Break the chain habit.  Shop locally-owned on Saturday, November 21. 

    

Join us on Tuesday, November 17, at 7:00 pm in the President's Dining Room on the Ursinus College campus.  Meet the members of the Collegeville Economic Development Corporation and learn more about the Main Street Program.  Please RSVP if you plan on attending by calling 610-454-1050 or e-mailing Linda Flederbach, Main Street Manager at manager@collegevilledevelopment.org.

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College is the recipient of several works by the artist Ben Wilson (1913-2001), who is known for his personal style of Abstract Expressionism. The gift of eight large oil paintings, two drawings, and a sketch pad was made by the artist's daughter, Joanne Jaffe, from the Ben and Evelyn Wilson Foundation. It is one of 50 such gifts Jaffe has made of her father's paintings and the sculpture of her mother, Evelyn Wilson, to museums and colleges and universities.

Wilson began his career in the 1930s, and was an artist for the Works Progress Administration, working in an expressionistic figurative style. His early paintings from the 1930s to the 1950s reflect the artist's agonized response to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the psychological aftermath. In the late 1950s, as world conditions improved, his spirits lifted and his paintings became increasingly abstract and colorful. He remained faithful to his own, very personal style of Abstract Expressionism for the next forty years. 

 

Wilson graduated from City College, now part of CUNY, in 1935. He also studied at the National Academy of Design, and the Academie Julien in Paris. He taught in his studios in Manhattan and Ridgefield, N.J., had 30 solo exhibitions and participated in dozens of group shows.

 

Berman Museum director Lisa Hanover has chosen, for the museum collection, paintings that reflect high points for Wilson's 60-year career as a painter, including Lamentation, 1945, representing  his early figurative work. The other works cover a spectrum from the 1960s through the late 1980s.
               

Admiring Wilson's inventiveness as a draftsman, Hanover also selected two lively drawings, and a sketch pad. "There's no better way to see how an artist thinks than by looking at his sketchpad," she said. "Wilson's drawings, like his paintings, reveal a tremendous fertility of imagination. He was a real virtuoso."

 

Assuming responsibility for her parents' art estates in 2006, Jaffe first turned her attention to her mother's sculptures and began making gifts from Evelyn Wilson's extensive "Community of Women" series, small "table-top" ceramic sculptures depicting single figures, intimate groupings of women, and mothers and children. She contacted  museums, university art museums and galleries, and Women's Studies programs, donating several hundred sculptures. The Berman Museum was the recipient, last fall, of a gift of five pieces from Evelyn Wilson's "Community" series. Jaffe welcomes inquiries about her father's paintings from universities and museums.  She can be contacted at jojaf@aol.com.

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus, known for its diverse collection and innovative educational programming, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; and  noon to 4:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The Museum is closed Mondays and college holidays.  The Museum is accessible to the physically disabled and admission is free. The museum is accredited by the American Association of Museums. Exhibitions and programs are funded in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For group tour information, call 610-409-3500.