2005 EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS

Arlene Love: Overview: A Decade: Drawings and Photographs 1995-2005

Lawrence Gallery, Rosemont College

A major strength of Arlene Love's Rosemont College Exhibit of 10 years worth of work is the skillful interweaving of two themes: social conditions in Mexico and her rediscovery of life in Philadelphia…………..

But Love dies more than tell a story comparing the stripped-down visual traditions of the Northeastern United States with Mexico's wonderful richness….. Her mixed-media drawings have a fairly complicated sense of the world and the artist in it. One of her Mexican drawings portrays a large menacing bull, this image pervaded by physical vitality and overtones of melancholy.……her Mexican photographs capture the visually rich everyday life.

The most hopeful transcendent images here are black-and-white photos of tender moments on Philadelphia streets and at the Mummer's Parade. These sensitive and very human pictures give the show delight and abiding pleasure that counterbalances the sensation of loss and bleakness suggested by several Mexican pictures. Such photos add moments of surpassing reflective beauty to her storytelling. It is as if, in this striking show, the artist were borrowing a line from the late English poet Philip Larkin "What will survive of us is love."

-The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday, October 23, 2005, Victoria Donohoe -



Ms. Versatility

Artist Arlene Love who began her career as a sculptor, displays her drawings and photographs at Rosemont College

"I guess you could say that I am a voyeur, a snoop, or in Yiddish, a yenta", laughs artist Arlene Love speaking of her photographs on view at Rosemont College.

…..Arlene Love…illustrates the third phase of a career that began with sculpture. "Am I fickle?" Love muses. When I went on to Act 2 (drawings, and act 3, (photography), it was singing in one range all your life and then discovering you have another octave, then another – and you can't stop singing!

"I'm an old-fashioned street photographer" she says. "It may look like realism, but when the shutter clicks, it doesn't always tell the truth. There is an ambiguity, a surrealistic quality. What happened the moment before and the moment after? "It's all snap judgment", she shrugs, pun intended.

Love still uses a film camera, not a digital camera, but does employ sophisticated scanners and a bank of printers. "Five years ago I didn't know how to open a computer", the engaging Love confesses, "and I thought the word cursor referred to expressions I sometimes use". What really excited her about the digital darkroom were archival carbon pigment inks. "Cavemen drew in carbon", she reminds us……..

Since Love's ultimate subjects have always been people and psychological nuance, she doesn't feel her work has changed, other than in terms of medium.

……..Love's enticing photographs of musicians, shoppers in the marketplace uncanny and soccer fans wrapped in flags, make unabashed voyeurs of us all.

-Main Line Times, Main Line Ticket, October 27, 2005 Marie Fowler



………….. No matter, whether she explores possibilities provided by either two dimensions or three, she generates a depth of sensitive visceral awareness and an uncanny command of form.………………….

Her photographs, made in Mexico and Philadelphia manifest an identity true to the location where they were exposed. While the mystery of what took place before and after the moment is forever frozen in the drift of time, the sight seen in a sub-second becomes a composition given voice on the elegant textured surface of fine rag paper.

The cosmopolitan spirit of Philadelphia comes alive in the photographs of city streets. The photos reveal the ….variations of personality, native origins and customs melding together in a vibrant cultural breadth of being. ….The photos reveal this with candor and strength. These faces and gestures have fallen under the spell of an endless quest…..Together they are the hallmarks of Love's talent for sharing an eminently poignant and sympathetic human compassion.

-Art Matters, October 2005, Exhibitions in Sight by Burton Wasserman



from Reviews

Philadelphia Inquirer:......Love’s piece consists of eight female figures, each roughly modeled to suggest a state of transition that could be creation or decay. The figures form a group, and yet each is isolated from the rest by stance and the fact that none looks at any other.
The piece might be read in several ways – as a metaphor for alienation, or, in more formal terms, as a multiple-exposure figure study. It looks handsome and strong in this secluded……..( Edward J. Sozanski)

Art in America…..Eight Figures, a spare forest of incipient and completed forms can be seen as a powerful metaphor for human development…(Judith Stein)

New Art Examiner…..Love depicts the separation of youth from age and evokes the contrast between an ideal of physical beauty versus the less than perfect human form She has captured the essence of innocence along with the harsh reality of moving toward one’s fate…….( Marilyn Goodman)

Public Art in Philadelphia Temple University Press…..One of the most notable outdoor sculptures…..(Penny Balkin Bach)

Art Matters…Face Fragment…is one of the most notable esthetic accomplishments of the past half century in the Delaware Valley. (Burton Wasserman)


F&M Today….of the seventy submissions from artists nationwide…..none fulfilled the stipulations as thoroughly as Arlene Love. Hers is humane in its scale, engaging in its character, evocative in its associations and imaginative in its composition and context. …..Love’s sculpture is not only intimate and intellectual, but monumental without resorting to the device….What Ms Love has given us is the modern equivalent of Egyptian royal statuary and the Greek Kouri……one cannot help but associate this sculpture with these stunningly captivating Greek grave stele of the late fifth century B.C. …..as in the best work of Greece, this piece manages to balance the ideal with the real…..for the many levels of meaning , it will bring new discoveries and renewed interest… ( Folke Tyko Kihlstedt)

New Art Examiner…Reviews: East Coast…..Like her work in three dimensions, the shapes – whether at rest or in motion – are vibrant with turbulent inner rhythms. (Burton Wasserman)


Mujeres….Domingo en Tlacolula…Las fotografaias en blanco y negro de Love capturan el espiritu solemne de las gente de Tlacolula., reflejan mementos de un estado interior y de fusion inevitable de tiempo pasado y presente. ( Edgar Saavreda)

Philadelphia Weekly…..This is not an easy show to view. But like all work that stakes out a position and not just an iconic posture, it is passionate and thoughtful and it needs a hearing and a viewing. (Roberta Fallon)

Philadelphia Weekly….so while she may have changed medium…we’re still in high stakes Love territory… (Miriam Seidel)

Journal of the Print World….A supremely intelligent artist, Love’s work also shows a deep reverence for the vulnerability of her human subjects….