Pioneering Art in the 1960s: Philadelphia

Paul Makler graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and practiced medicine until 1972. He was Member of the US Olympic team in 1952. Makler attended the Barnes Foundation from 1954-5, and taught Greek at Abington Friends School from 1984-1998. He has been the curator of the University of Pennsylvania Art Collection since 1979, and, since 1998, has completed coursework in Intellectual History, English and related subjects. The Makler Gallery opened in 1960 and continued operation until 1985. The gallery represented premier artists including Milton Avery, Anselm Keifer, Jacques Lipchitz and the Cobra Group, among others.

Hope Makler attended the Barnes Foundation in 1956-7 and received a Masters degree in art history at Penn and Bryn Mawr in 1959. She conducted the Makler Gallery from 1960-1985, and has subsequently continued as a private dealer. She was the first female and Philadelphian on the board of the Art Dealers of America, and has continued as a member of the Advisory Board for many years. She is a member of the Womens Committee of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and has returned to studying Folklore, English and related subjects since 1998.

The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery opened in Philadelphia in 1952 as the Janet Fleisher Gallery. Over the course of the next eighteen years, the gallery exhibited a wide variety of folk art, including both traditional and non-traditional work by American self-taught artists as well as European naïves and visionaries. In 1970, the gallery began to focus predominantly upon American self-taught artists, and we mounted our first one-person show for the then unknown artist Sister Gertrude Morgan. Shortly thereafter the gallery collaborated with Herbert W. Hemphill, a founding member of New York's Museum of American Folk Art, on a series of survey exhibitions exploring the work of twentieth-century American self-taught artists. John Ollman, the director of the gallery since 1970, became sole owner in 1997.

Judith E. Stein is a Philadelphia-based independent curator and critic. A recipient of a Pew Fellowship for her writings on art, she is a former arts reviewer for National Public Radio and a frequent contributor to Art in America. She has taught at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. As curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1981-95), she organized major traveling exhibitions of Red Grooms and Horace Pippin and more than ninety shows of contemporary art for the Academy's Morris Gallery. She co-curated "Picturing the Modern Amazon," for New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. Her current projects include a biography of the art dealer Richard Bellamy and a book on the Barnes Foundation.