not quite according to plan

For a start, it has been pouring - pouring - with drenching cold rain.  The shuttle van taking a group of us from Bethlehem to Philadelphia airport was late - luckily, I didn't have a plane to catch ... because the driver had the time wrong (but I think everyone made their flight); then the cab driver taking me to my hotel got lost (or rather, his GPS kept trying to get him lost) - and on neither journey could either driver possibly have seen where they were going.  Then ... if I'd been more awake this last week, and less preoccupied with NAVSA, I might have woken up to the fact that the workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are on strike against unfair labor practices - and that the day and a half I'd planned at the PMA wasn't feasible - no way I'm crossing their picket line.  I've had this planned for months - and chose my (very nice, small, non-corporate) hotel to be close by - one reason why I was walking so much in the deluge.

But I went to the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, which has the most wonderful neo-Gothic architecture - pure Ruskinian - designed by Frank Heyling Furness and George Hewitt after the first one burned down, and opened as part of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition.  It looks framed as a triptych above - great window design.

Here it is in the rain.

Unfortunately, not a lot of the permanent collection is on show - but I was interested (in the light of the work I've been doing on Joseph Pennell, and Pennell's admiration for him) in this Childe Hassam, The Hovel and the Skyscraper (1905) - a view of Central Park from Hassam's building on W 67th that's about to be obliterated by a skyscraper.  There are so many different types of work going on ...

I didn't want to drown my iPhone by taking it out in the heaviest rain, so here are some damp roses taken during one of the lighter moments.

At the helpful suggestion of a couple of women working in the PAFA shop, I went to the Fabric Workshop and Museum, which had some terrifically interesting works on/using fabric - I'll single out this silk hanging by Alison Saar (Betye Saar's daughter), Hair Story (1987), which re-interprets popular African American hair styles from the 1950s as African barber shop signs;

and Sarah Sze's Four Rocks (2014) - photographs of rocks on the Maine coast printed on Tyvek and attached to armatures so as to look like themselves.  And yes! They are covered in lichen!  I guess this turns my time here into a research trip, after all...