to spare can see where America's most popular artist (or was that Norman Rockwell?) created many of America's most beloved paintings.

The whole world is going Hollywood. But is this a good thing? Florida-based Digital Domain Media Group, the special-effects company that brought the "Transformers" movies and the Tupac Shakur hologram to life, is setting up a studio in oil-rich Abu Dhabi. The deal signed Monday between Digital Domain and Abu Dhabi's government-backed twofour54 deepens the Emirati capital's ties to Hollywood as it accelerates its efforts to become a media hub. Digital Domain plans to establish an animation, visual-effects and motion-capture studio and a media school in Abu Dhabi as part of the deal.