NEWS + MEMBER EXHIBITS
by Cheryl Levin
[Editor’s Note: The new NAWA Pennsylvania Chapter is documenting its artists and activities for future generations. Below, the Chapter’s Historian recounts the joy and serendipity of historical research and documentation].
A few years ago, I excitedly opened a letter from my 28-year-old son, who had a request for me. That request turned into a journey.
In his letter, my son asked me to write a history of his parents’ lives, beginning with when we met. His father, also an artist, passed away in 2012. My son didn’t want just an outline, he asked for dates, to take it seriously and to be exact. I felt a sense of pride. My son wanted to know about me.
I dutifully began my assignment. I researched the places we had lived and included photos I found online. I dug up old postcards from our shows together and photographs long ago filed away.
In the 1990s, my son’s father and I were founding members of an art cooperative, High Wire Gallery, which rented gallery space above the Clay Studio in Philadelphia. High Wire Gallery no longer exists but today the Clay Studio has a thriving world-class building in Philadelphia. I found a photograph online of Clay Studio’s inaugural building, where High Wire Gallery was located. The photograph, a gorgeous, full frame black-and-white print, showed the building under construction. Looking closer, I realized I was right in the middle of the entire High Wire Group, who had been photographed in front of the building.
Flash forward, a year later, during an early NAWA PA Chapter meeting when Lolly Owens, a founder of NAWA PA, asked me to be the NAWA PA Historian. I enthusiastically accepted, thinking back to the joy of discovering those photographs of the High Wire Gallery group. I continued to think about the importance of documenting the legacy of women artists, particularly during a presentation at a Summer 2025 NAWA workshop by an artist database manager.
Lolly Owens and her husband at the Abington Art Center during NAWA PA’s inaugural exhibition. Photo credit: Cheryl Levin
My goal for the NAWA PA history project is to include not only written history of our Chapter’s achievements and milestones, but also visual documentation of the current NAWA PA artists. My emphasis will be less on showing our artwork – that’s already in the annual catalog, on our own websites and in other resources – but showing us together at our exhibitions and, of course, black-and-white portraits of how we present ourselves.
