Shorts

“Tricks of the Trade: Apprenticeships in the Traditional Arts,” an exhibition ex­ploring the relationships between master artists and artisans and their apprentices will be shown at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, Pittsburgh, from Wednesday, January 10, through Friday, February 23, 1996. “Tricks of the Trade” documents more than one hundred part­nerships in a...
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Currents

Hello, History! The former Chautauqua Lake Ice Company warehouse in Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District will come to life on Sunday, April 28 [1996], when it officially opens to the public as the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. Renovated by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which has been protecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the...
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Shorts

The first exhibition in Philadelphia devoted to identifying and honoring African American women tap dancers, “Plenty of Good Women Dancers: African American Women Hoofers from Philadelphia,” features glamorous photographs and dancers’ vivid recollec­tions portraying the golden age of swing and rhythm tap of the 1930s and 1940s. “Plenty of Good Women Dancers”...
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Painting a Sense of Place: Walter Emerson Baum and the Lehigh Valley

Even today, take any of its highways or byways and, around some turn in the road, a visitor can be overwhelmed with a scene of such intimate beauty that it makes the heart race a little. This is the bucolic Lehigh Valley of southeastern Pennsylvania. Streams and stone houses, church spires, quaint villages nestled among the lush, rolling hills – all come together in a blend so distinct...
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Shorts

“From Ft. Wagner to Verdun: African Americans in the U.S. Military, 1863-1918,” is on view at the Civil War Library and Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibition, continuing through August 30, 1998, showcases artifacts, objects, and documents chronicling the experience of African Americans in mili­tary service from the Civil War through World War I. The Civil War Library and Museum is...
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Portrait of the Hutchinson Family (1806)

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, young women of affluent Philadelphia families enrolled in the school of Samuel and Ann Elizabeth Gebler Folwell to learn drawing and painting from Samuel, and advanced embroidery from his wife Ann. The Folwells encouraged talented pupils to undertake a silk needlework picture with intricate French knots and satin stitches as a final project....
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Bookshelf

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition by Karen Lucic Allentown Art Museum, 1997 (120 pages, paper, $30.00) This remarkable book traces the development of artist Charles Sheeler’s modernist treatment of a highly familiar theme, the Bucks County barn. Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was born in Philadelphia and as a young man lived in the Bucks County...
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“From the Things We Know Best”: The Art of William W. Swallow

Two passions absorbed William W. Swallow (1912-1962) his entire life: art and the teaching of art. During a career that spanned just three decades, Swallow created ceramic sculptures that transformed the people and life of agrarian Pennsylvania into timeless, time­-honored icons. Although he achieved national fame, he continued – with singular devotion – teaching high school students...
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Shorts

Opening Saturday, May 29 [1999], at Allentown’s Liberty Bell Shrine Museum is “‘Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land’: The Liberty Bells of Pennsylvania.” The exhibit, continuing through Tuesday, August 31 [1999], will focus on the eight bells that summoned citizens of Pennsylvania communities to hear the public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July...
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Current and Coming

Steel Poetry Inspired by the various aspects of the steel industry in Bethlehem, Mildred T. Johnstone (1900-1988) created unusual canvas embroideries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the wife of Bethlehem Steel Corporation executive William H. Johnstone, she had the singular honor of being the first woman to tour the compa­ny’s steel mills. Although the mills have grown silent,...
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