70 Years of Art: Arlene Love Reflects on Tyler
The year 2024 marks seventy years of Arlene Love’s career as a prolific artist. As part of the (re)FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts festival, Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades presents a solo exhibition of Love’s impactful work. It is the inaugural exhibition at the Interactive Museum for Contemporary Art (iMOCA), and spotlights Love's pioneering feminist sculptures, as well as her figurative drawing and photography.
Love’s professional journey as an artist began at Tyler, where she earned her BFA in 1952 and BSEd in 1953. She spent five years at the school, which was then located in Elkins Park, PA.
Each student was required to take studio classes in every medium offered. Love credits this curriculum with not only pushing her toward a career as an interdisciplinary artist working in multiple mediums, but with introducing her to sculpture, the medium she is most known for.
In fact, Love entered Tyler with the intention of focusing on painting. Fatefully, it was during her very first week of classes that she was required to go to the sculpture studio.
“I reluctantly left the painting studio, and in the sculpture studio we were handed an armature, modeling tools, and a big lump of plasteline,” Love said. “I immediately felt like I discovered the medium for me. I became totally enamored by sculpture. If it hadn’t been required I never would have discovered it.”
She also credits Tyler with introducing her to etching, a medium which she, at the time, thought she would never use again. But then, over forty years later, she revisited the medium and produced a portfolio of etchings in 1996.
“It was like riding a bicycle—I never forgot it.”
Love recalls a memory that stands out from her time as a Tyler student: she was doing a bronze casting, which attracted an audience.
“The school was so small that when a bronze casting was done, it was an event. A bunch of students would come to watch.”
She felt that the people who came to watch her viewed it like “watching a dancing bear” because it was so out of the ordinary for a woman to do what was so widely believed to be “men’s work.” Love recalls the Dean of Tyler, Boris Blai, hollering to her, “I’ve never seen a foundryman in earrings. Take off those damned earrings.” During her five years at Tyler, Love notes, there was not one woman on the faculty.
Because of the small size of the school, students were able to develop warm relationships with their professors. The educators Love learned from are some of the most major influences in her life, including Professor of Sculpture Raphael Sabatini, or, as he was more commonly known at Tyler, “Boss” -- a moniker that was embroidered onto the back of his smock.
“[Sabatini] taught me how to see what I was looking at. I was with him for all five years. He was the most important teacher in my life,” Love said.
Other educators she remembers fondly include Dr. George Stewart Stokes, an English professor who came up to teach at Tyler from Temple’s main campus, and Dr. Herman Gundersheimer, a professor of Art History.
“[Gundersheimer] took us through the history of art from the Venus of Willendorf through the current times with great enthusiasm and informality. He was a delightful man,” Love described. “But remember, in those days, the history of art was the history of white European men.”
As she looks back on her education and the trajectory of her career, Love says that if she could, she would go back and tell her younger self to be more aware of the discrimination against female artists at the time. She gives the example that she was referred to as a “sculpturess” rather than a “sculptor.”
“This was before the second wave of feminism….We assumed that this was just the way things were until 1972, when we started to get new vocabulary.”
Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades is on view February 9–March 10, 2024 at the Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) in Philadelphia. Arlene Love will speak at a reception and artist talk on March 1 from 4–8 p.m.