Brandywine Workshop, Printed Image Galleries, 730 S. Broad St., through Feb. 1, 546-3675

In a quick quarter century, the Brandywine Workshop has grown into a nationally recognized center for offset lithography. An anniversary exhibition of some 60 prints showcases the workshop's commitment to quality and cultural diversity. These prints, often combining lithography with serigraphy and collage, were selected from over 300,000 produced by the 200 artists who have participated in the workshop's artist-in-residence program since it began in 1975.

Sam Gilliam, the first artist-in-residence, is showing several works. Wissahickon suggests the sluggish peaceful glint of the river on a summer afternoon with flashes of greens, blues, reds and yellows. Golden Neck, a typical Gilliam print, is more elaborate, combining collage, lithography and serigraphy with areas of gloppy combed texture.

Although the Workshop is nationally recognized, local artists are well-represented. In John Dowell's three rather Japanese-looking Altered Chorus works, various surface patterns are laid over the same under pattern. Dowell's calligraphic abstraction contrasts with Frank Galuszka's classic flower piece, which emerges delicately from a bubbly textured dark ground. Moe Brooker's serigraph is characteristic of an earlier manner (1982) with a striped section, a heart and a scattering of drawn stars.

Nanette Clark's lithograph looks a lot like her collages of strips of paper painted with textile-like patterns. Even though lithography makes reproducing patterns easy, Clark makes it labor-intensive through hand-coloring and hand-tearing.

In Fly Girl Style, former Philadelphian, now Californian, photographer Pat Ward-Williams shows a two-section lithograph based on photographs of henna-decorated hands inset with smaller photographs of women displaying elaborate, probably African-based hairstyles. The border is decorated with a bird/fish motif.

Another native Philadelphian, Howardina Pindell, has moved from early minimal work to a more personal and intimate style in recent years. She is showing an expansive two-part work, Autobiography: Past & Present, which includes images representing her worldwide travel, from the maze at Chartres to African masks to Egyptian pyramids. Images resembling the so-called "reserve hands" silhouetted on prehistoric caves add to this complex layered design.

With a similar, but even more specific and personal photo-album approach, Allan Edmunds collaged EFA I from photographs of family members and other family records.

In Four Signs (Series B), Hubert Taylor collages repeated images of numbered crosses marked with stenciled X's. The silhouetted forms combine interestingly with layered mark-making. Likewise, folding contrasts with and accentuates Taylor's dimensional drawing.

The artist-in-residence program has brought many renowned artists to Philadelphia, including "genius" award-winning sculptor John T. Scott (Brandywine's 1997 James Van Der Zee Award recipient). His Dreamscape for Anna Rita... (his wife) is a 60-inch-long horizontal, layered and folded with windows, lines, snake heads, grids and checkers. Helen Oji's Cultural Exchange (exhibited in the Sales Gallery) focuses on the eye, an image which is represented universally but differently in each culture. In her lithograph, a blue jewel refracts renderings of all kinds of eyes. In the dark surrounding space more eyes gleam. None is paired. Each is a lonely eye. Another mostly blue work is Betye Saar's L.A. Sky with Spinning Hearts, a playful romantic vision of celestial bodies and red spinning hearts.

Alison Saar makes a similarly mythic but more earthy statement with Black Snake Blues, a representation of a woman and a snake in bed together.

Jacob Lawrence is represented by a fairly recent work, Builders Three (1991), in which the simple geometric composition and angled tools of the builders remind one of the American cubism of Stuart Davis.

Using a technique which seems to have been popular at the workshop a few years ago, Al Loving cuts two prints related to West African textiles into strips and interweaves them in Life and Continual Growth I (1988).

Several artists make social statements. Perhaps the strongest is Camille Billops. The KKK Boutique, a wedding-like scene, is set in a graveyard. An untitled work savagely parodies the cover of a piece of sheet music titled "Mammy's Little Coal Black Rose." In researching Billops' iconography, I discovered that these works relate to the films of her husband, James Hatch. He made a "DocuFantasy," The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (1994), and co-authored a book, Inside the Minstrel Mask. Blackface masks are pervasive in Billops' work.

Even the abstract painters of the '60s are represented in Brandywine's collection. Kenneth Noland is showing Florida Shades, vertically striped in pastel pink, white and blue on a ground of translucent greens and greys. Jules Olitski's Wooka, offset lithograph and serigraph, would be recognizable (and welcome) anywhere with its bright pink edge motifs and radiant speckled surface.

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