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CRUISING around Philadelphia’s City Hall at street level, you might not see him at first. Take a look up at the top, and there stands William Penn. The 37-foot, 27-ton bronze rendering of the Quaker who founded the Keystone State sits atop the Second Empire-style masonry tower. Now, imagine being up there with Penn, looking down and around the City of Brotherly Love.

That’s what Constance Bassett and David Cann do while cleaning and restoring the statue. The sculptors and conservators have been maintaining the historic landmark, using a custom wax mixed with pigment to match the original bronze.

In their Moorland Studio in Stockton, to be featured on the Covered Bridge Artisans Tour Nov. 26 to 28, Mr. (more…)

THE air is getting raw, the days are growing shorter and even the autumnal glow is starting to fade… but there’s still more to look forward to this season. The Covered Bridge Artisans will be holding its annual studio tour and sale Nov. 26 to 28 in five artists’ studios in the Lambertville, Stockton and Sergeantsville area. Seven guest artists will participate from a restored stone church in Locktown. And, yes, there’s even a covered bridge to visit. (Pictured: A painting by Ty Hodanish, whose Prallsville Mill Studio is a stop on the tour.)

Not only is this a chance to see locally produced art and crafts, and make purchases for holiday gift giving, but it’s an opportunity to go out into the country and see how artists (more…)

You may have to enlarge it to see the detail, but the bridge connecting Lambertville, NJ, to New Hope, PA, is teeming with people watching the fireworks over the Delaware River. Lambertville is beautiful any time of the day, but Russ Poles of Hunterdon County finds its quiet beauty at night. His River Towns at Night can be seen at Orchard Hill, 22 North Union St.,  Lambertville, through January 1, 2011. It makes me think of some of the paintings by Robert Beck of Lambertville at night.

Entering the galleries of Princeton University Art Museum, one is greeted at first by familiar sights: Monet’s “Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge” and Toulouse Lautrec’s “The Sacred Grove” - both landscapes in the traditional sense.

Nobody’s Property, on view through Feb. 20, 2011, explores a new kind of landscape: a contemporary look at the land and earth. Even the exhibition title forms a kind of landscape on the rug as you enter. Its shadow lettering makes you think about whether it’s projected light or sculpted into the pile. You hover over it to see if you cast a shadow (more…)

As we go through the digital revolution, artists are reacting as print products disappear before our eyes.

New York City’s New Museum is exhibiting The Last Newspaper, in which 27 artists “disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper… using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper …”

The cover of an October New Yorker magazine featured Roz Chast’s “Shelved,” in which a young man sits in an overstuffed chair in a library with a laptop on his thighs. All the books on the shelves have (more…)

John Baldessari, a pioneer of conceptual art, felt he wasn’t going anywhere with painting and so in the late 1960s he had the “body” of work cremated and took home the ashes in a box. He made cookies from some of the ashes, hoping they would be eaten and ultimately return to the earth, although only one person ate the cookie.

In a survey of his work at the Metropolitan Museum, there are at least two extraordinary videos: In one we see him standing there in grainy black and white, moving his arm in small motions of change, reciting “I am making art, I am making art, I am making art.” In another, he sings the words of Sol Lewitt to Beatles tunes.

He also fills a ruled page with “I will make no more boring art,” like a child in school is forced to write as punishment.

With photography, he broke all the rules. For example, he’d frame a picture in the camera, then move the camera to shoot it.

As a collage artist, he believes two things go together when they don’t go together; that is, there is tension and tautness. “But it has to be similar enough to be intriguing.”

Designing hospitals as centers of healing is an art. Not only can a hospital provide a comforting environment for patients, but a well-designed medical center remembers to take care of the caregiver, who can convey a sense of wellbeing to patients and families. And the arts play a central role in hospital design, as the medical profession grows increasingly aware of the importance the arts play in healing. (Pictured at left: “Little Lila” by Beth Livingston, an artist and Paralympic athlete who frequently exhibits in Art First! at the University Medical Center at Princeton.)

Research dating from the 1970s shows that patients recovering in a room with a view of trees, vs. patients recovering in a room with a view of a brick wall, not only got better more quickly but required less (more…)

FLUTTERY swirls enchant and captivate, such as the sprays of golden leaves outside the window.

When photographer Emmet Gowin was growing up in Danville, Va., he found himself thus entranced by the forbidden plume coming off the back of a DDT truck. These days, he is drawn to flights of moths, just as they are drawn to flame.

Harry Callahan, Mr. Gowin’s mentor with whom he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in the ‘60s, had Eleanor, his wife and model. Mr. Gowin has Edith, his wife and collaborator. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he photographed her, along with sons Isaac and Elijah, in their native Danville, capturing an Appalachian simplicity and way of life, with old barns, rural landscapes and bedrooms with (more…)

The front-page picture in The New York Times shows a group of people standing on a balcony in Iraq. Flanked by colorful cloths, the men, women and children are looking down to the street, where there has just been an explosion.

Langhorne, Pa., printmaker Selma Bortner clips pictures like these from newspapers and magazines and pastes them into a journal. There’s another picture of a woman pulling her dead husband out of a car that has just exploded, and one of a young boy who just (more…)