New Art Association of Harrisburg exhibit

There's an exhibition of works from the organization's permanent collection is currently on display, with art that translates into a visual catalog of the personalities, influences and styles that have been a part of AAH since its early days.Donors have been giving works of art to the Association since the organization was founded in 1926. It wasn't until the association fortuitously acquired its headquarters in the Governor Findlay mansion on Front Street that the permanent collection has been of significant size.

The current exhibit is a history of the artistic life of the association, said Terrie Hosey, AAH's curator. Some works were donated by people who were forced to downsize, or in memory of a deceased artist. Others were part of an estate or bequest. A few were donated from benefactors who helped an artist by accepting paintings in exchange for art supplies or transportation.

The permanent collection resides in the fourth floor of AAH's historic building, stored on racks that make it difficult to know exactly what's up there. There's not a lot of storage space, and some really excellent works aren't framed yet, Hosey said.Once she selected the works for the exhibit, she hauled them down several flights of stairs, carefully cleaned each item and decided how best to display the oil painting reproduction.

One beautiful old oil painting had a small tear in the canvas that couldn't be seen in the storage space. It's hardly noticeable on the wall. These works can be as fragile as living creatures. 

What can you see in the exhibit? On the main ground floor room there are colorful works in different styles by Lorenzo Ayala, Clyde McGeary, Brian Rogers and Kathleen Piunti, among other artists. Other familiar names include the late watercolorist Nick Ruggieri and Wanda Macomber.There are a couple of erotic photographs by Lancaster-based Bruce Fry and some intriguing book illustrations by Alden Turner. A three-dimensional shaped canvas in yellow and green by Gary Jurysta immediately evokes the 1960s.

On the way upstairs, there's a portrait of a vaguely familiar face on the landing. It's Dave Miner's "Johnnie Johnson." At one time, Johnson was the night watchman at the Art Association, and a fixture at exhibition openings. Continue on your way, and you'll end up in the Charles "Li" Hidley room, dedicated to works by him and his students. Hidley was an outstandingly important artist and teacher at AAH from 1966 until his death in 2003. He served as the organization's idiosyncratic curator and receptionist. He was also responsible for the acquisition of many of the works that are included in AAH's permanent collection.
Incubus.jpg'Incubus with a Lily' by Li HidleyTerrie Hosey

AAH president Carrie Wissler-Thomas was once a student of his, and she said that the room illustrates the transforming influence Hidley had on many fine artists, not just those who painted in his expressionist style. "He burst upon the scene in the mid '60s," she said, "and he dedicated himself to freeing his students from the constrictions of the past."

Wissler-Thomas is currently working on a book about the vivid history of the AAH, and she portrayed one of its founders, Mrs. Gertrude McCormick, in Open Stage of Harrisburg's recent production. It's McCormick's massive and elegant portrait that greets you when you walk in the front door of the historic building.

“Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy” is explored in depth a read-the-whole-thing essay by Robert W. Merry in the National Interest. Originally published at the start of the year, Power Line linked to Merry’s article on Sunday, and it’s definitely worth revisiting. ”A question haunts America: Is it in decline on the world scene?” Merry writes, before noting that “an analysis of Western decline must lead to Oswald Spengler.”

Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published in 1918; but Spengler* wrote it assuming that Germany would win World War I, and thus rule over of an increasingly exhausted and nihilistic Europe. Well, he got it half right — and when Germany lost the war, the title and thesis of his book was taken as a prophetic, and it became hugely influential in his native country. Spengler lived in the era that was post-Nietzsche and the rest of the 19th century “bearded God killers,” as religious scholar Martin E. Marty memorably dubbed them, but died in 1936, before seeing World War II, and the Allies’ victory of National Socialism, followed by their Cold War struggle against International Socialism.

As for Western science, it wasn’t accidental that the telescope was a Western invention or that human flight first occurred in the West. Likewise, with drama, particularly tragedy, the West developed a penetrating “biographical” approach, as opposed to the Greeks’ “anecdotal” outlook. One deals with the entirety of a life, the other with a single moment. Asks Spengler, “What relation . . . has the entire inward past of Oedipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?” On the other hand, “There is not the smallest trait in the past existence of Othello—that masterpiece of psychological analysis—that has not some bearing on the catastrophe.” Western artistic expression probed deeply into the psychology of life and ultimately found its way to a preoccupation with the individual—the dawning of that personality idea that later was to create the sacrament of contrition and personal absolution.

    If, in fine, we look at the whole picture—the expansion of the Copernican world into that aspect of stellar space that we possess today; the development of Columbus’s discovery into a worldwide command of the earth’s surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and the theatre; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks—we see, emerging everywhere, the prime symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth called “Will,” “Force,” and “Deed” must be regarded as derivatives of this prime symbol.

But, concluded Spengler, all that yearning, probing, exploration and artistic expression was finished in the West of a century ago. Signs of the new civilizational phase, he wrote, were evident in the new pseudoartistic expression that no longer celebrated the West’s fundamental cultural ideas but rather assaulted them; in the rise of impersonal world-cities whose cosmopolitanism overwhelmed the folk traditions of old; in the preoccupation with the money culture; in declining birthrates and the rise of the Ibsen woman who belongs to herself; and finally in the death struggle that had emerged between the democratic state of England with its ethic of success and the socialist state of Germany with its ethic of duty.

Simply put, the digitization of social interaction, economic transaction, the political process and everything in between is decentralizing the world, moving it in the opposite direction of the massive centralization of Obamacare. But nobody needs a federal bureaucrat to tell him what health insurance to buy when anybody with an Internet connection can simultaneously solicit bids from dozens of competing providers, pay the winner via electronic fund transfer, manage the claims process with a laptop, consult with physicians and other medical specialists via email, and even be operated on remotely by surgeons on the other side of the globe. Rather than imposing a top-down, command-economy, welfare-state health care model with roots in Otto von Bismarck‘s Germany of 1881, a 21st century government would ask what is needed to apply to health care access the Internet’s boundless capacity to empower individual choice.

Click on their website http://artsunlight.com/.