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Syd Carpenter and vanessa german, two renowned sculptors with ties to Pittsburgh and a gift for blending found objects into their works, will be among the featured artists in two Northwest Philadelphia museums this spring. <\/p>\n
\u201cSyd Carpenter: Planting in Place, Time, and Memory,<\/a>\u201d is taking over the first floor of Chestnut Hill<\/a>\u2019s Woodmere Museum\u2019s Charles Knox Hall<\/a> through May 24. It is a bold statement of Black women as mothers, planters, and keepers of the Earth. Carpenter\u2019s work is not meant to be glanced at or taken in quickly. It has to be studied and breathed in phases.<\/p>\n Each ceramic pail, trowel, spade of half-eaten apples represents our connection to the soil. <\/p>\n With a career spanning almost 50 years, Carpenter has many of her works on permanent view at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a>, and the African American Museum of Art Philadelphia, as well as colleges and universities across the country. <\/p>\n She began her career in 1980s Philadelphia. Carpenter has designed the ancestral garden leading to the Colored Girls Museum\u2019s Germantown<\/a> twin and is one of five artists whose ceramic vessels are installed in the garden. <\/p>\n \u201cTo be able to look back through time and place and see my work at so many major museums and places \u2026 it\u2019s such an affirmation,\u201d Carpenter said. <\/p>\n \u201cPlanting in Place and Time\u201d traces the evolution of her work, starting with gourd and womb-shaped clay vessels created after completing her master of fine arts degree at Temple\u2019s Tyler School of Art. <\/p>\n Throughout the more than 60-piece exhibition are works featuring Carpenter\u2019s signature \u201cMother Pin,\u201d the knobby wooden clothespins. The artist likens them to the form of women\u2019s bodies, their curvy shapes speaking to the consistency, durability, and unshakable faith of Black mothers, like her own. <\/p>\n Carpenter is the daughter and granddaughter of gardeners. Her grandmother moved to Pittsburgh from the Deep South in the early 20th century during the Great Migration, and Carpenter was raised in Pittsburgh before the family moved to Philadelphia in the 1960s. <\/p>\n Many pieces from Carpenter\u2019s African American Farm Series are in the Woodmere show. <\/p>\n In 2012, Carpenter went on a sojourn to the Deep South, visiting farms owned and operated by Black families for generations. Massive wall sculptures featuring farm utensils, animals, and plants Carpenter formed with her fingers and fire came out of that visit. They serve as a portrait gallery on Woodmere\u2019s first floor. <\/p>\n Freestanding sculptures feature Carpenter\u2019s earthen pieces and found objects \u2014 kitchen tools, farm implements, and small pieces of furniture \u2014 welded to their base. Each piece is named after a farmer. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was important that each piece had a name so it was connected to the person who worked and cultivated the farm,\u201d Carpenter said. \u201cIt is how we keep these names, their legacy, alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Ramshackle Fence, a 6-foot-wide sculpture of seemingly disparate items Carpenter fashioned \u2014 bottles, jugs, clothespins, and tattered T-shirts \u2014 and mounted on Woodmere\u2019s orange accent walls, an intentional monument to the Black farm. <\/p>\n Busts of Carpenter\u2019s brother Frank, a Desert Storm veteran who returned to Philadelphia as a quadriplegic, are among the exhibition\u2019s most moving pieces. The life-size image of Frank in his too-tiny fedora, semi smile, and wide eyes that look like they just finished crying, speak to the bond between siblings and how war might make a country whole, yet soldiers a shell of themselves. Frank died in 1997. <\/p>\n \u201cPlanting in Place and Time\u201d is part of a three-site celebration of Carpenter\u2019s work in the Philadelphia area. \u201cRe-union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart,\u201d<\/a> is on display at St. Joseph\u2019s University\u2019s Frances M. Maguire Art Museum at St. Joseph\u2019s University through March 29. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a retrospective of Carpenter\u2019s work and the women who shaped it. <\/p>\n \u201cHome Bound in Wood, Steel, and Clay,\u201d <\/a>at Ursinus College\u2019s Berman Museum explores Carpenter\u2019s large scale work, featuring a series of ceramic leaves Carpenter shaped to invoke animals. It will close April 5.<\/p>\n \u201cSyd has been an anchor figure in the arts community of Philadelphia for many decades now,\u201d said William H. Valerio, executive director at Woodmere. \u201cShe has produced almost 50 years of art that we can assess for its messaging that speaks to the life-affirming strength of the human spirit.\u201d <\/p>\n \ud83d\udcc5 Through May 24, \ud83d\udccd Woodmere Museum of Art, Charles Knox Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue, \ud83c\udf10 woodmereartmuseum.org<\/a> <\/p>\n vanessa german<\/p>\n Colored Girls Museum executive director Vashti DuBois has no idea what artistic flavor Asheville-based sculptor, performance artist, and community activist vanessa german will bring to the museum\u2019s living room, but she knows it will represent to the spirit of her 10th anniversary show, \u201cSay it Loud, I\u2019m Black and I\u2019m Proud.\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSay it Loud\u201d takes its name from the late James Brown\u2019s 1968 Black power theme song, and like the fast-paced record, it speaks to the spirit of the Black American experience at a time of racial upheaval. <\/p>\n \u201cI traveled a lot in the last two years \u2026 to Kenya, Ghana, Grenada,\u201d DuBois said. \u201cI came back with a feeling in my bones and profound sense of pride about being a Black woman. That song jumped into my head as an appreciation of how much Black people have done under extraordinary circumstances.\u201d <\/p>\n german, who grew up in Los Angeles, moved to Pittsburgh in the early 2000s and spent close to 20 years making art and teaching children how to be artists at ArtHouse.<\/a> Her work is grand, an amalgamation of found objects and mixed media art.<\/p>\n In 2017 she gained a bit of fame from Miracles and Glory Abound <\/a>a 17-foot traveling piece that reimagines Emanuel Leutze\u2019s painting <\/a>of George Washington crossing the Delaware River as a Black woman. <\/p>\n She is currently community artist facilitator at the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center in New York\u2019s East Flatbush. <\/p>\n In 2023, Montclair Art Museum featured a retrospective collection of her work, \u201cPlease Imagine All the Things I Cannot Say.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n That is where DuBois met her. The two women clicked, and it didn\u2019t take long for DuBois to figure out that german\u2019s aesthetic blended in with TCGM\u2019s. <\/p>\n