Pop Stars

Pop goes the artist, the artist goes Pop. Again. It seems our culture’s appetite for the yumminess of Pop Art is never satiated. This week, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, in conjunction with PrideFest America, opens "Artistic Alternatives: The Art of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol." The litany of names alone is a clue to the exhibit’s effort to record the arc of the Pop movement from the ’60s to the ’00s. But beyond that, it’s a great testament to the influence of these artists both on each other and on current proprietors of Pop — from Haring’s Mickey Mouse homage to Warhol to Johns’ Targets lithographs, clearly an influence on printmakers in his wake. Film works — Rauschenberg’s 1967 performance video Linoleum and a recording of Haring at the New Arts Program in Kutztown — make the artists more than just icons of iconoclasm.

A concurrent exhibit sheds light on two members, like Hockney, of the British Pop Art movement, called "An Unnerving Romanticism: The Art of Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway." Married for 36 years, the couple took different creative paths but ended up having a similar effect on both the British and American art scenes. Sleigh was a realist portrait painter who worked much of the time with male nudes in strikingly honest, extremely liberated poses; Alloway, coiner of the term "Pop Art," was a respected artist/poet/critic and co-founder of the British gaggle of art-types known as the Independent Group. On view will be Sleigh’s intimate portraits of close friends and artists (including her husband), along with Alloway’s poetry and previously unexhibited drawings.

Two events in conjunction with the exhibit are free and open to the public: a dialogue between Sleigh and artist/critic John Perreault (Tue., April 10, 6 p.m.) and a screening of the 1979 BBC production The Fathers of Pop narrated by historian Reyner Banham and featuring interviews with Alloway and other British Pop pioneers (Wed., May 9, 6 p.m.).

—Lori Hill

"Artistic Alternatives" runs March 20 through May 13. "An Unnerving Romanticism" runs March 22 through May 13. Reception for both exhibits March 22, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., 215-545-4302.