b. 1936

ELIZABETH OSBORNE (b. 1936)

A ghostly figure looking out from a doorway; actual windshield wipers positioned over a painted car window; vividly clothed, sensuous figures posed in sparse rooms; land and sky betraying no brushstrokes, horizons to infinity; supernaturally precise still lifes that stop time; charged explorations of the painter’s studio, the past asserting itself in mirrors; vivid bands of light and color echoing the sounds of the cosmos. Few artists of Elizabeth Osborne’s generation have explored as wide a range of subject matter. Driven by curiosity and an unwillingness to repeat herself, Osborne has frequently shifted working methods to support new directions. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Osborne has been at the center of its art world, a critical figure integral to the city’s cultural identity as an educator and as an innovator in her studio. Her art bears the impact of her time in Philadelphia but transcends place, running with multiple streams of modernism and post-war painting.

Osborne had a progressive Quaker education at Friends Central School near the original site of the Barnes Foundation. Two mentors in her childhood, Louis W. Flaccus and Hobson Pittman, supported her early drive and talent in art. Flaccus, a family friend, was a professor of Philosophy and amateur painter; Pittman was a professional artist who taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and at Friends Central. Both men encouraged Osborne to defy societal expectations of young women and to trust her passion and instincts for a career in art. Osborne took advantage of everything that Philadelphia offered a young artist. She visited galleries, museums, and took additional classes outside of her school week at the Philadelphia Museum College (now University of the Arts) with painter Neil Welliver. Surviving work from this period shows that Osborne was quick to understand observational drawing, grasping the nuances of form and the emotional capacity of line and color.

These relationships grounded Osborne as she endured a series of traumatic losses during childhood and into her teens. Her father Charles died from leukemia in 1945. Three years later her mother, Virginia, killed herself by overdosing on pills. Osborne and her siblings, including an older brother and a twin sister, were left to be raised by Virginia’s brother and wife. In 1954 while painting a portrait of her grandfather, he revealed that her biological father was the architect, Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), who had died the same year as Charles Osborne, further illuminating the impact of loss on her mother. In 1955 her twin sister Anne killed herself while Osborne was traveling in France on a fellowship. These tragedies have resurfaced in her work throughout her career in unexpected ways – as figures who seem to be mirages, objects intimately observed but separated from one another as though unknowable. Osborne has reflected on the impact of grief on her work and how it affected her figure paintings:

"My work really was affected for a while by the loss of loved ones, of the presence of death…In the figurative paintings there’s probably this connection with longing and missing my sister in the solitary figures and the darkness with figures emerging and receding…Losing people is imprinted…there is a natural impulse to have these people back. They disappear from your sight, your life but they reappear when you try to go to sleep at night."[1]

By 1954 Osborne had entered PAFA while simultaneously working towards a BFA at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, PAFA was a mixture of progressive instructors and conservative academics resistant to many modernist developments of the previous half century. Founded in 1805 and the first museum and art school in the United States, it was an immersive experience for art students, offering a rich permanent collection and annual exhibitions of contemporary American art. Among her instructors were experimental figure painter Ben Kamihira, abstract artist Jimmy Lueders, realists Francis Speight and Walter Stuempfig, and traditional modernist Franklin Watkins. Osborne’s training encompassed working from life models, drawing from casts and still life set ups, and other rigorous beaux-arts-based pedagogy. She maintains that her most fruitful relationships and education came through the camaraderie between friends and fellow students including Raymond Saunders.

Osborne was a successful student, mastering the techniques and rigor of the program at PAFA but eager to expand her knowledge outside of the studio. She visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation then in its original Paul Cret designed building in Merion, Pennsylvania. She also took trips to New York by train to visit museums and galleries. At PAFA, she and other advanced students became friendly with painting conservator Ted Siegel and spent much time in conversation with him in his studio and observing his work. Osborne won prestigious travel awards from PAFA, which enabled her to go to Europe in 1955, 1957, and 1958. After graduating from PAFA and UPenn, Osborne started exhibiting professionally and had considered going to California for further study with artist Richard Diebenkorn, whose work she had seen at PAFA. These plans were diverted, however, when she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to work in Paris in 1963 to 1964, where she produced a body of work inspired by subway riders, signs, cars, windows, and mirrors.  

Osborne’s work at this time ranged from thickly painted figure studies, featuring searing planes of color to muted nocturnal fragments of urban experience. Poised between mid-century explorations of the body’s existential predicament and the polyphonic cacophony of pop, Osborne understood her aspiration to be in line with the work of older artists who had used the figure for self- and social examination. Contemporaries such as Francis Bacon, Nathan Oliveira, and Theodore Roszak had been included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 exhibition, New Images of Man, and Osborne took note of the alternative they provided to Abstract Expressionism. In her successful Fulbright application, for which Roszak wrote a support letter, she noted that her “most tangible and penetrating experiences all involved the relationships between myself and others. Painting became more and more important as a means of expressing this realization.” She argued that the uninterrupted focus a Fulbright fellowship could provide would help “lessen the gap between” herself and her painting.[2]

Osborne’s work from the beginning was thus about the capacity for painting and representation, despite its distance from photographic realism, to present embodied experience. Sensation, emotion, physical discomfort, the brightness of daylight, and the somber condition of mid-winter dusk. How do these conditions affect the body of the artist and thus the viewer? In Osborne’s hands the absence of a depicted body does not disconnect corporeality from the equation. About her later abstractions, she considered the kinetic trace of her hand’s presence to be a direct link with the viewer’s presence in front of her painting. “My eye, as the viewer, also moves across this wavy brush mark, which then becomes like a point of contact.”[3]

By 1963, Osborne accepted a teaching position at PAFA, the first full time female faculty member there since Cecilia Beaux and Violet Oakley had taught there at the turn of the 20^th century. In 1964 she married her first husband, Robert Cooper, who trained as an architect and eventually worked in Louis Kahn’s firm. Their daughter Audrey was born in 1971. Cooper and Osborne’ circle of friends included not only Kahn and other architects but writers in Philadelphia, including Steven Berg, Jeff [S. J.] Marks, and C. K. Williams who co-founded The American Poetry Review.

In 1972 Osborne had her first solo show at Marian Locks’ gallery, beginning a fruitful, half century association with the gallery. Marian Locks was a visionary gallerist who connected Philadelphia and New York artists for the Philadelphia public and promoted her artists with passion, intelligence, and business savvy. Osborne met artists Edna Andrade and Diane Burko, who became lifelong friends. Andrade was an early innovator of rigorous optical abstraction and Burko already involved in the burgeoning feminist art movement and ecologically oriented landscape painting. Osborne’s work had subtle elements of both by this point, and yet would never completely emphasize geometric abstraction (except in a discrete homage to Andrade) or declare her landscapes to be political.

Osborne had already made three distinctive bodies of work that critics had reviewed well: thickly painted figure paintings and still lifes; dark paintings incorporating objects ranging from windshield wipers and rear-view mirrors to doors and windows; and large colorful figure paintings of couples in bright rooms. It must have come as a shock to view her new work, which had no figural content and presented crisp, clear, clean landscapes in assertive colors, made flat on the studio floor, in poured technique on unprimed canvas. Several appeared in an early exhibition drawing attention to our changing landscape called The Topography of Nature: The Microcosm and Macrocosm organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Osborne’s new paintings were based on little watercolor studies and photographs done on site on the Atlantic coast and in the Southwest.

Rather than reproduce these views in larger form, the new paintings used them as a starting point to explore new ways of working with thinned down paint. “A lot of new and exciting things came together in these paintings,” she explained. “I was working on a larger scale than ever before in a new medium which was thrilling to use and had a great range. I put aside brushes and oils and worked on unprimed canvas. I wasn’t feeling constrained by [PAFA’s] point of view towards light and form and took liberties with my subject matter. The approach allowed me the freedom to take these forms, rocks, vegetation, water, mountains, and push them towards abstraction. It moved me more into that realm than ever before.” [4] Exhibitions of these paintings at Marian Locks Gallery sold quickly and were well received by critics.

Not content to ride the wave of attention from these paintings, by the mid-1970s, Osborne shifted again. She applied her new fluid approach to large scale acrylics and oils to the figure, working with a model named Nava who posed nude and in floral dresses with Osborne’s modernist landscapes behind her. Osborne also began to spend more time with watercolor, eventually developing a technique that has few peers anywhere for its luminosity and precision. She arranged a wide array of challenging set ups that featured colored glass and curved vessels, elaborate floral arrangements and austere table-top compositions staged before complex fabrics.

The watercolors brought Osborne further attention in New York where they were exhibited for many years at Fischbach Gallery and invited to major surveys of the medium throughout the United States. Virginia Butera, reviewing her 1982 exhibition at Fischbach, wrote that, “[Osborne] imbues [her subjects]…with a delicately balanced fragility which makes [her work] seem eternal and, at the same time, on the verge of shattering. A calm (enough to make this reviewer nervous) reigns over each painstakingly arranged composition. Not one element is out of place. And yet the strength of the pieces is emphatically a result of the omnipresent tension created by the juxtaposition of the man-made geometric perfection and the irregularity of nature.”[5] To many critics, what made these seemingly modest pictures exhilarating and emotionally complex was that despite their beauty, they bore a terrible tension that underscored isolation and separation. The objects had personalities.

Osborne could have coasted on these for another decade as the New York exhibitions sold out and she received commission requests, but she grew weary of the demands they made on her attention and technique. True to form, she brought what she had learned in doing these works into her work of the mid-to late-1980s. Aware of a new body of work to that which had come before, Osborne has always remained self-critical and thoughtful about how to proceed. “It’s always been very satisfying to me to feel that from one group of paintings to another, I’ve moved forward,” she told an interviewer as early as 1969. “I think this is the best way a painter can judge himself: by measuring himself against himself.”[6] She produced a series of ambitious, rigorously designed, and precisely executed still lifes and a tour-de-force self-portrait (1987) seen in a mirror, firmly if incongruously, in the tradition of both 15^th century Flemish painting and contemporary American realists such as Sylvia Mangold and Gregory Gillespie.

Despite Osborne’s deep engagement with painting objects and patterned fabrics, landscape remained critical to her identity. Alongside of these other genres she worked in sketchbooks everywhere she went, depicting water, plants, animals, birds, and the unique geography of place. Trips to New Mexico, Maine, Arizona, Manchester, Massachusetts, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, Ireland, and Mexico taught her the varied conditions of light unique to each locale. In the 1990s she changed the way she articulated space and texture in landscapes. Osborne’s brushwork became larger, thicker, bolder, less connected to precise imagery and more open to suggestion and experience. Instead of carefully delineating terrain or describing specifics of ecology, she laid down color in horizontal bands, pulling the thick sticky paint across the width of canvas or panel with a firmly pulled wide brush. Sometimes she’d go in and work the result, adding islands to a seascape or other markers of place. Other times Osborne allowed the raw brushwork to be, considering their character to be enough to suggest atmosphere, a time of day or season, and mesmerize the viewer with color. No matter the degree of abstraction, each reads as place somehow, and Osborne intended them to have direct connections to observed locations.

On the eve of her retrospective at PAFA in 2009, Elizabeth Osborne completed three paintings that abandoned this attachment to place and terrain. Titled Lux I-III (2008-09), they present glowing, saturated horizontal bands of color, some thick some thin. They melt into each other at the edges where they meet, the transitions seamless and elusive. They represent nowhere yet feel familiar, a primordial experience of seeing the place where Earth curves away and sky gradates to cosmos. Osborne had come close to total abstraction throughout her career, bringing representation to the brink of dissolution. She compared that tendency to “walking a tightrope”[7] Around 2000-01 she had taken daring steps towards abstraction in a fascinating series of studio self-portraits, none showing a conventional self-image, all symbolic and psychological explorations of the painter’s tools. But identifiers of palette, brushes, windows, canvases and mirrors rooted the viewer to reality.

In the new paintings, she trusted her eye and experience to present color as light, as space, as itself. It sent her off on a new thread in her work that brought together everything that she had learned in a career that had by then spanned fifty years. She noted, “Some of the marks of the brush, especially in my abstractions, came out of the landscape paintings that I did for some time – site studies – where I was working with this kind of undulating brush mark to describe water or landscape forms. It was a mark that I had been using for a while, then I stopped doing landscape paintings, but the mark carried over in these abstractions. It’s just a mark I was comfortable using, this wavy mark.”[8]

This trio of paintings – Lux I-III – led Osborne into several years of direct engagement with abstraction, yielding a group of virtuoso paintings that reveal a sophisticated and sensuous understanding of color. They call to mind pictures of Saturn’s rings, the hum of electronics, portals to other worlds, and the most extraordinary terrestrial firey sunset skies. Yet none claims to represent a specific place, open ended and made with the trust of the viewer to meld with what is presented. In this way, Osborne balances the seen and unseen, sensation with design.

Osborne’s most recent paintings reincorporate the figure, a route inspired by seeing her daughter standing before one of her abstractions at an opening in 2013.[9] The new figure paintings incorporate backgrounds that carry the abstractions forward into her designs. Her second husband Ron (they married in 1991) sits reading before a bookcase, his body depicted with tangible volume and weight, his face pleasantly specific. Behind him, the full, tall bookcase is a dazzling display of colorful book spines, itself a vivid abstraction locked into context to be read as representation. In other paintings Osborne depicts her daughter from behind, a stand in for the viewer, immersed in looking at paintings, juxtaposing body and sensation directly. More recent paintings gesture toward mourning and mortality, including her late dog Jasper looking down from the top of a dark stairway. Large images of Osborne’s last Philadelphia studio painting racks or ghostly self-portraits set in her studio as she looks into the past to see her departed friend Jimmy Lueders, reveal her constant rumination on what painting can mean and how it connects to the past. In these pictures, Osborne shows how she remains “interested in getting a very exciting sort of range of paint, and using thin and heavy areas, and getting a certain psychological impact with the figure itself. A kind of haunting figure. Something that people really will remember and think about.”[10]

Robert Cozzolino
Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings
Minneapolis Institute of Art

[1] Author interview with Elizabeth Osborne, conducted on Januauary 9, 2009 in Philadelphia.
[2] Elizabeth Osborne, statement submitted to the Fulbright Foundation, n.d. Elizabeth Osborne papers, Philadelphia.
[3] Osborne in conversation with Anna Mecugni, in Kirsten M. Jensen, Veils of Color: Juxtapositions and Recent Work by Elizabeth Osborne (Doylestown, PA: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2015), 31.
[4] Author interview with Elizabeth Osborne, conducted on July 17, 2006, in Philadelphia.
[5] Virginia Fabbri Butera, “Elizabeth Osborne,” Arts Magazine (May 1982), 31-32.
[6] Osborne quoted in Andrea Knox, “Painter Elizabeth Osborne Sees Better Days Coming for Arts,” Center City Philadelphian (September 1969), 28.
[7] Eve Medoff, “Elizabeth Osborne: Painting with Light,” American Artist 41 (September, 1977), 36.
[8] Osborne, in conservation with Mecugni, in Jensen (2015), 30.
[9] Osborne, in conversation with Mecugni and Kristen M. Jensen, in Jensen (2015), 51.
[10] Oral history interview with Elizabeth Osborne, 1991, May 24. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Osborne’s work is represented in many important private and public collections, including American Re-Insurance, New York; AT&T, New York; Brown, Wood, Ivey, Mitchell, and Petty, New York; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; Chemical Bank, New York; CIGNA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Commerce Bancshares, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri; Dechert, Price and Rhoads, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware; Duane, Morris, and Heckscher, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; First Pennsylvania Bank, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; George Washington University, Washington D.C. ; James A. Michener Museum of Art, Doylestown, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York; Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Print Club of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Provident National Bank, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rahr-West Museum, Manitowoc, Wisconsin; Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania; Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge, New York; Simpson Thacher, Bartlett, New York; The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; UniDynamics Corporation, Stamford, Connecticut; Westinghouse Corporation, New York; and Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

CV

1936, born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1959, BFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1954-58, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Berry Campbell, New York, Elizabeth Osborne: A Retrospective, 2022.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Reflections: Painting Memory, 2017.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Watercolors: Five Decades, 2017.
The Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware, Elizabeth Osborne: The 1960s, 2016.
Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., Color Bloc: Paintings by Elizabeth Osborne, 2015.
The James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Veils of Color: Juxtapositions and Recent Work by Elizabeth Osborne, 2015. (Traveled to The Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2016.)
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Luminous Gestures: New Works by Elizabeth Osborne, 2013.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Osborne: Watercolors, 2011.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Work, 2011.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light, 2009.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Figurative ‘60s, 2007.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Floating Landscapes: 1971-1979, 2006.
J. Cacciola Galleries, New York, Works on Paper, 2006.
The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Recent Prints, 2005.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Osborne: 30 Years, Works on Paper, 2002.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Vantage, 2000.
Old Main Art Museum, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1998.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1997.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1994.
Jane Haslem Gallery, Washington, D.C., 1994.
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota, 1993-94.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1992.
Arronson Gallery, The University of Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Watercolors, 1991.
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1990.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1988.
Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1988.
Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1984.
Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1982.
Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1980.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1978.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1976.
Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, Ltd., New York, 1977.
Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, Ltd., New York, 1974.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Landscapes, 1972.
Makler Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1970.
American Consulate, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1969.
Peale Galleries, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1967.
Perakis Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1967.
Perakis Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1963.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, The Women of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: Past to Present, 2024.
Berry Campbell, New York, Perseverance, 2024.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, From Dusk Till Dawn, 2015.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “Something Clicked in Philly”: David Lynch and His Contemporaries, 2014.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, It’s Not the Numbers, 2014.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Works on Paper, 2013.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World, 2013.
Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Four Visions/Four Painters: Murray Dessner, Bruce Samuelson, Elizabeth Osborne and Vincent Desiderio, 2012.
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Same/Difference, 2010.
Main Line Art Center, Haverford, Pennsylvania, Main Line Collects Philadelphia, 2008.
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Invited Exhibition, 2008.
Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, PAFA Alumni Show, 2007.
Jane Haslem Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2006.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, In Full View: American Painting From 1720 to 2005, 2005.
The Academy at Penn, Kroiz Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2005.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Light, Line and Color, 2004.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Variable Geographies, 2003.
Kroiz Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Alumni Exhibition, 2003.
Davis Dominguez Gallery, Tucson, Arizona, 2002.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Watercolors at the Pennsylvania Academy, 2002.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Watercolors at the Pennsylvania Academy, 2000.
The Monmouth Museum, Monmouth, New Jersey, Contemporary Colors: Works on Paper, 1998.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Flowers in Mind, 1998.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Unbroken Line, 1997.
Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Floral Fantasy, 1996.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Twentieth Century Still Life, 1996.
Jane Haslem Gallery, Washington, D.C., American Watercolors and Drawings, 1995.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Faculty Exhibition, 1995.
William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1995.
Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania, Quartet: Four Pennsylvania Artists, 1994.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Modern Still Life; Drawings, Watercolors and Collage from the Permanent Collection, 1992.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Drawings Today, 1991.
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Directions, 1990.
Jane Haslem Gallery, Washington, D.C., Works on Paper, 1990.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Looking Back; The Seventies at Marian Locks, 1989.
The Pennsylvania State Museum, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Art of the State: Pennsylvania, 1989.
American College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Ninety-Second Annual Juried Exhibition, 1989.
Jane Haslem Gallery, Washington, D.C., Consonance, 1988.
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, The Luther Brady Collection, 1988.
Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho, The Janss Collection, 1988.
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, Mainstream America: Collection of Phillip Desind, 1987.
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pennsylvania, The Flower in Twentieth-Century American Art, 1987.
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Graphic Arts, 1986.
Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Celebrating Philadelphia, 1986.
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, American Realism: Twentieth-Century Drawings and Watercolors, San Francisco, 1985-1987. (Traveled to DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin).
CIGNA Headquarters, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, City View, Panoramas to Particulars: Works from the CIGNA Collection, 1985-1986.
William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, California, American Realism, 1985.
Impressions Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, Tulip Time, 1983.
Keny and Johnson Gallery, Columbus, Ohio, American Works on Paper (1883-1983), 1983.
Florida International University, Tamiami, Florida, Realist Watercolors, 1983.
Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas, Collector’s Art Gallery XVI, 1982.
Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York, A Feast for the Eyes; Contemporary Representations of Food, 1981.
Silvermine Guild Galleries, New Canaan, Connecticut, Still Life and Beyond, 1981.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, 1981. (Traveled to Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia and Oakland Museum, Oakland, California.)
Goddard-Riverside Community Center, New York, Still Life Today, 1980-1981.
State University of New York, Cortland, New York, Selections from the Fischbach Gallery, 1980.
University of North Dakota Galleries, Grand Forks, North Dakota, Waterworks, 1980.
Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, In Celebration of Prints, 1980.
Graphics I and II, Boston, Massachusetts, Still Life Prints, 1979.
Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Contemporary Drawings: Philadelphia II, 1979.
Allport Gallery, San Francisco, California, Women Artists in America, 1979.
Westmoreland County Museum, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, The New American Still Life, 1979.
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pennsylvania, Twenty-Five Pennsylvania Women Artists, 1979.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Artist and Teacher, 1979.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Paintings and Sculpture Today 1978, 1978.
National Academy of Design, New York, 1977.
Squibb Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey, 1977.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, 1976.
Pyramid Gallery, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia in Washington, 1976.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, In this Academy, 1976.
Glassboro State College, Glassboro, New Jersey, Landscape, 1975.
Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri, Watercolor, U.S.A., 1975.
Pennsylvania State Museum, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Five Pennsylvania Artists, 1975.
Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, PMA at MCA, 1975.
Bronx Museum of Arts, Bronx, New York, The Year of the Woman, 1975.
Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Women’s Work, American Art, 1974.
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Topography of Nature, 1972.
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, 1969.
Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., 1968.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1968.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1967.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1966.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1965.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1964.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1963.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1962.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Annual, 1961.

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Percy M. Owens Memorial Award for a Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist, 92^nd Annual Juried Exhibition, American College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1989.
MacDowell Colony Grant, 1983.
Harrison S. Morris Prize, Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1971.
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1968.
Ford Foundation Purchase Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1964.
Fulbright Scholarship, Paris, France, 1963.
Scheidt Traveling Fellowship, Cresson Traveling Fellowship, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1958.
Catherwood Traveling Fellowship, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1955.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS
American Re-Insurance, New York
AT&T, New York
Brown, Wood, Ivey, Mitchell, and Petty, New York
Chase Manhattan Bank, New York
Chemical Bank, New York
CIGNA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Commerce Bancshares, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri
Dechert, Price and Rhoads, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware
Duane, Morris, and Heckscher, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
First Pennsylvania Bank, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
George Washington University, Washington D.C.
James A. Michener Museum of Art, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York
Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Print Club of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Provident National Bank, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Rahr-West Museum, Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania
Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge, New York
Simpson Thacher, Bartlett, New York
The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
UniDynamics Corporation, Stamford, Connecticut
Westinghouse Corporation, New York
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania