The 96th Juried Art Show at Phillips’ Mill
by Gwenn Seemel
In a region rife with juried art shows of varying quality, the yearly exhibition at the Mill stands out, both for the 25 generous prizes awarded to artists and for the seriousness of the jurying.
As the summer winds down every year, a handful of art experts with formidable résumés descend on the 300 year old building in New Hope to review works created by painters, draftspeople, and sculptors haling from within a 25 mile radius of the Mill. This year, the judges were assessing over 700 artworks that had all been delivered to Phillips’ Mill for what’s called Jury Day, when the experts come to Bucks County to examine the art in person. For this iteration of the annual juried show, those experts were Robert Reinhardt from the Fleisher Art Memorial, William Valerio from the Woodmere Museum, and Michael Williamson from The Barnes Foundation along with artists Chakaia Booker and Jase Clark.
Phillips’ Mill prides itself on bringing in judges from outside our little slice of the Delaware River valley. As the Juried Art Show committee chair Paul Klug explained in an interview for WDRV 89.7 FM’s Let’s Talk!: “we want them to maintain their independence and look at [the work] purely for its artistic capabilities.” When you’re awarding two dozen prizes totaling $14,500, you want to be sure that the jurors have a fresh take on the work—one that will hopefully not be influenced by personal knowledge of the human behind the art.
For example, Lambertville artist Sean Mount was the recipient of the Patrons’ Award for Painting, a prize which, like all the show’s awards, is decided by the jurors and funded by Phillips’ Mill patrons. In 2019, Mount received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and he has had a thriving career portraying mostly landscapes, but it’s unlikely that the Pennsylvania-based jurors were evaluating We Are Stardust on this measure. Rather, it’s Mount’s nuanced depiction of sparkler light at night that doubtless impressed the judges.
To my eye, it’s Buck’s County artist Ponder Goembel’s work that shone brightly. In an exhibition that draws heavily on the Pennsylvania Impressionism vibe of many of the creatives in the area, Goembel’s surrealist teatime proved that birds of a different feather can flock together. From the detail of the toucan’s glasses riding high on her bill to the shards of gossip floating between the figures, I love the way this piece uses the imagery of children’s books to speak to adult lessons.
And then there’s this group of expressive clay forms by Lisa Naples, a Frenchtown ceramicist and educator best known for her figurative work who’s recently found herself exploring abstraction more and more. She likens this non-representational direction to poems in contrast with her representational work, which she sees more as novellas.
The poetic piece on display at the Mill originated in Naples’ process. She was developing a glaze for one of the large sculptures currently featured in Grounded in Gold, her layered and lavish solo show at the Michener Museum, and she needed tall objects that would provide vertical surfaces on which to test the finish. That’s when these tree shapes appeared in her mind. “I’m in the habit of accepting images that drop like this without questioning them,” Naples shared. Trees is the first group of these forms that was successful, with many more having been made and lost as she works out “the chemistry of the dripping” for her new glaze.
Though the sculptor sees titles as “important pointers,” she also values the way that the public can decide an artwork’s significance for themselves. “I find that potent and beautiful: that the viewer’s interpretation can be unrelated to mine and yet speak meaning that the viewer needs to understand.”
This viewer, for one, appreciates that openness. As I wandered throughout the Mill taking in all the art, I was struck again and again by the power of community—so much so that it ended up informing my choice of artworks for this article. Whether it’s in the joyful block party in Mount’s painting, in the less-than-lovely aspects of community in Goembel’s image, or in the more ambiguous narrative of Naples’ forms relating and playing off each other, the space between us matters enormously.
Phillips’ Mill’s 96th Juried Art Show is an artful example of the extraordinary things people can accomplish when they work together as a community.
The exhibition is on display every day from 1 to 5 pm at Phillips' Mill, across the river from Lambertville at 2619 River Road, in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Admission is $6 for the general public and free for Mill members, and the show runs through October 26th.
Author’s note: I’ve been a part of the Phillips’ Mill community as an exhibiting artist in the past. My art appeared in the 94th and 95th Juried Art Shows, and it won an award in 2024. I did not apply for the show this year for a variety of reasons, and I’m glad, because it allowed me to write this review without my take on the 96th Juried Art Show being clouded by personal feelings.
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