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October 3, 1999
HOUSE OF ART ELLEN POWELL TIBERINO, WHO DIED IN 1992, WAS A MAJOR TALENT WITH PAINTBRUSH AND PENCIL. WHICH IS WHY FAMILY AND FRIENDS HAVE TURNED THE POWELTON VILLAGE HOUSE SHE LIVED AND WORKED IN INTO A MUSEUM.
Edward J. Sozanski, INQUIRER ART CRITIC
The modest museum in Powelton Village that celebrates the art and life of the late Ellen Powell Tiberino doesn't announce itself grandly. There isn't even a small sign to indicate that 3819 Hamilton St. houses a collection of work by one of Philadelphia's most respected artists.
A large yew bush that partially obscures the front of the red brick building deflects visitors to an entrance at the side, through an iron archway laced with vines. Once inside, they're immediately enveloped in the Spirit of Art.
Tiberino, who died in 1992, was a major talent with a paintbrush or a pencil. She was also beloved and admired for her humanity and perseverance in battling cancer for 14 years before it finally wore her down at age 54.
The museum - formally the Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum of Contemporary American Art - has been established in the West Philadelphia house where she lived, worked and died.
It's a low-budget, family-and-friends project launched publicly several weeks ago with a weekend-long dedication attended by several hundred of Tiberino's admirers.
It's starting out with a substantial body of her paintings, drawings and pastels installed in an environment that reflects the kind of art-devoted life she led.
Besides housing part of the museum, 3819 Hamilton also serves as the gateway to one of the city's most unusual art establishments, a delightful communal courtyard adorned with artwork by various Tiberinos and their friends.
The spirit of this space, which in large part is Ellen's spirit, is infectious. Even a casual visitor can sense that the people who live in this compound, which involves nine properties on both sides of the block bounded by Hamilton and Spring Garden Streets, not only love art but care for one another.
Ellen's husband, Joseph Tiberino, their children and a number of friends and supporters have decided that Ellen's accomplishments as an artist should be permanently enshrined, not only for her survivors but for the public.
The museum they're developing already houses a collection of 75 to 80 works from all phases of her career. Some are owned by family members, others are lent from outside the family.
Joseph, also a painter and muralist of considerable achievement, explained during a recent tour that while a memorial collection was the primary impetus for the museum, he had two other objectives in mind for it.
"We want to show other artists' work, too, in special exhibitions. And we also want to establish a permanent collection of work by Ellen's contemporaries," he said.
These would be artists such as local sculptors Joe Brenman and John Simpson, who installed examples of their work in the courtyard for a recent public celebration of the museum's founding. Their work will remain on view through the end of the year.
Ellen Tiberino was not only a talented artist who invested the figurative tradition with an expressionistic African American spirit; she represented a natural fusion of black and white culture that was much less common when she married Joseph, an Italian American, in 1967.
She was the daughter of sharecroppers who migrated to Philadelphia from Cape Charles, at the southern tip of Virginia's eastern shore, in 1937. She was born only a few weeks after they arrived here.
She attended Overbrook High School and went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1956-61. She did so well there that she was awarded a prestigious Cresson Travel Scholarship in 1959, which she used to tour Europe.
She lived in New York for about six years during the 1960s before moving back to Philadelphia to marry Joseph, also a city native and an alumnus of what is now the University of the Arts. Her paintings from this early period of her career, as he pointed out, are somewhat dark, sometimes so dark that the figures can barely be made out.
Ellen's art was figurative, expressionistic and passionate. As she explained once in a interview, "When I am asked where I get my inspiration, I say it's all my life, my friends, everything I've seen and known. And I want to make it all come together and make sense and make people see. There's a feeling of joy that comes with it.
"I don't think enough credit is given to the real things in life, what I base my work on," she continued. "Many people want only beauty around them, and I record life."
Her subjects were often girls and women expressing self-awareness or experiencing basic life situations such as pregnancy and motherhood. African American life and history was also a consistent theme. One of her late works is a pastel drawing of her mother and father, William and Queenie Powell, standing in a rural Virginia landscape.
Tiberino drew with considerable authority and vigor; her style communicates her passion as an artist and her own vibrant personality. There's nothing delicate about her work, but there is considerable tenderness and empathy.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds five of her drawings in its permanent collection. Director Anne d'Harnoncourt described them as "a wonderful group, extraordinarily full of character, that we're very proud to have."
"For me, her use of line is remarkable," d'Harnoncourt continued. "It's alive and forceful, and it communicates something on its own in addition to [the character of] the person she's depicting."
Tiberino's philosophy of working from life once led her into controversy. In 1986, she and Joseph, with whom she often collaborated, made a relief sculpture about the 1985 MOVE disaster, in which five children died. It depicted Mayor Wilson Goode as the alter ego of Death. Installed at the Temple University School of Law as part of a Black History Month exhibition, it caused an uproar.
She exhibited widely in New York and Philadelphia, particularly at the Hahn Gallery in Chestnut Hill, and attracted a devoted group of collectors. She had the first solo exhibition at the former Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, now the African American Museum in Philadelphia, in 1977.
Ellen passed on her talent to the three sons and a daughter she had with Joseph: Raphael, Leonardo, Ellen and Gabriel. As an artistic family, the Tiberinos have earned a place in Philadelphia history alongside the more famous Peales, Sartains and Wyeths.
Joseph noted that all four children displayed artistic talent as children. Raphael, 30, is a professional artist in New York, while 16-year-old Gabriel, who attends the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, puts in a professional level of studio time.
"He's a prodigy, he breathes paint," his father said of Gabriel, who had a gallery show when he was only 8 years old.
Twenty-five-year-old Ellen, a student at Community College of Philadelphia, still makes art, but not full-time. Leonardo, 28, is now a Muslim minister in New York.
The Tiberino compound involves all or parts of nine properties on Spring Garden and Hamilton Streets. Some houses are owned by family members, while several neighbors have donated their yards to the enterprise.
Raphael owns one of the houses; it contains two galleries of his mother's work, including many of her later pictures.
The rest of the museum installation is hung in a first-floor gallery at 3819 Hamilton, along with a few works in a basement gallery converted from a workshop. The space is magically transformed by an exuberant floor mural painted by Joseph, Raphael and Gabriel.
While Ellen's career is the principal focus, a visitor can't wander anywhere in the compound without encountering art by Joseph, who remarried two years ago, and her two sons, all of whom are comfortable painting at mural scale.
Raphael has contributed a large painting of his mother and father, done from photographs. It's installed in an outdoor lean-to at the side of 3819 that Joseph uses as an al fresco studio.
At one corner of the courtyard, in one of the "borrowed" backyards, Gabriel has painted a mural that depicts African American men in various roles, from soldier to artist, the latter a self-portrait.
Joseph, who works in a style reminiscent of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, has constructed an elaborate, high-relief mural that wraps around one side and the back of the 3819 building.
In a back room of Raphael's house on the Spring Garden side of the compound, visitors encounter Joseph's "contemporary chapel," which contains paintings of two time-honored religious subjects, the Last Supper and Christ's deposition from the cross, as well as a painting of Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro commemorating the Pope's trip to Cuba.
The effect of this environment - part village commune, part shrine, part artist's studio - is to frame Ellen's work within its natural context, which is eclectic and religiously flavored as well as biracial.
For instance, 3819 contains two small rooms fitted out as chapels, complete with devotional candles, where a local priest has often said Mass. One chapel contains a painting of Ellen nursing an infant Raphael, the other a sculpture by Brenman of a Salvadoran family who sought refuge in Philadelphia.
The deep respect and affection Ellen inspired in others has enabled her museum to launch itself on a limited budget, which is evident in its lack of slickness and marketing razzle-dazzle.
It's run by a volunteer board of about 20 members, Joseph said. "Except for me, none of them is an artist," he quipped.
The museum has just acquired part of the house at 3817 Hamilton as a loan, and hopes by spring to convert it into more galleries so that the display can be expanded. Now that the institution is formally organized, it plans to seek foundation support to augment the $5 donations it asks from visitors.
The museum is truly a labor of love, and when you go though it, love is what you're likely to take away with you.
IF YOU GO The Ellen Powell Tiberino Museum is situated at 3819 Hamilton St. in West Philadelphia. It is open from noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. A $5 donation is requested. Information: 215-382-2003.
Copyright (c) 1999 The Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted with permission
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