Biography

Act 1
Arlene Love has been an artist since she was first seduced by the smell of oil paint and turpentine at the age of fifteen. When she entered art school, she attended a required class in sculpture and spent the next forty years totally dedicated to that medium. During these decades, her work was seen in at least twenty solo shows from New York to North Dakota, and in national juried and invited shows in galleries and museums, including Sculpture USA in New York's Museum of Modern Art. She has had numerous commissions which can be seen in private and public collections. In Philadelphia, PA. the 9' high Winged Woman is at the Dorchester facing Rittenhouse Square, and a Philly favorite, Face Fragment identifies the Monell Chemical Senses Center at the University of Pennsylvania Science Center. Her Eight Figures, completed in the 1980's was recently cast in bronze and installed in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, a vast new regional cultural center. Other monumental bronzes include a tribute to Ben Franklin and one to John Marshall at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and a soaring Jacob Wrestling with the Angel at the University of Scranton.

Act 2.
In the mid 1980's, Arlene and her painter husband Lee Lippman began to travel again in Mexico after many years absence. Settling in Oaxaca, they lived in rented houses for longer and longer periods. Because of makeshift studios and the difficulties of obtaining materials, Arlene concentrated on drawing. Before long, they owned a ranchito , high on a mesa in the Sierras del Sur north of the city of Oaxaca. Located at the end of a goat path, off a dirt road, there were no phone lines, no streetlights, no radio, TV or newspapers. Their studios were in a building, which had been home to a small weaving business. It was nestled into the hillside and was only a few feet from their adobe house sitting on the apex of the mesa with a view of mountains and valleys for miles around, including, on a clear day, the silhouette of Monte Alban.

Before long, these urban artists developed a small farm, with five cats, three dogs, three pigs, three turkeys, thirteen chickens, and a beloved pampered pet donkey, MariaCallas. Their pride was a cornfield with beans and squash.. In the large airy studio, Arlene's drawings became larger. She worked in saponified crayons, shellac and encaustic on Mylar. She likened these materials to the clay she had worked with all her life, because they could be pushed and moved, eradicated and resurrected – so the shift from sculpture to the flat surface did not seem dramatic. She exhibited these works in a Oaxaca Gallery, La Mano Magica, and was invited as a Oaxacan artist to show in regional Mexican exhibitions. All during this time, Arlene was taking pictures – and tossing the negatives and slides into shoe boxes.

Act 3.
As the 21st century crashed in, the 20th century overtook their unspoiled paradise, and houses and satellite dishes started appearing in the hills. After eleven years of rural life, they sold the ranchito and returned home to Philadelphia's center city. Now, living in the present, Arlene saw the words "the digital darkroom."

She'd always loved photography but hated the darkroom. The current technology of Photoshop, sophisticated scanners, carbon pigment inks and archival paper enabled Arlene to re-unite with an old love – black and white photography – and do it in the light.

Those shoeboxes of negatives made in Mexico became her first two exhibitions of photography, and she has had three solo shows of her photographs of Philadelphia streets, Walking Distance and Philly Eats. Arlene Love and her camera can now be found prowling the streets of her native city, usually within walking distance of her studio.