Current Exhibition
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Admission
The admission to the Schuylkill Center’s art gallery at the Visitor Center and our trails is free and open to the public.
Hours
Gallery hours are Monday – Saturday, 9 am – 5 pm
Trails and Outdoor Exhibitions are open daily from dawn to dusk. The front gate closes at 5 pm.
Visiting the Schuylkill Center
The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education is located at 8480 Hagy’s Mill Road, Philadelphia, PA 19128. Parking at the Visitor Center is free and is open Monday – Saturday, 9 am – 5 pm. Our trails are in part wheelchair accessible. Please consult the Schuylkill Center’s visit page for more information.
Current Exhibition
Winterbloom
February 1, – March 29, 2025
Winterbloom is a solo gallery exhibition by Claire Downes Whitehurst at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. During a time of winter dormancy and hibernation in the forest, this exhibition presents colorful, visionary abstractions drawn from Whitehurst’s attunement to forms and patterns found in nature. Pulling from the biological and symmetrical systems of plant growth, her work expands notes of suspension, wonder, and meditation in beholding the order that unfolds, even in stages of latency. Whitehurst’s new works in Winterbloom manifest her interdisciplinary practice in painting, printmaking, and ceramic sculpture. In a series of unique works on paper, Whitehurst uses a monotype process, transposing drawings onto mulberry paper which she then overlays with intricate colored pencil embellishments. In a series of porcelain tablet paintings, Whitehurst builds patterned drawing matrices, into which she pours colored clay slip. While Whitehurst’s biomorphic compositions feel intuitive and spontaneous, her labor-intensive processes are obsessive and meticulous, akin to a spider building its web.
Winterbloom is curated by Heather Moqtaderi, Interim Director of Environmental Art.
About the Artist:
Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and sculptor. She received her BFA from the University of Mississippi, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. She draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the deep South, exploring queer space, religious iconography and architecture through form, color, and composition. Her work plays with the relationship between image and object.
In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research at the University of Iowa. She worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. Her research focused on the relationship between surface and image, and the compositional complexities of abstract narrative.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and a book of her drawings and poetry was published in 2021 through Drum Machine Editions in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including New American Paintings, Oxford American, ArtMaze Magazine, and the Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum along with many others.
