The Woodmere Art Museum, (9201 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19118) is hosting a new exhibit titled ‘Doris Staffel: Painter, Teacher’ that will run through July 28 – September 30, 2012. It focuses on the work of painter Doris Staffel, described as one of Philadelphia’s preeminent abstract painters and colorists. This is the first exhibition to examine Staffel’s entire career, as well as her first solo show in a museum. Along with Staffel’s solo exhibition the Woodmere Art Museum will also be showing a smaller collection of works highlighting three-generations of Philadelphia artists: Staffel’s own teachers, her colleagues, and the students that she taught. Drawn mostly from Woodmere’s permanent collection, it includes several recent acquisitions and promised gifts exhibited for the first time.

The exhibition brings together all fourteen paintings and works on paper by Staffel that are held in the Woodmere’s collection, pieces that represent her various career phases from the 1940s to the present. The two pieces from Bryn Mawr College have been loaned along with other pieces from public and private collections to complete the exhibition.

The two pieces on loan from Bryn Mawr College Special Collections represent the different media within which the artist worked.

The piece below, Dragon’s Teeth, dates from 1984 and is a charcoal on paper (18 3/4 in. x 17 1/2 in.) and is from the William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection of
Works by Women Artists, a gift of Bill Scott.

This piece, Enfolding, from 1990, is an acrylic on paper (23 in. x 30 1/4 in.) and is also a gift of Bill Scott. Born in 1921 in Brooklyn, Staffel came to Philadelphia in 1940 to study at the Tyler School of Art where she stayed to teach for twenty-seven years at The University of the Arts in the city. She is described by the Woodmere Art Museum as being an influential figure to younger artists, and her work is displayed in galleries in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the US.

An interview with Staffel in which she discusses her work and life is available on You Tube

For more on the exhibition, please check the Woodmere Art Museum website.