Presenting Artists

George Apotsos is a ceramicist, painter and installation artist.  In his work TORSO, Apotsos depicts a fragmented human body on nine miniature ceramic houses.  He uses the home as a metaphor in response to the way we connect through technology (Internet) in an attempt to be intimate while maintaining a safe distance. The human body in TORSO, as in ancient Greece, is a depiction of an ideal, although one that is in need of unification and wholeness.  Apotsos interplays the sacred and the corporeal in an attempt to coalesce these seemingly disparate yet vitally connected entities.

George Apotsos is a 1985 alumni of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a Fairmount resident since 1989.

Having studied with James Weeks and Philip Guston at Boston University’s School of Visual Arts, and received her MFA degree, Ann Northrup moved to Philadelphia in 1981. Living and working in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, she has often painted the lush and beautiful scenery of the Wissahickon Park, right in her own backyard. She is showing those works as well as others from her numerous painting adventures to some very different places: the Massachusetts coast, as well as the waterfalls of the Berkshire Hills, the dry and fantastically eroded Torrey Pines Park of San Diego, the rugged Marin Headlands of Sausalito CA, Italy’s Umbrian farmlands, the confluences of the great rivers and the majestic skies of the St. Louis area, and most  recently, the quirky shapes of the bare hills and creeks of north-central Wyoming in the winter.

These very different landscapes allow her to connect to emotional and elemental themes that she uses as metaphor in other paintings, both small and extra large. For instance her mural “Sandy’s Dream”, at Main and Levering Streets in Manayunk, uses the rugged California coast to represent the difficult challenge of Ovarian cancer, and the beautiful, but sometimes uncaring quality of nature.  Her  mural, “Going Home” uses a watercolor of the pathway through a Fairmount Park cliff to represent the difficult path out of prison and back home. Her newest mural “Taste of Summer”, at Juniper and Spruce, depicts a celebratory family meal in a deep and enchanting garden space. Smaller related works are being shown at the George Apotsos Studio, as well as photographs of the murals.

John Howieson was born in the wilds of Dallas, Tx.  He is just as proud of his Southern upbringing on the barren planes, under the open skies, as he is to call the crowded, Revolutionary, City of Brotherly Love home.  When he arrived a few years ago on the Eastern Seaboard, he was instantly awestruck by the derelict, and often remote, abandoned structures of the city.  These are often vestiges of Philadelphia’s days as an important manufacturing, and industrial town.  The idea of decay, symbolically and often literally, juxtaposed against the gleaming skyscrapers of Center City, is poignant to him. 

He has become a fervent advocate for the preservation of what sites Philadelphia has not lost to the wrecking ball, or implosion. His preservation technique, in its most powerful form, is his photographic documentation of these forgotten and sometimes forbidden monuments to industry, history, and society.

John is proudly, primarily, self-trained.  His initial exposure and experience in the craft comes from a childhood intermittently spent in his mother’s dark room.  Later, whilst running a photo lab, he truly learned the science behind the medium.  His further education has enhanced his work, as it is still imbued with a mystic, ethereal, yet aesthetic quality that can ensnare what is oft imperceptible by eye alone.  This occasion marks his debut in local galleries.  He is both honored and intrigued that a broader public can now join him on his visual journey of an ever-changing metropolis. 

Shira Walinsky is a muralist and painter.  She is a lead muralist for the Philadelphia Mural Arts since 1999.  The familiar mural on the Spring Garden Bridge, is one of her earliest murals.   Born in Los Angeles, California, her family moved to Philadelphia when she was one.  She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College  in 1995. She is a recent resident of the Fairmount district and has a studio in west Philadelphia.  She teaches at Drexel University.