Also this issue:

Spontaneous Combustion
Dance, drums and tabla combine to light up the Painted Bride.
-Deni Kasrel

Out of this World
-Susan Hagen

Lee Blessing
-Interview by David Anthony Fox

He Talks Pretty
-David Anthony Fox

Quilting Bucks
-Helen i-lin Hwang

From Chippendale to Talavera
-Lori Hill

Moving to the Desert
-Deni Kasrel

Stage Flight
-Debra Auspitz

October 17-23, 2002

artpicks

Family Affair

by Debra Auspitz

Artist Gwyneth Leech has one hell of an artistic pedigree, most of it linked to Philadelphia. Her grandparents, Katharine and Michael Gallagher, met at the School of Industrial Arts in Philadelphia (now the University of the Arts), in the early 1920s. Katharine was an illustrator and author of children's books. Michael was a printmaker who worked with Dox Thrash in the '30s and, along with Thrash and Hugh Mesibov, had a hand in the development of the Carborundum Print Process. The Gallaghers had three children: Jack, who became a draftsman; Martha, a dancer who studied at Juilliard and worked with Martha Graham; and Leech's mom, Louise, a painter who attended Fleisher Art Memorial, PAFA and Tyler School of Art and dabbles in printmaking, marionettes and ceramics. Leech and her sister Kitty were raised in Germantown (their father was a law professor at Penn and a musician). Both sisters went to Penn, after which Kitty went on to design costumes for New York theater, while Leech spent 17 years in Scotland following studies at the Edinburgh College of Art. Recently returned to the States, Leech decided to curate an exhibit of her family's work over three generations, featuring her own work and that of her sister, mother and both of her grandparents. The show was up in New York last year, and comes to Philadelphia this week. "It's sustaining to come from a family of artists," Leech says. She also muses, "It is a wonderful thing to see how different our work is and yet how related across the generations. Especially at the moment, in such uncertain times, I value the sense of infinite possibility in the creative response to life which this show embodies."

“Gallagher/Leech, Three Generations/Five Artists,” Oct. 18-Nov. 15, Cosmopolitan Club, 1616 Latimer St., 215-735-1057.