George Luks Archives - Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine

Pennsylvania Heritage Recommends

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off The Civil War in Pennsylvania: The African American Experience Samuel W. Black, editor of a collection of eight essays comprising The Civil War in Pennsylvania: The African American Experience (Senator John Heinz History Center in partnership with Pennsylvania Civil War 150, 2013, paper, 239 pages, $29.95), contends, “In various ways African Americans have been fighting for freedom for several...
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Schuylkill County: Built on Coal

Posted by Joseph Hanney on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off The history of Schuylkill County is inextricably bound to the story – and drama – of the great anthracite industry in the United States. Despite nearly two centuries of active mining, the county’s 783 square miles still boast the largest accessible reserves of hard coal known in the world. Its lives and lifestyles have been quasi-fictionalized by two of the county’s best...
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The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: An Ideal and a Symbol

Posted by Jeanette Toohey on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off By 1805, the year the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was founded, Philadelphia had achieved a large measure of political, social and economic stability. It had been the nation’s capital and continued to thrive as a center of banking and commerce. The largest city in the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the center of culture, with Boston its...
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Currents

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off Famous Faces John W. Mosley (1907-1969), characterized by an admirer as “our most magnificent and beloved photographer,” was Philadelphia’s leading black photographer, whose images appeared in nearly every African American newspaper on the East Coast (see “His Eye Was On The Positive” by Richard D. Beards in the winter 1990 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage)....
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Shorts

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off Nearly one hundred watercolors and drawings of fruits, flowers, animals, and saints by artists working in the cities of Jaipur and Bikaner, India, will remain on view at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation through Friday, February 24, 1995. The exhibition of natural history works of art features pieces created in Rajasthan, the desert state of...
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Charles Grafly: An Apostle of American Art

Posted by Stephen May on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off From the earliest days through most of the nineteenth century, sculpture in America was the enterprise of w1tutored artisans, craftsmen, stonecutters, and woodcarvers modestly plying their trade on furniture, gravestones, figureheads, and shop signs. Lacking opportunities for academic training at home, ambitious craftsmen flocked first to Rome and, following the Civil War, to Paris to learn the...
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Anchor by Stuart Davis

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off “I am an American, born in Philadelphia of American stock. I studied art in America. I paint what I see in America, in other words, I paint the American scene,” so Stuart Davis (1894-1964) described himself and his work. He was raised in an environment that nurtured artistic leanings. His mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, a sculptor, and his father, Edward Wyatt Davis, art editor for the...
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Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices

Posted by David Lembeck on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off On a February morning in 1937, artist George Warren Rickey (1907-2002) and a group of four men met at the post office in Selinsgrove, Snyder County. Armed with cloth-covered rolling pins, the men attached Rickey’s mural entitled Susquehanna Trail to one of the lobby’s end walls. After six hours, they transformed the entire blank white wall, from marble wainscoting to ceiling, into a...
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