Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
118-128 North Broad Street
Philadelphia

Presently, the museum is closed due to the novel Coronavirus pandemic
February 21 to July 12, 2020

The collection represents over one hundred years of accomplishment by African American artists in a variety of styles and media, both two- and three-dimensional. These works once graced the home of Clayton and her mother Williabell Clayton, who died in 2004. The two began collecting the works during the early 1990s, —not long after the critic Maurice Berger, who tragically died last week as a result of the novel coronavirus, published his 1990 article “Are Museums Racist?” decrying the museum establishment’s underrepresentation of artists of color.

An influential teacher at PAFA, Sloan’s students included the late Barkley L. Hendricks, whose better-known paintings depict brash characters in flamboyant dress. In this show, Hendricks’ small, dreamy pastel and charcoal drawing Head of a Boy shows the artist’s quieter side.

Hendricks’ drawing finds psychological depth in the visage of a seemingly ordinary subject, and many of the collection’s other portraits do the same. In Dox Thrash’s untitled, undated painting of a man with red suspenders, the boldness of the eponymous clothing item, along with the red of the subject’s lips, reinforce his intense gaze. The angular face and glowing highlights of Loïs Maillou Jones’s Bus Boy (1943) lead us to wonder what drama might be in the young man’s life beyond his pedestrian occupation. Augusta Savage uses sculpture to depict a similar drama in the undated Gamin, a portrait of a boy with his head slightly cocked, staring intently into the distance.

Prints of every type and from every era are the backbone of this collection. Henry O. Tanner’s 1913 etching, The Wreck, evokes chaos at sea by breaking the scene into ghostly pointillist specks. James Lessane Wells’ 1938 woodcut, Sister,s melds abstraction and figuration by repeating the curvature of the women’s faces in a set of concentric rings of increasing size. And a 1995 Elizabeth Catlett lithograph entitled Blues Player shows a woman holding a guitar at a raking angle, the rhythmic zigzag of her limbs and sharp black-white contrasts of her clothing evoking the music’s bright sounds.

Prominent among the collection’s prints are two silkscreens by Jacob Lawrence. The flat interlocking shapes of Genesis Series and the noisy, rhythmic interplay of the books in Schomburg Library foreground color and shape as much as the named subjects these pieces depict. Veering further into pure form is one of the collection’s few fully abstract pieces, an untitled 1945 oil painting by Beauford Delaney, whose meandering yellow, blue and red bands mingle with circles, stars and more nebulous shapes in a roaring river of color.

The push to include more African American artists in museums takes many forms. One is racially- and politically-conscious shows like Thirty Americans, which recently closed at Philadelphia’s venerable Barnes Foundation—and whose very title spurs discussion of Black artists’ marginal citizenship in the art world. Awakened in You takes another approach. With its focus on keen observation of the world and the people in it—and with the sheer visual pleasure it brings—this show awakens deeply personal responses in the viewer. It draws us near to the world view of the artists who made these works, thereby drawing them toward a more central place in the academy.

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The paintings of Jonathan Lyndon Chase display an overwhelming elasticity to them. Bodies are readily stretched, twisted and contorted to fit into spaces that remain unnameable but still very much present. In an untitled work from 2014, the space and depth of the painting references a fecal pile in the way the paint is stacked and sits on the surface with a kind of clumsy audacity. Visceral grit, orchestrated by a network of collaged material, weaves its way into more traditional painting language. But even the collage is sometimes abrupt, with intruding shards of aluminum foil, stitched yarn and foam, constantly causing the paintings to throb and pulse in and out of resolution.  Elegance is replaced with subtlety of intrusion and the tenderness of seamless collision. His figures are painted with skins that seem vividly translucent, allowing us to gaze through the stratified layers of paint. Their luminescence seems both coy and purposeful, often serving as the only rational light source.

Chase manages to excise gender performances from his paintings almost entirely. Instead, we are left with the residue of toxic masculinity, repurposed and repositioned in a manner that allows us to probe and question their function and meaning. Chase tends to leave his paintings absent of nameable places, with the exception of a few paintings – such as Man in Tub (2015) in which a figure’s limbs and body are recombined like Tetris pieces to fit snug into a placid bathtub, for instance, or another in which two figures are reclined in intimate repose in what appears to be a bed. In this intentional defamiliarization of space, he begins to deflate the omnipresence of normative social structures that forcefully define how and where conventionally masculine and feminine bodies are supposed to function. In this way, he prevents us from hijacking the agency of these figures forcing us to read their bodies as texts.

The specter of racist and homophobic violence looms large when queer black and brown bodies deny conventional legibility and insist upon the opacity of their own historical narratives. When we don’t know what to do with young black boys and girls who don’t behave according to our violent prescriptions of manhood or femininity, we kill them. We kill them with prayer. We kill them with conversion therapy.  We kill them with oversimplification.  We relegate their complicated and contradictory humanity to the darkest corners of our imagination. We erase them. What I find most intriguing about this work is the way Chase leans into this obscurity instead of privileging clarity. This playful and at times spectacular irresolution plays a significant role in his work.  Bodies are refigured as complex ensembles, brilliantly synthesizing the facility of his line, his deft paint handling, and a color sensibility that references comics and ‘90s cartoons.  A collection of hieroglyphic hands, heads, dicks and asses with an elastic relationship to one another and to the spaces they occupy, these robust and curvaceous figures at times aggressively push the limits of the picture plane and at other times are jettisoned into the constellation of body parts strewn about the canvas, leaving us to sift through the pile to discern the dead from the living.

Trying to place the men and boys in Chase’s paintings becomes a struggle. In one painting he simultaneously captures the enormity of Superman’s “Fortress of Solitude” as well as the suffocating horror of the Well in Buffalo Bill’s basement in “The Silence of the Lambs.”  In another painting, Man with Heads (2015), we see a figure carrying a sack of severed heads.  Again, like many of the figures in Chase’s paintings, he seems to glow almost like a beacon at the center of the composition, illuminating the sheets of dark walls that confine the open space behind him.  A bit farther off in the distance we notice two cliffs on either side of the canvas, converging into a precipice.  With a firm and confrontational pose, torso twisted around and eyes focused back onto us, and with a full view of his bare behind, the figure entices viewers toward this conceptual edge of the painting, reminding us that our polite curiosity is not to be trusted.

We do not miss the clarity of representational narratives in these paintings. Instead Chase presents us with a curious proposition. What if we affirm the unconventional complexity in the bodies of black and brown queer folk? What happens to gender if we decenter masculinity and femininity and consider other modes of self–expression, displacing history to freely probe and repurpose the sources of our identity construction?  There is no rush to answer these questions here. He instead forces us to sit, wholly attentive and present with every painting. This is encouraging.

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July 2 to October 11, 2015
118-128 North Broad Street at Cherry
Philadelphia, (215) 972-7600

Shared media or common theoretical interests sometimes spur artists to form a collective. The Philadelphia Traction Company is a collective formed around a building. Beginning in 2007, this group of graduates of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) set up shop in a vast shed that was once a repair depot for Philadelphia’s trolley system, and a symbol of the city’s industrial past. The process of making that forlorn and forbidding space their home was the common experience that forged their partnership. It has led to shared approaches to materials and a certain esprit de corps that has transcended markedly different artistic output of individual members.

The Traction Company’s eponymous exhibition at PAFA contains works by individual members, collaborative projects and equipment borrowed from the site. Most notable are installations that straddle the line between art-making and entrepreneurship, such as the Modular Studio (2015) that greets visitors as they enter the exhibition. Made of repurposed materials of many types, including palette racks, unfinished plywood, pre-fabricated wainscoting, and corrugated metal, the capsule is meant to be inserted in the old trolley barn as a studio-within-a-studio. According to group member and multidisciplinary artist Billy Dufala, the rent collected from such moveable spaces is one way the group plans to cover the high cost of maintaining the building.

Modular Studio encapsulates the knowledge gathered by the group about how to make do in their adopted home. Dufala notes that the building’s owner has been supportive of the artists’ presence but limited in his capacity to maintain the site. Faced with a vast, unheated and not always dry space, the artists learned to repair, improve and adapt in the manner of wilderness explorers. Their first building-within-a-building, a three-story structure that functions as place of rest, design studio and office, took advantage of the trolley barn’s lofty overhead. On the floor below, each artist created or inserted facilities for his or her own craft, such as metal casting, woodworking, or welding. Along the way they acquired an understanding of the building’s 19th century bones that has shaped the aesthetic of their recent collaborative projects.

The need for spot heating has sparked many innovations including a tiny, handmade stove installed in Modular Studio. This beautifully-crafted item is an example of the overlap of art and old-fashioned manufacturing know-how that characterizes the Company’s output. The artist made serendipitous use of odd-shaped scrap metal pieces to create a stove that is both functional and ornamental.

This form-cloaks-function aesthetic dates the trolley barn’s heyday, when industrialists sought to familiarize new machinery by embellishing it with decorative styles from the past. A grand example is Miguel Horn’s Obelisks (2015), replicas of the building’s ornamental gate-posts, displayed upside-down at the entrance to the gallery. Made of thick-hewn wood carved with elegant designs, the tapering posts recall, in their new orientation, Egyptian-style designs made popular in the mid-19th Century as archeology uncovered the treasures of the ancient world. When presented in the context of a current-day, white cube gallery, these functional objects stand out as art in and of themselves.

The group recognized that the building’s best readymades were its enormous roof trusses, and so re-created one in the gallery using thick timbers borrowed from a demolished building nearby. Seen up close rather than from the usual vantage point of approximately thirty feet below, the truss’s heroic scale and hard-worn beauty comes to the fore. We see the natural ruptures and striations of its oversized wooden beams, and the enormous nuts and bolts affixed to its carefully fabricated steel join plates. More than with sheer size, the object impresses us with the care the artists took in learning how to make it. Imagine that Marcel Duchamp had apprenticed as an industrial ceramicist in order to manufacture a urinal for Fountain instead of using an off-the-shelf model.

According to Dufala, the group’s skill set comes in handy not only in repairing and improving the building, but in outside projects that help to situate the collective within its community and sustain it financially. Dufala is himself a veteran at forging such creative partnerships, having developed the Recycled Artist In Residency (RAIR) as a quid-pro-quo with a local scrap yard: artists gain access to materials, the scrap yard gains a positive image. The Traction Company has also improved its standing in the community by lending its skills to the repair of a nearby church. And it has been hired to fabricate other artists’ work, suggesting another earned-income alternative to the usual funding sources for collectives, membership dues and grants.

Opposite in scale from the truss, but also showing off the group’s collective technical bravura is subTRACTION, a playhouse-sized model of the entire building, complete with miniature versions of welding equipment, power tools, raw materials, and works in progress. Walking into this pint-sized world, which is barely tall enough to stand in without bumping one’s head, one appreciates the group’s flair for re-purposing materials as well as its relentless concern for detail. The artists have re-created each of the trolley shed’s hanging light fixtures, for example, using a cut-off top from a metal spray can and a decorative LED bulb. subTRACTION – which was shown at the artists-coop Napoleon in 2013 and discussed at the time by The Review Panel Philadelphia – recalls every effort the group made to adapt to the harsh conditions they encountered. It is part scale model, part self-portrait.

Individual members vary greatly in style and approach when it comes to their own work. Following PAFA’s age-old traditions, many are figurative sculptors. We see Joshua Koffman’s allegorical grouping Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), commissioned by St. Joseph’s University as a thirty-year commemoration of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive teachings on Jewish-Catholic relations. Nearby is Connie Ambridge’s helmeted portrait head Joan of Arc (2015), in bronze and silver and adorned by an intricate gorget of hexagonal brass plates. Sedekial Gebremedhin’s video installation Dinner at Traction (2015) represents a much more contemporary approach. In line with the Traction Company’s self-aware building techniques, this video—showing an African American couple feeding each other hors d’oeuvres—is projected in a viewing room whose exterior structure is exposed. There are numerous examples of abstract sculpture as well, including Brendan Keen and Leila Bateman’s Space for Space (2015), a giant pod carved from glued boards and supported by a thicket of wires that creep up the piece’s base. In a pop-art vein is Laura Giannini’s Mason Basin (2015), a claw-foot tub made of tiny bricks.

As different are they are in style, these works are linked by an attention to materials and details of facture that speaks the artists’ experience of collectively building out their shared facility. The trolley shed has spurred the development of both hammer and nail skills and an industrial approach to art making that differs from the non-profit gallery model that characterizes most collaboratives.

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Mary Claire Ramirez is a graduating student in the MFA program at PAFA. She discusses her artistic outlook with faculty member and artist Michael Gallagher, exploring ideas about the hybrid nature of her work, the implications of the 2D and 3D distinction, and the active role of the viewer. This interview constitutes the 2015 artcritical prize at PAFA, which has been awarded for the first time this year; a vote of faculty determines which graduating MFA candidate is selected for special editorial exposure in our pages. Ramirez will also participate in a group show, “And Many More,” selected by the recently appointed Curator of Contemporary Art at PAFA, Jodi Throckmorton, at 33 Orchard on the Lower East Side, opening June 17.

MICHAEL GALLAGHER This current installation represents the culmination of your time spent here at the Academy working towards your MFA. I believe you came into the program working two-dimensionally, primarily in painting and drawing. These mixed media works evidence a growing interest in sculpture. Can you comment on this move from ‘image to object’ and your choice of materials and their usage?

MARY CLAIRE RAMIREZ Graduate school was about ‘making’ and making ‘it’ anywhere.  I came to PAFA to cultivate a practice that I could take anywhere and make-work in response to a dynamic environment.  My studio has always been provisional.   I suppose there’s a tech savvy, ‘post-studio’ aspect to some of my maneuvering, but I truly value establishing a distinct thinking space.  It has been my motivation to move and to keep moving.  Finding space, creating space, and altering space all prompt a constant state of inventiveness.  It’s also a state that breeds pragmatism, which can be an asset as well as a hang-up.

In my first semester I was reluctant to deal with ‘thingness’ beyond painting.  Working two dimensionally (and digitally) seemed the most practical response to my nomadic lifestyle.   Partly out of space, partly out of habit, I would step into the role of draftsman or painter-technician, concerned with materials and rendering.  Being classically trained, I fell back on my methods and my mantras (“fat over lean,” etc.) – but working in this manner reduced painting to surfacing.  For example, paint as a material, though instrumental in facilitating certain optical effects was essentially subordinate to the image depicted.  I realized I was making pictures that were absolutely concerned with ‘finish’ and the ‘painting’ was more or less incidental.  This material-conceptual disjunction between ‘surface’ and ‘finish’ was the jump-off.  It marked the sort of criticality of convention I had been skirting in my undergrad and more acutely opened up exploration in my graduate studies.

The move from “image to object” was more conceptually slight than its sculptural manifestation.  Painting’s allure has always resided in its dual status as image and object.  Photography, (digital photography in particular) further collapses this relationship and is the primary reason I have integrated photography into my practice.  These two modes of image-making come with certain expectations and valuation given their respective (and mutual) histories.  These industrial/artisanal associations are the ‘hi – lo’ elements I extort and exploit in my art making.

My most recent work is comprised of both artist and non-artist materials. There are many found objects and studio detritus visible in the works, as well as some very sophisticated imaging techniques and language. These esoteric moments run the risk of being overlooked, but they are present nonetheless.  I use ‘waste’ and crafted vulgarisms as humanizing mechanisms in the work.  The use of elegance in surfacing, design, and language are intended to forefront the sophistication in the work.

Sophistication is about a connoisseurship of means.  When I use materials and images that recall the interplay between class and classlessness, between culture and culturedness, I am linking up concepts of privilege, status, and superiority with socio-economic determinants of access and excess.  I commonly achieve this end through appropriation, jury-rigged assemblage, and photo-composites.

I think one of the most striking aspects of your work is the diversity of forms. No two works seem to share a consistent visual language, although one can sense an underlying connectivity to everything you make. Even when one object seems to be ‘pairing up’ with another, that coupling is brief and then you’re on to a very different looking piece, that never the less seems related to the work when seen in total. You describe your work as ‘discreet objects that morph” For this reason I think of you as a true ‘free- ranger’ – you make connections everywhere, with just about anything, something like Repo-Man’s “Lattice of Coincidence”. Are you familiar with this reference?

Haha. Yes!  I’m familiar with the reference.  I’m also abiding cautious of the fact that correlation does imply causation.  It’s a very common logical fallacy; one that snares simple apprehension and can be the territory for some rather fanciful conclusions and magical thinking.  For this reason, it also happens to be the cornerstone of much of my installation work.

Installation grants me the most play with the life span of an aesthetic event.   As one moves through an installation space a nonlinear narrative is activated.  Kinships arise through proximity.  The propinquity that exists between the objects and subject intensifies as the viewer navigates vignettes and asides that emerge and fall away.  Discrete elements may literally and figuratively begin to transform each other.   Shifting vantage points bring the installed actants into a ‘lattice of coincidence’, a contingent framework sustained by the repetition of seeded formal and iconographic references.  These co-occurrences and couplings emerge, as salient, but the relationship can be as bare as it is brimming.  It is after all, an act of the mind.

You mention sculpture as an image becoming” and how it slows a viewer down. Can you comment on how you have come to differentiate between 2D and 3D works? You mentioned earlier that you think of ‘sculpture as image’ – how so?

I loosely narrated an instance of an image ‘becoming’ when I walked us through orchestrating an installation space.  A thing must first be perceived before it can be judged and its nature reasoned.  Art is funny because it has no reason. We speak as though it does, but reason is an act of the mind, and that lies with the beholder.   That being said, I wouldn’t discount the coded logic of an image.

I like pictures because they are ubiquitous.  I like images because they are treacherous.  They can simulate and stimulate. Their materiality is uncertain, unfixed, and tenuously vessel-bound.  Sculpture can be a substrate or it can be an anchor— semantically and morphologically an image.  Sculpture in its literal concreteness can facilitate the ‘false concreteness’ of the image.

Because the photographs sublimate an instant and the sculptures tend to be a little more generous in showing their seams, I try to slow photography down with sculpture and use graphic devices in my sculptures to improve their agility, to give them the appearance of being mobile or scalar like a digital image.  This hybridization helps the work resist categorization and remains multivalent, allowing it to ‘pair-up’, change state, and suspend judgment.  It also blurs the 2D- 3D distinction.  Some sculpture is very flat while other pieces are in the round.   When I talk shop, I often address anything that is not a photographic print as a sculpture— but much of the sculpture incorporates photography.  It’s an archivist’s nightmare. Given their mixed heritage, I informally refer to the prints and sculptures as ‘objects’ regardless of what image they may host.

I notice a funny, small-scale wall mounted object that you have titled “The Generous Gambler”. There’s that ‘discreet object morphing’ – what appears to be an eye gazing out from the wall simultaneously becomes an ear, the eye now a proportionally huge ‘receiver’, capable of hearing everything. Can you walk us through this piece?

Yeah. This little guy is quite attractive and unassuming– or perhaps unconcerned.  The object is familiar, but estranged. On first take, it appears to be some sort of organ or apparatus installed like a fly on the wall. The fetish is griped by the wall and by white lid that envelops it.  Perhaps it’s a talisman or medallion?  The anatomy is uncanny.   It looks a little like a disembodied ear lobe or an oculus.  It has the aura of something omnipresent, but easily overlooked.

The piece is named for a poem by Charles Baudelaire. It refers to ‘the encounter’—to the gambit of seeing and of being seen, to the suzerain gaze, and to the paranoia wrought by beholder and the beholden. ‘The Generous Gambler’ also cheekily refers to the speculative nature of the art object in consumer culture.

This small piece is made of a large, discarded coat button inset in epoxy putty. I encountered the button on a Philadelphia sidewalk. Its eye caught my eye, so I picked it up. I fashioned the putty to preserve the impression of my hand, reinvesting the object with the hold it had over me. As product of this exchange, the piece en masse is now a unique object made of common materials.

Work as diverse as yours can prove challenging to the viewer. You stated, “the work needs to be discoverable – I like to give the viewer a lot of credit”. What do you feel is the relationship between what you make and how a viewer connects to the work? (You mentioned peoples’ expectations and their suspension thereof)

T.S. Eliot said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” I’m not sure who should feel more comforted by this statement– the poet or the reader? I’m a fairly self-assured gallery goer. I’m unapologetic about what I like, what I don’t like, and give pause to things I don’t quite understand.   I love a well-crafted argument. As a viewer, I delight in these moments of suspension and speculation. But not everyone likes the same thing.

Viewership is self-interested. We look selectively, spending time with what we choose– or at least we think it’s a choice. These matters of taste and judgment are habituated. We like what we like because we know what we know. But what do we know, or rather, what do we think we know? Moreover, how do we know?

So much ‘knowledge’ is prejudice; assumptions and presumptions about what ‘should be’ prefiguring experience. These value ascriptions are called into question when we confront something unexpected or alien. To recognize something as anomalous, as something that ‘shouldn’t be’ forces one to confront not only what ‘is’, but allows one to see what ‘could be’.   It seems like nonsense. Such encounters exceed reason, but are utterly relatable. The introspection is uncomfortable, but not disastrous. Maybe it’s not so alien. Maybe you’re just seeing it for the first time.

I use simple apprehension to help ease people into more complex processing.   It’s what makes the artwork work. The machination is sophisticated and sardonic, but the objects are colorful and alluring. Some entities may be subtle while others are more immediately recognizable, like a picture of people swimming or a pair of handcuffs. An edifying potential exists between the images and objects. It’s an effect of placement and suggestion. Elements demonstratively reveal the connective tissue that structure semantic feedback loops. This recognition ruptures in irony upon realization.

As an artist, I challenge myself to make work that slightly outpaces my own understanding. Perhaps this admission is less reassuring to a circumspect gallery goer, but I like to give viewers a lot credit (being that I am one myself). Most gallery goers, regardless of their profession or personal history are familiar with design. We interact with products and navigate our surroundings on a daily basis. Through sheer immersion one participates in visual culture. As a cultural participant, one is to some extent visually literate and can access the work should one overcome the hesitation.

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Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

November 14, 2014 to April 12, 2015
118 North Broad Street (between Race and Arch streets)
Philadelphia, 215 972 7600

A walk through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ exhibition of work by Peter Blume (1906 – 1992) is like a tour through 20^th century art. Precisionism, Surrealism, abstraction, and Pop art all have their moment in the painting and drawing of this lesser-known American artist, who is now getting his due with the Academy’s retrospective “Nature and Metamorphosis.” The accompanying catalogue, with excellent essays by Sarah Vure, Samantha Baskind and curator Robert Cozzolino, offers engaging insights into Blume’s particular brand of Modernism.

The confidence of Blume’s hand is striking. Whether rendering a stark winter farmhouse, a war catastrophe, or a pile of improvised biomorphic forms, the artist always knows exactly where to end one shape end and begin another. In the painting New England Barn (1926), for example, barn, farmhouse, and shed are joined by the up-down rhythm of repeated triangles. In a classic Cubist ploy, the edge of one background building merges with that of a horse cart in the foreground, confounding the expected spatial reading. Not so classically Cubist is a female figure in the hayloft, who has apparently bared her flesh for the cart driver’s pleasure. Unabashed sexual moments like this one recur frequently in Blume’s work, preventing its reading as pure form.

Blume’s take on the industrial subject matter of the Precisionists also involves unexpected insertions. Parade (1928) depicts the same type of ship ventilators as in Charles Sheeler’s familiar painting Upper Deck (1929), but Blume’s extreme dislocations of space and nonsensical additions (including a suit of armor) resemble the Surrealism of Max Ernst. Such insertions are both the strength and the problem of Blume’s work. He brushed aside associations with all movements, including André Breton’s attempt to identify him as a Surrealist: “They wanted me to join the club. I told them that was hopeless.” Yet in striking out on his own, he never quite found his own voice. Color palettes bounced from muted grays and whites to warm earth tones. Levels of detail varied from the minimal to the chock-full — as in The Eternal City (1934-37), an allegory of fascism that seems to contain every stone in Italy.

Like many artists of the era, Blume was deeply affected by the Second World War, and his confrontation with that conflict’s horrors spurred experimentation. In The Eternal City, his insertion of the bright-green head of Mussolini amid piles of equally bright-red bricks announced a willingness to try out-of-the-tube colors. Drawing also took Blume in new directions. A series of untitled ink doodles from 1946 used the automatic drawing technique favored by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, improvising biomorphic forms with pen and brush. Much more diffuse than the paintings, these inventions find their way into later works with compelling results.

A notable example is Flowering Stump (begun in 1945 but completed in 1968). The floral forms that emerge from this stump resemble many things but nothing in particular: fungi, acorn squash, genitals, sting rays. An automatic charcoal study that accompanied this piece clearly helped Blume imbue his work with such free-floating associations. Another pivotal piece, House at Falling Water (begun 1938, completed 1968), is possibly the strangest image ever of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece. The intensely detailed plant forms and tiny, waif-like hounds in the foreground command our attention, rendered as they are with the vibrating tonality of Ivan Albright’s mounds of undulating flesh. Meanwhile, Blume softened the house’s concrete slabs to the consistency of tofu.

The works completed in the 1970s and 1980s bring Blume’s de-familiarized bio-forms to their pinnacle. Piles of rocks in From the Metamorphosis (1979) freely transform themselves to toes, arms, breasts and buttocks. In Autumn (1984), a gaggle of squashes tilt to and fro with more excitement than is customary for vegetables, their ticklish stems resembling the business end of a sex toy. In each of these paintings, full-intensity background hues pop out in front of foreground blacks and grays, flattening the space and adding to the festive delirium of the scene. The elements that began in earlier works — Cubist dislocation of form, Surrealist transformation of scale and substance, the bizarre use of primary and high-contrast colors, and of course sexual innuendo — finally coalesce into a personal statement that, while referring to different types of Modern art, maintain its own integrity.

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The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World  at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, November 17, 2012 to April 7, 2013.

In his now notorious remarks in the New York Times,  Ken Johnson invited anyone with a theory about the kind of art “women tend to make” to test it out by visiting the exhibition, The Female Gaze, at the Pennsylvania Academy.  My 13-year-old daughter, who has attended many contemporary exhibitions, revealed her theory when she quipped, “Dad, are there going to be a lot of vagina paintings in this show?”

In fact, the sole match for her particular view of women’s art was an untitled test plate from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1976).  The works in the show might fit any description or label that has been applied to art: abstract, representational, conceptual; personal and political; militant and conventional; academic and outsider. Anyone who attends this show with theories—or better put, stereotypes—of women’s art in mind is bound to be disappointed.

The Female Gaze celebrates an inspired addition to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ venerable holdings. Collector, philanthropist, and artist Alter Linda Lee Alter has donated over 500 works in every style and medium imaginable. In the same gallery one finds Daisy Youngblood’s gorilla sculpture; Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, jewel-like abstract painting; Catherine Murphy’s hyper-real painting of a gun target stapled to a tree; Kara Walker’s silhouettes of antebellum figures; and an enameled metal sign by Jenny Holzer.

The bequest is all the more important when understood side-by-side with the Academy’s existing collection, enshrined next door in its landmark Furness building.  Despite efforts to tout a 200-year history of friendliness toward women, the Academy’s past accessions are rather one-sided, and might just as aptly be called the Male Gaze.

During an interview, Alter explained to me that most of the institutions on the short list for this bequest were male-dominated. She believed, however, that her gift to the Academy would be transformative. The size of the existing collection meant that the donated works would be visible, and the bequest came with a commitment by the staff to take care of them and display them alongside existing art.

While Female Gaze reveals no clear tendency among women artists, it does evince the collector’s preferences. The persistence of painting, and especially figure painting, is deeply felt in this selection of work. Greeting us very directly at the entrance are Diane Edison’s painted Self-Portrait (1996) and pastel Nude Self-Portrait (1995). In this second piece the artist gazes down haughtily at the viewer from between her pendulous breasts.  The African American artist is known for her intense portraiture, and in this case gives us a rich expanse of brown hues rarely seen in museum nudes. Alice Neel’s palette is quite different in Claudia Bach Pregnant (1975), with contrasting pinks and greens representing flesh and fabric. The painter keeps the eye busy with a lively cadence of curved lines and culminating black tresses falling over the sitter’s shoulder.

There is also a strong interest in art which turn old idioms to new uses. Judith Schaechter’s stained glass works, for example, project nightmares of the contemporary urban world through the colors and graphic styles of this medieval medium. Like a cathedral window image of the baby Jesus, Child and Toy (1989) is organized according to the decorative geometry of its frame, with figures in the central space and a chain of symbolic elements on the periphery. The artist uses brilliant red and yellow glass to depict a doll-like child menaced by toys: candy and stuffed animals on the one hand, and the more adult amusements, money, drugs and guns on the other. Looking at an entirely different reality, Ann Agee uses the style of the ceramic tabletop knick-knack to commemorate a middle-class ritual in Birthing Class (2001). Colorfully dressed pregnant women listen to a demonstration by a nurse while their hipster-ish husbands look on with excessively cheerful smiles. Glints of light on the glazed surface underscore the overwrought optimism of the scene.

With the emphasis on representational work, the exhibition shows a clear bias toward the retinal and away from the conceptual. There are the occasional objects, however, that raise questions about the boundaries between art and life, image and representation. One is the 1993 painting Target by Catherine Murphy. Easily mistaken for a photograph, this bullet-ridden image brings an object into the gallery that, particularly amidst current debate over gun control, we would rather not see. It also offers a connection to the Academy’s nineteenth century collections, which include a section of tromp l’oeil painting, and a focus on the science of collecting and categorizing lived experience.

Finding other points of connection to the Academy’s historic collection will determine whether Women Artists Making their World is indeed transformative.  If the displays in the old gallery had a subtitle, it would be “Male Artists Making the World”—for the artists there, like Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, have taught us how to see. The question for me, then, is not how women artists create their own world, but how they complete our picture of what the world looks like.

One indication of how this might be done is in Female Gaze’s inclusion of works from the Chicago art milieu of the late 1960s and 1970s. This radical scene saw the participation of men and women in collectives like the Hairy Who, and spawned the careers of artists such as Nancy Spero, Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca, alongside of men like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, and Jim Nutt.  Ramberg’s painting Hereditary Uncertainty (1977), exhibited in Female Gaze, contains the jagged shapes and colors found in work by Roger Brown. Yet Ramberg’s subject, the straightjacketing of women’s bodies through clothing, is distinctly feminist. Significantly, this painting was also included in a 2012 Academy exhibit on the influence of famed Art Institute of Chicago teacher Ray Yoshida. It was displayed in the historic Furness building, only footsteps away from Thomas Eakins’ monumental surgical scene, The Gross Clinic. On that occasion, the female gaze revealed to us a way of hacking up a body that Eakins overlooked.

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