June 28, 2011

Senior Artists Initiative (SAI) Fifth Biennial Exhibition will be held at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery from June 20th through July 28th with an opening reception Wednesday, June 29th at 5 PM. SAI is a nonprofit organization that assists senior artists in understanding the need for and processes involved in organizing their life's work by developing programs that provide recognition for senior artists. SAI offers educational, legal, placement and exhibition services to its members. Ten prominent Philadelphia area artists are represented in this exhibition of paintings, sculpture and photography including: Moe Brooker, David Graham, Jeanne Jaffe, Niles Lewandowski, Carol Moore, Peter Paone, our own Orlando Pelliccia and Bruce Pollock, Boris Putterman and Robert Whitley.

Moe Brooker paints in vibrant and expressive color, often in response to music or life events such as in his large canvas “Listen With Your Eyes.” Dino Pelliccia’s iconic wood sculptures, finely crafted and minimalist, evoke the human form as in “Black X” or “Deep White.” The painting “Indigo,” from a new series of larger canvases by Bruce Pollock, suggests the deepest of cosmic spaces while playing with exuberant surface texture. The painting “Mending” by Boris Putterman uses imagery of man-made elements in a landscape to create a visual metaphor of personal meaning. Carol Moore’s mixed media drawings on manipulated inkjet prints, entitled Farfalle (Butterflies), are typical of her style of work. Small acrylic paintings such as “China Wall,” by Niles Lewandowski, evoke ancient landscape seen through modern eyes. David Graham’s “Pretty Marsh” is one of four color photographs that focus on unusual situations in the natural landscape. Jeanne Jaffe creates a methodical and airy cascade of miniature organic forms in her suspended sculpture “Spill of Memory.” “The souls that yesterday kept in silence” is a personal narrative, typical of Peter Paone’s intense figurative paintings.

A Westphal College 2011 Faculty Mini Grant provided partial funding for this exhibition. Drexel University, the James A. Mitchener Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and The University of the Arts sponsored the artists and funded the projects for 2010. For more information please call 215-895-2548 or click here.

SAI began in 1998 with a series of panel discussions and over the years has grown as an educational nonprofit producing seminars, publications, and oral history videos of prominent senior artists to help preserve the Philadelphia Region's artistic heritage. Since 1999, Senior Artists Initiative Inventory and Oral History Project has produced and published on the Internet, the oral histories of sixty-five prominent Philadelphia area artists utilizing docents and interns from area museums and educational institutions to assist artists in inventorying their work, and then to interview the artists to explore their artistic development. The interviews are video recorded and made available for viewing and the videos of all ten featured artists will be a part of the exhibition at the Pearlstein Gallery.