Haunting Narratives: Detours from Philadelphia Realism, 1935 to the Present (May 12-July 15) showcases the work of nearly 60 artists from the mid-1900s to the present who abandoned traditional modes of realism in favor of darker, more “haunting” narratives, a genre that has been at the center of Philadelphia art for centuries.
Haunting Narratives: Detours from Philadelphia Realism focuses on the thematically dark, often hauntingly strange works of art made by painters and printmakers of Philadelphia since the 1930s. Benton Spruance, Robert Riggs and Leon Kelly set the stage in the 1930s for this unique thread of narrative art, a tradition that continued in the work of Sidney Goodman, Peter Paone and Ben Kamihira. The exhibition is rounded out by the many contemporary twists on the genre from artists like Daniel Heyman, Hiro Sakaguchi, Judith Schaecter and Lisa Yuskavage, among many other artists with Philadelphia ties. Selected from a broad artistic spectrum, the works in Haunting Narratives are diverse, ranging from pictorially dark, murky scenes to paradoxically colorful, seemingly lighthearted facades that mask a more unpromising reality.
