Hillendale Road will be closed on Tuesday, July 28, from 6:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. near the Mendenhall Farm driveway. A culvert/pipe underneath the road at that point is being replaced, and it will take most of the work day to complete this job, according to Pennsbury Township officials. Signs will be posted, and the road will reopen as soon as the job is completed.
Road contractor, Inncon, Inc., will begin Concord Township’s road program work Monday, July 27, beginning on Schoolhouse Lane. Inncon will work their way south through the township. More information will be posted as it becomes available.
PennDOT has announced the following road projects, which are weather-dependent and could affect residents in the greater Chadds Ford area during the week of July 26 through Aug. 2. The department recommends that motorists allow extra time if they are traveling through one of the construction zones.
Brush-cutting is scheduled to continue on Route 202 in both directions in Birmingham, Thornbury, Westtown, and West Goshen townships between Boot and Brinton’s Bridge roads. Lane restrictions will be needed from Monday, July 27, through Thursday, July 30, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Also on Route 202, lane closures in Concord and Chadds Ford townships will continue for roadwork between Applied Card Way and Route 1 in connection with the Wegmans shopping center from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. through Oct. 1.
The Wegmans project will also necessitate lane closures on Route 1 in Concord Township in both directions between Brinton Lake Road and Route 202 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., also through Oct. 1.
Utility installation will result in overnight lane restrictions on East Market Street between Matlack and High streets and on South High Street between Miner and Union streets in West Chester Borough through Friday, Aug. 14. Crews will be working weekdays from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Boot Road in West Goshen Township will be subject to lane restrictions for road widening between Clover Mill and National roads. The work will be done weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through July 31.
Burnt Mill Road in Kennett Township is closed and detoured indefinitely between Norway and Spring Mill roads while crews prepare for repairs to a bridge that collapsed on April 24.
Traffic pattern shifts are scheduled on Route 202 in both directions in East Whiteland Township between the Route 401 and Route 30 interchanges through August 2016 for the road-widening project.
Lane closures are scheduled on Route 100 (Pottstown Pike) between Shoen Road and Route 113 in West Whiteland and Uwchlan townships, on Sunday night, July 26, and on Monday, July 27, through Friday, July 31, for the road-widening project scheduled to finish in February 2016. From 7 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, to 5 a.m. Monday, July 27, motorists will encounter right lane closures on northbound Route 100 from Ship Road to Gordon Drive, and on southbound Route 100 from Rutgers Drive to Shoen Road. On Monday, July 27, through Friday, July 31, Route 100 will be restricted from two lanes to one lane in both directions between Shoen Road and Route 113 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
If you want to report potholes and other roadway maintenance concerns on state roads, call 610-566-0972 in Delaware County or 484-340-3200 in Chester County, or visit www.dot.state.pa.us and click on “submit feedback.”
Two exhibitions of works by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist James Welling, inspired by the work of Andrew Wyeth, will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum of Art starting August 8. The exhibition Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs presents a selection of 50 photographs from a five-year series centered on the life and work of the painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), exploring the influence of one artist upon another across time and media. Brandywine will also present Gradients, Welling’s first site-specific sculpture installation, at nine locations throughout the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s 200-acre campus in Chadds Ford.
Things Beyond Resemblance Guest curator Philipp Kaiser has selected 50 photographs from Welling’s Wyeth series, a body of work for which Welling immersed himself in the very sites where Wyeth lived and painted. In 2010 Welling began travelling to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine, the two centers of Wyeth’s life and work, to create a new body of photographs over a five-year period. Welling’s interest in Wyeth’s work traces to his adolescence, when Welling first encountered the elder artist’s paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. Wyeth’s paintings left a deep impression, as did the works of other representational, yet stylized, artists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield.
“At one point one of my peers cited his earliest influences in photography as Walker Evans and Robert Frank,” said Welling. “While Evans and Frank were important to me, they were not formative in the way Wyeth had been. A flood of Wyeth memories came back to me, as I realized just how decisive he had been for my photography. I realized that I had never stopped thinking about Wyeth; he had become part of how I see.”
“It has been fascinating to work with Jim Welling on this multi-year project,” noted Thomas Padon, director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art. “In the series, Welling internalized Wyeth and focused in on Wyeth’s subdued palette of color, textural contrasts and ethereal effects of light; at the same time Welling significantly extended his own investigations of light and color, emphasizing these through post-production manipulation–an approach he used here for the first time to approximate Wyeth’s non-literal compositions.” Welling’s photographs range from subconscious borrowings to meticulous recreations of Wyeth paintings. While some photographs are directly restaged, others have been altered to explore or convey the essence of Wyeth’s work.
James Welling (b. 1951) Door, Olson House, 2010, archival inkjet print on rag paper. Paper: 17 x 25 3/8″. Image:15 5/9 x 23 3/8″
In other photographs, Welling departed from Wyeth subjects altogether as he explored Wyeth geographies on his own terms. “The idea of using another artist’s production as the springboard for one’s own work is more often found in music and poetry and less often in visual art,” Welling offered. “I think this is what I’m doing in Wyeth. I’m making a new work in the act of ‘translating’ the work of another artist.”
Gradients In conjunction with the exhibition, the Brandywine River Museum of Art has commissioned Welling to create a site-specific installation that explores the intersection of photography and sculpture. Titled Gradients, these sculptures extend investigations explored in Things Beyond Resemblance to the very landscape that inspired both Welling and Wyeth. The commission is a significant expansion of Welling’s personal artistic practice, marking Welling’s return to sculpture after a forty-year hiatus. “The Brandywine landscape has been a place of inspiration to artists since the mid-nineteenth century,” said Padon. “We are thrilled that Welling has inaugurated an ongoing series of outdoor installations that will make the Brandywine’s campus an active programmatic space. Gradients will encourage our visitors to focus on the specific palette inherent in each site in which Welling photographed and temporality of color in the landscape,” Padon added.
In early July, 2015, Welling photographed sites around Chadds Ford chosen for their importance to Wyeth. He then took digital samples of the colors found in the photographs and placed them into a digital file using a process known as gradient mapping. The resulting “map” is a smooth gradation of color representing bits of the chromatic spectrum captured from the original site. The gradient itself was then printed using the dye sublimation process, which fused the ink directly onto a metal plate. Mounted on walls or signposts, the printed images tie back conceptually to both his photographs on display in the museum and to the palette of Wyeth’s Brandywine scenes.
Digital rendering of a Gradient sculpture shown in the original James Welling photographs (taken July 2015) on which it was based.
Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs and Gradients will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum of Art from August 8 through November 15, 2015.
Biography
James Welling, is one of the foremost photo-based conceptual artists in the United States. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling has, since the mid-1970s, questioned the norms of representation and explored issues and ideas related to personal and cultural memory, the tenets of realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, and the material and chemical nature of photography. His work has been shown widely internationally, including a 2013 retrospective at the Cincinnati Art Museum (which traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles). As the head of the Photography Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, Welling has been a highly influential teacher to a generation of artists including Tiaxin Chen, Owen Kydd and Brandon Lattu. In 2014, Welling was named one of the recipients of the Infinity Award given by the International Center of Photography, New York.
About The Brandywine River Museum of Art
The Brandywine River Museum of Art features an outstanding collection of American art housed in a nineteenth-century mill building with a dramatic steel and glass addition overlooking the banks of the Brandywine. Admission is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors ages 65 and over, $6 for students and children ages 6; free for children 5 and younger and Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art members. Museum admission is free on Sunday mornings from 9:30 a.m. to noon through November 24, 2015. For more information, call 610.388.2700 or visit www.brandywinemuseum.org.
Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The planning of this exhibition has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Gradients is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. In addition, this project is supported in part by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Anyone experiencing withdrawal from being unable to visit Brandywine View Antiques as it readies its new location in Chadds Ford – or anyone seeking a one-of-a-kind bargain – will get assistance on Saturday, July 25, as the business holds a massive yard sale.
A yard sale will be held at Brandywine View Antiques on Saturday, July 25, in preparation for reopening at its new location in late summer.
Owner Lisa Vonderstruck promises a front lawn at 1244 Baltimore Pike with a treasure trove of merchandise from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. She said the sale would help with ongoing preparations for reopening the shop.
“We have too many boxes, and we need to make room for our future, new vendors,” she said, adding that she is selling displays, furniture, and garden items – from up-cycled to recycled. “We’re excited. I just want to blow this stuff out of here.”
In addition, she said some of the items obtained when clearing out two estates recently don’t fit the eclectic mix planned for the new digs and will be sold at rock-bottom prices. “We’re treating this like a yard sale,” she said. “Lots of great bargains.”
Vonderstruck said customers would be able to walk the grounds – a spacious three acres – but the interior is off-limits until the grand opening in late summer. She said Al the Tool Guy, a retired schoolteacher who just celebrated his 80th birthday, would be setting up his wares at Saturday’s sale, and would be accompanied by his buddy, Allen, who would also have some quirky vintage finds.
She said she’s pleased with the progress on the new shop, which included ripping out carpeting, redoing floors, moving in display cases, and extensive landscaping. She said the three cats she adopted at her Pennsbury Township location survived the move and have been “living in the bathroom sink. ”
Vonderstruck said she can’t wait to be back up and running. “It’s been a lot of work, but we’re making progress,” she said.
Dan Levin, a member of Concord First and a 2013 Democratic Party candidate for supervisor, is calling for the resignation of two supervisors and the township solicitor, alleging conflict of interest and misappropriation of funds.
Levin said he would be calling for Dominic Pileggi, Kevin O’Donoghue and solicitor Hugh Donaghue to step down during the Aug. 4 Board of Supervisors’ meeting.
“They used township funds to pay a lawyer to falsely file a brief in the name of the [Government Study Commission,] without their knowledge or approval, and solely to support the positions they took as private citizens in the appeal before the Supreme Court,” Levin said in an email.
Supervisors voted last July to have a referendum asking if voters wanted a study commission to explore changing Concord’s form of government, but that came after the supervisors learned that Concord First had run a successful petition drive to have its own question on the ballot. That question would have asked voters whether they wanted Concord to change from township of the second class to township of the first class.
(Voters approved the government study commission and earlier this month the commission voted to write a home rule charter for Concord Township.)
Supervisors also challenged Concord First’s petition in court and were successful in preventing it from being on the ballot. However, on July 20, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the Court of Common Pleas decision and the concurring decision of Commonwealth Court that denied Concord First’s ballot question.
When Concord First appealed those lower court decisions to the Supreme Court, attorney Michael Sheridan, at the request of township solicitor Hugh Donaghue, filed several briefs in opposition to Concord First. One of those briefs was an amicus brief that told the court the Government Study Commission was in place.
As previously reported, that brief was filed on behalf of the members of the Government Study Commission, however, none of the commission members had knowledge of the brief before it was filed and had not authorized a filing in their names.
Also, the commission did not technically exist at the time of the filing because the election had not yet been certified and the commission members had not yet been sworn in.
“The GSC’s role in this affair was, from the start, a supervisor-initiated smoke screen to disrupt the Concord First initiative – which was signed by nearly 1,000 Concord registered voters in a week. If not for Concord First circulating our petitions, the supervisors would have had no interest in launching a GSC…” Levin said.
According to Levin, funds used to file the brief were taxpayer money that was never authorized in an official meeting. He said it should have come from Pileggi and O’Donoghue as private citizens and from Donaghue as their private practice counsel.
Levin continued by saying, “I can, and will, look into filing conflict-of-interest and misappropriation of funds complaints against Donaghue, Pileggi, O’Donoghue and any other township official with knowledge of this malfeasance.”
Pileggi declined to comment.
O’Donoghue responded via e-mail saying: “The Citizens of Concord Township approved a Government Study Commission to review our current form of government and make recommendations on how Concord Township should govern in the future. The Commission has included First Class and other forms of government in their review. It is in the best interest of Concord to let the commission complete its work and allow all the citizens of the township to then vote on how Concord is governed moving forward.”
O’Donoghue, who is running for re-election this year added, “I believe in my heart that Concord Township residents know that I have Concord’s best interest at heart and they will hopefully choose to elect me for another term on election day.”
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
For the chronically unemployed, life can become an exercise in hopelessness and despair as jobless individuals lose touch with the workplace and experience the erosion of their skills, according to researchers.
On Tuesday, July 21, the Chester County Commissioners and the Chester County Workforce Development Board announced what they view as a promising alternative: the start of Platform to Employment (P2E), a multi-faceted program. It will offer job readiness training, personal support services, finance counseling, and paid work experience with the intent to secure jobs for 25 individuals who have experienced long-term unemployment in Chester County.
P2E is a five-week preparatory program, created by Connecticut-based “The WorkPlace,” to address the need for the long-term unemployed to return to work and the employers’ need to recruit skilled workers. Chester County’s commitment to this program is the first in Pennsylvania, said a county press release.
“Nowhere is this need to bring together employers with long-term unemployed more relevant than in Chester County,” said Chester County Commissioners’ Chairman Terence Farrell in the release. “At just four percent, our unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the state, and it is safe to say that employers cannot find good fits for some open positions. Many of our long-term unemployed people have the skills required for those positions, but they need career-related support services to strengthen those skills. Platform to Employment addresses that need.”
Chester County’s decision to contract with The Workplace on the P2E program follows research into the success of the initiative in areas across the country, said Pat Bokovitz, director of the Chester County Department of Community Development. The formula created by The Workplace has resulted in nine out of 10 participants’ being hired by employers by the end of the program.
Commissioner Kathi Cozzone, who also serves as a member of the Chester County Workforce Development Board, commented: “Like other areas in Pennsylvania and the nation, Chester County has a number of long-term unemployed who aren’t included in the unemployment figures because they’re no longer collecting benefits. And many of them are over the age of 50.
“Anyone who has been out of work for a long period of time, no matter what the age, faces very tough odds of finding a job again,” Cozzone continued. “I’m confident that the P2E model that we’ll be using, alongside our PA CareerLink Chester County and United Way Financial Stability Center partnership, will reduce those odds tremendously.”
The launch of the P2E program began with an appeal to all Chester County residents who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more to complete an online application for entry into the program. Bokovitz said applications starting coming in right after the announcement. He said the county is reaching out to faith-based communities and job clubs to ensure that people who could benefit from the program have the opportunity to apply.
“We’re looking at it as a pilot,” Bokovitz said. However, he said the quick response from applicants and inquiries from employers already shows high interest. “I think we will continue with it in some form or fashion,” he said.
He said the county sought and received a $200,000 grant – federal funds that were distributed through the state – to address the problem of long-term unemployment. The program will cost $179,500, the bulk of which – $122,000 – will pay the wages of the participants for eight weeks, he said, adding that sometimes companies will put the workers on their payroll sooner, saving some of that cost. The funds that remain will go toward outreach to employers.
“We’re really excited about this,” Bokovitz said, explaining that this particular segment of the jobless community has been hard to serve. “It’s so easy for people to become discouraged and then they struggle to get motivated to apply for jobs,” he said. “We want to end that cycle.“
In addition, Bokovitz said he believes the program will help educate businesses to the benefits of “taking a chance on someone who’s been out of the workforce” for some time. During the recruitment period for participants, Chester County’s Workforce Development Board will be reaching out to the county’s employers to show them the P2E model and discuss the program.
Details of eligibility, the requirements for acceptance into the P2E program, and the application can be found here (click on the Chester County button on the right side of the home page). Space within the program is limited to 25 people, and all applicants will be subject to a selection process. Training is scheduled to start in early September.
The Westtown-East Goshen Police Department has released details of a sobriety checkpoint conducted on Friday, July 17, in conjunction with the Chester County Impaired Driving Program.
Officers operated the checkpoint in the 1300 block of West Chester Pike in East Goshen Township from 10:30 p.m. through 2:30 a.m., coming in contact with 614 vehicles, a police press release said. Based upon these brief interactions, eight operators were field-tested, and four were arrested for DUI.
The release listed the following arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol or a controlled substance: Steve P. Aikman, 45, of West Chester; Suzanne Ickes, 31, of Media; James J. Walker Jr., 59, of Downingtown; and Joseph A. Corsi, 68, of West Chester.
At the conclusion of the checkpoint operation, officers, who were collecting cones and warning signs, located a suspicious vehicle and persons in the parking lot of a business in the 1300 block of West Chester Pike. Upon investigation, officers charged Mauro Magana, 19, of New Castle, De., with underage drinking and disorderly conduct (for a small amount of marijuana); Manuel Alejandro Vasquez, 19, also of New Castle, was charged with underage drinking, the release said.
