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October 4, 1991
HOME DELIGHTS HEART AND EYE
Kimberly J. McLarin, Inquirer Staff Writer
It is dark yet oddly bright, old but constantly changing, with colors and thick paints and shapes that spring from the walls, this house, the place where artists gather, this home of Joe and Ellen Powell Tiberino.
It sits on an unremarkable street in Powelton Village. Red-brick and slighty run-down like the neighborhood. From the outside it seems to be just another simple home, aging fast.
But inside this house is a wealth of paintings, sculptures and ceramics that seem to grow from the walls and stand up from the floors, an outpouring of visual delights so big that it spills onto the patio with its hand-painted tiles, crawls up the walls and across the garden and into the house behind.
For more than 20 years, Ellen Powell Tiberino - Philadelphia's most prominent black female artist - and her husband, Joe - a muralist and sculptor who works on a grand scale - have lived and worked in this magical place.
Along the way they have helped establish a community of artists who use the house as a base for their collaborative efforts, and each other as a source of support and inspiration.
"It's peaceful," Joe Tiberino said. "You can go out there and do your work and be cut off from the whole world."
"I love to bring my work here and work with everyone sitting around talking," said sculptor Earle Wilkie.
Today, Joe and Ellen Powell Tiberino, their son Raphael Tiberino and four other artists known collectively as the Rambla Group will open an exhibition of major works at Galerie Nadeau, 118 N. Third St.
The collaborative exhibition is a natural outgrowth of the long-standing friendships among the group's members, which also include Wilkie, Roea, Gail Gruninger, Joe Brenman and Rinagai Jawer.
"It's very exciting to be around people who are juicy with life," said painter Jawer. "They're delicious. It's kind of a blessing."
Joe Tiberino and Ellen Powell both grew up in Philadelphia - he at Fifth Street and Susquehanna Avenue, she in Mantua in West Philadelphia. They met at a party. She was on her way to New York after traveling through Europe on the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship Award.
For him it was instant attraction; for her the bug took longer to bite. The stylish couple dated off and on for more than five years before marrying in 1967 and returning to Philadelphia to start a family. They moved to Powelton Village, exulting in the spacious old houses and affordable prices even if the area was considered slightly undesirable by your average, strait-laced Jane and Joe.
For artists it was a creative community, the only place to be.
"It was a very serious art colony," Joe Tiberino said. "There were about five of us who regularly went from one place to another. . . . It was like a constant interchange of creative energy."
The Tiberinos' first house, which backs up to their current one, is a living monument to that time of early energy. A half-carved Wilkie sculpture of faces and bodies stands out from the wooden living room doors. Faded, larger-than-life murals by Joe flood the walls - and in some cases the ceilings - of nearly every room.
In a mural in the master bedroom, an elegant black woman holds the center of a strange group of people. She is offered a packet of birth control pills by a man dressed in religious robes. Off to the side stands Joe, his beard half shaved, his eyes fixed upon the woman.
"I haven't quite worked it out," said ceramicist Gail Gruninger, who is renting the house. "But this is my favorite."
Ellen Powell Tiberino's colorful and luminous paintings line the walls of Gruninger's living room and studio, the result of trades between the two
artists.
"It influences me when I'm in here painting," Gruninger said of one painting. "I use a lot of the same colors."
Connected by a leafy, tree-shaded path to the home of their youth, the Tiberinos' current home is a realization of both artists' talents.
In the crowded living room hang several of Ellen Tiberino's paintings, her expressionistic works frequently depicting women, full-hipped and big- breasted, some elegantly assured, others more somber and removed.
"I can't help this, and it's funny, but many times I know it's (a painting) going to look like me," she said. "I automatically put my character into people."
Ellen Tiberino is a prolific painter - a woman, her husband says, who probably produces more than any other artist in the city. Even now, struggling against a long-battled cancer that takes her frequently to the hospital and constantly drains her strength, she works at a feverish pace.
"I feel that I have to work every day," she said. "I'm a night person and sometimes I'm up until 5 in the morning. All that energy. All that adrenaline."
Outside the Tiberino home, Joe's murals cover the entire back and side walls of the house, too big to be contained inside.
The mural shows an array of citizens, standing, saluting, playing a three- dimensional trumpet or saxophone. On one edge is the MOVE relief sculpture, a collaborative effort by Ellen and Joe produced in 1986, that includes a screaming child with hair aflame and the image of Mayor Goode as a mask of death. On another side is a black family seeing the sights of their new northern home.
Joe Tiberino said he began the mural about six years ago.
"But you can't measure it in time," he said. "This thing is growing and evolving."
Having acquired five houses in the immediate area, the Tiberinos have a lot of room to grow and much work left to be done. One of Raphael Tiberino's murals decorates a kind of outdoor chapel off to the side of the main back yard.
Raphael, 22, said he always knew he wanted to be an artist like his parents, though his brother, Leonardo, 20, and sister, Ellen, 17, have not yet followed that path.
"It was just there," he said. "I was always drawing."
What was it like growing up in a family where artists were always dropping by to talk and drink wine and watch each other work?
"To me it was just normal," Raphael said. "Although the neighborhood kids called us the Addams Family" and refused to come near the place on Halloween.
Although Raphael recalls no rebellion, his father said there were times when his son thought all the paintings on the walls were a bit extreme. Then he went to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and brought his artistic friends home, who stood in awe of the wealth of talent poured out on the walls. All of a sudden, Joe Tiberino said, the house was "cool" again.
Raphael has joined the Rambla Group. The word rambla refers to wandering
artists in long-ago Spain, said Joe Tiberino, and aptly describes the tightknit group of artists who have gathered under the name for support and to share creative techniques.
The group may buck the image of the artist as a lonely figure, striving in isolation to create that perfect work. But that's part of the point.
"Art can be lonely. It's too lonely," Joe Tiberino said. "I love to paint with people sitting around."
Copyright (c) 1992 The Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted with permission
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