The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page H05

PHILLY.COM SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER H5 "Art" by Thomas Hine and "Galleries" by Edith Newhall appear in alternating weeks. EDITH NEWHALL Women's work A 1970s feminist collaboration, the Sister Chapel, is recreated at Rowan University. "Bathroom Apples," a photograph by Andrew Fillmore, at the Print Center. Through Aug. 6 at the Print Center, 1614 Latimer 11 a.m.

to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 215-735-6090, printcenter.org It's only a Brick Moon Fjord, the artist-run exhibition space that used to take up the ground floor of a house on Frankford Avenue, has moved to the ground floor of the Crane Arts Building. "Brick Moon," its inaugural exhibition, takes its name from an 1869 sci-fi tale by Edward Everett Hale about the accidental launch of a satellite with 37 laborers on board who manage to establish a society in outer space. The story's eerie narrative reverberates in the works of Josh Azzarella, the team of Bastien Aubry and Dimitri Broquard, and also Laine Godsey, Judy Natal, Sarah Pater, and Ly-dia Rosenberg.

Their works strongly suggest inexplicable events in unfamiliar places. Fjord, Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays.

Were it not for Andrew Hot-tie, an art history professor at Rowan University, the quirky 1970s feminist collaboration known as the Sister Chapel would be history. Instead, more than a decade of detective work by Hottle has produced something of an art-world miracle. Not only have all of the paintings by the artists involved in the project been found by Hottle and reunited (and one repainted), they're displayed at Rowan University's Art Gallery West in a fabric-wrapped pavilion that until now had never been realized at its full scale. (In the Sister Chapel's previous installations, at PSl in Long Island City in 1978, and three other venues between 1978 and 1980, the pavilion, designed by the sculptor Maureen Connor in 1976, was represented by a model and shown near a circle of monumental paintings.) Conceived in 1974 by the artist Use Greenstein as a way to honor women's achievements, the Sister Chapel became the project of Greenstein and 12 other like-minded female artists. Eleven vertical paintings of inspirational women on canvases of the same dimensions (108 by 60 inches) were painted by Alice Neel, Shirley Gorelick, Betty Hol-liday, June Blum, Martha Edelheit, Diana Kurz, Elsa M.

Goldsmith, Cynthia Mailman, May Stevens, Sharon Wybrandts, and Sylvia Sleigh. On exhibit, they would be presented in a circle. Hanging above them, like a ceiling, would be a painting by Greenstein loosely representing dawn and sunset, with a Mylar gant hat as a laurel wreath, you will have my evaluation of Marianne Moore." This Sister Chapel installation, which may become a permanent one (Rowan University has been given most of the paintings, thanks to Hottle's efforts), also includes a selection of photographs, posters, and other related ephemera from the 1970s. Want to know more? Read Hottle's book The Art of the Sister Chapel: Exemplary Women, Visionary Creators and Feminist Collaboration, published in 2014. Through June 30 at Rowan University Art Gallery West at Westby Hall, Rowan University, 201 Mullica Hill Glassboro.

Summer hours by appointment. 856-256-4521 or www.rowan.edu. Sightings, Document Having already had their work selected for and exhibited in the Print Center's 90th annual International Competition, which favors "local, national, and international artists who utilize photography and printmaking in intriguing ways," finalists Jeffrey Dell, Andrew Fillmore, and Leah Makin have been awarded solo exhibitions there. (Additional awards will be announced in August, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Collection Award. Dell, Fillmore, and Mackin are eligible for those, as well.) Dell, a printmaker and professor at Texas State University, has the Print Center's ground-floor gallery for his show, "Sightings," composed of prints that depict what appear to be sheets of curled and folded paper floating in space.

Indeed, from a distance, Dell's delicately colored images on white backgrounds could pass for Plexiglas wall sculptures. Mackin, who received her bachelor of fine arts from the University of the Arts and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was recently awarded an artist's book residency grant from the Women's Studio Workshop. She is presenting "Portable Document" on the north side of the second-floor gallery. Her haunting inkjet prints, drawings, mono-prints, and a steel sculpture with intentional fingerprints on it are based on digital images of historical materials available online.

A New Yorker and graduate of Lewis and Clark College and the Rhode Island School of Design, Fillmore is a photographer of un-contrived still lifes and portraits found in his daily life. "This Time is Always the Present," also upstairs, offers offbeat, beautifully composed color images, among them one of a woman dyeing her hair and a pair of apples aging on a bathroom windowsill. "Frida Kahlo" by Shirley Gorelick, a 1976 painting in the Sister Chapel at the Rowan University Art Gallery. 8 "mirror" at its center. Connor's fabric structure would form the "chapel." Now, finally in its completed form, the Sister Chapel is best enjoyed as a whole, a remarkably preserved and improved time capsule.

Neel's 1976 portrait of Bella Abzug, for example, though recognizably a Neel, is not her best work, probably because she used photographs of the congresswom-an as her source rather than painting her from life (Abzug was campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate at the time). Some other paintings are painfully dated. The two exceptionally powerful paintings here are Shirley Gorelick's portrait of Frida Kahlo, painted in 1976, which borrows its surreal imagery from several of Kahlo's own self-portraits, and Holliday's 1977 angular and ghostly Marianne Moore, of which Holli-day observed, "I've made her whimsical and faintly Mary Poppins-ish, but if you read the white gloves as gauntlets, the umbrella as a sword, and the extrava "Cerebral Box Nr. 12," by Bastien Aubrey and Dimitri Broquard, at Fjord.

xhibii dtAptay ihhpuqh $jum 30ih Blue Cross RiverRink Summerfest Mondays thru Fridays 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Weekends by appointment For more information: 215-735-3250 or infoaisphila.org Waterfront Nenne Sanguineti Poggi: Artist Without Borders There's an extraordinary art show right now at the America Italy Society in Center City, Nenne Sanguineti Poggi: Artist Without Borders. The show consists of seventy artworks, paintings, drawings, prints and mixed media, and sculptural relief, a retrospective of a respected Italian artist who spent three decades working in Africa. What makes the show so unusual and compelling is the glimpse of the times it offers, encompassing a full ninety years of the artist's working life on two continents.

She lived long, from 1909-2012, and was active and independent right up to the last. The artist received the Italian Presidential Medal of Recognition posthumously in May 2013. Born in Savona, Italy, into a family of intellectual and cultural achievement, Sanguineti Poggi's artistic talent was recognized early, and she studied with respected artist Eso Peluzzi. In her early twenties, she married and left Europe for Africa, where she spent thirty years living and working in Eritrea, for a while a colony of Italy. She fell deeply in love with the country and responded with great enthusiasm to its traditions and peoples.

She became sought after for her large-scale murals, mosaics and concrete reliefs and was awarded numerous commissions for government buildings, churches and other architectural projects. She became a favored artist of Emperor Haile Selassie I (it's fascinating to see the news photos of their meetings!) While some of her public works have been taken down in Eritrea, possibly because they were reminders of Selassie's rule, many exist to this day in Asmara as well as in Addis Ababa and Axum. While Sanguineti Poggi delighted in the traditions of Eritrea and Ethiopia, she also acted as a bridge between cultures, engaging in serious artistic dialogue with the major Western European art movements of the time. The influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, Miro and Klee are clearly seen moving through the decades of work produced by this long-lived artist. Yet these influences are always filtered through the artist's strong spirit: an energetic blend of intellectual curiosity, humor and joi de vivre that was uniquely her own.

The artist's confident hand, strong sense of composition and recurring interest in magic, symbolism, religion and the history of art can be traced throughout her career. One of the most moving moments in the exhibition is seeing Sanguineti Poggi's last drawing, a soft self-portrait with angels, made in the final year of her life. It is hung next to the earliest piece in the show, another self-portrait drawing done at age 13. A similar bright questing spirit shines clearly through each despite the ninety years that separate them. (Nancy Bea Miller is an artist, writer, college professor and independent art curator.

She studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Edinburgh, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.) Independence CapitaJOne VISIT I PHILADELPHIA 10 3s Mec.