Philadelphia Inquirer, Sun., Sept. 17, 2006

Collage: An enigmatic medium

by Victoria Donohoe

We've all taken wastebasket scraps and glued them together to make paintings - adults and children alike - so there's bound to be a receptive audience for the 22d National Collage Society Juried Exhibit at Ursinus College.

Collage is capable of including elements of drawing, prints, photos, paintings and more. This makes it an enigmatic and elusive medium, offering endless formal and thematic possibilities.

The current roundup of 55 works features 52 artists from 19 states and from Turkey. It's the first local appearance for this annual event, sponsored by the Ohio society, which celebrates its 25th anniversary next year.

There's a theatrical quality to some of this work, but certain other artists here are more at ease as composers of pictures than as colorists.

Where the exhibit really shows its powers of persuasion is in the remarkable number of lively works, large and small. These range from collages in which artists seized an opportunity afforded them for a more relaxed approach than they enjoy as painters, to collages in which artists are simply following their natural inclinations in search of originality. Another of the show's attractions is that the assembled works glow with a promise of new beginnings.

Worthy of note are pieces by Pilar Acevedo and Laura Lein-Svencner, both from Illinois; Ann Bunn of Colorado; Jo Ann Cooksey Bono of Norristown; Trina Gardner of Wilmington; George Martz of Centreville, Del.; Will Ursprung of Chester Springs; and Burnell Yow! of Philadelphia.

Since the society's anxious beginnings in the early '80s, when collages started to be excluded from American Watercolor Society competitions, the collage group has in some ways moved back into line with national and regional art exhibiting traditions. Thus the society would be well advised to do everything it can to retain the valuable emotional charge an annual exhibit like this one has, never letting it go flaccid or polite on us. Fine show.

Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art, Main St., Collegeville. To Nov. 5. Tue.-Fri. 10-4, Sat.-Sun. noon-4:30. Free. 610-409-3500.

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