ON A RECENT hot July afternoon, artist Joseph Tiberino sat with friends at a table in the courtyard adjoining the several homes that make up the West Philly museum named for his late wife, Ellen Powell Tiberino.
The old friends drank Argentinian cabernet out of water glasses, chatted about everything from recent art acquisitions to the first rock 'n' roll record, and casually planned a film shoot for later that evening.
That blend of communal spirit and artistic endeavor is endemic to the Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum, a complex of five houses and nine yards filled with paintings, sculptures and murals.
“When I first started going with my wife, she didn't want to get married because she didn't see how she could be an artist and a mother too," Tiberino said. “Eventually she changed her mind on that, so we got married and bought the first house on Spring Garden Street. Four or five years later we bought the next house and then the next house, so it's just been a gradual growth."
That organic quality comes through in the way that objects of daily life overlap with the priceless works on display. The boundary between life and art is utterly invisible to anyone wandering through those gates, where family photographs hang next to pieces in a variety of media by Ellen, Joseph and their four children, all artists.
“It has a real magical air about it," said Gerald Carter, a longtime friend, who runs the Sleeping Giant Art Gallery from his home a few blocks away. “You walk off a street in West Philadelphia and into a different world, like Alice through the looking glass."
The old friends drank Argentinian cabernet out of water glasses, chatted about everything from recent art acquisitions to the first rock 'n' roll record, and casually planned a film shoot for later that evening.
That blend of communal spirit and artistic endeavor is endemic to the Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum, a complex of five houses and nine yards filled with paintings, sculptures and murals.
“When I first started going with my wife, she didn't want to get married because she didn't see how she could be an artist and a mother too," Tiberino said. “Eventually she changed her mind on that, so we got married and bought the first house on Spring Garden Street. Four or five years later we bought the next house and then the next house, so it's just been a gradual growth."
That organic quality comes through in the way that objects of daily life overlap with the priceless works on display. The boundary between life and art is utterly invisible to anyone wandering through those gates, where family photographs hang next to pieces in a variety of media by Ellen, Joseph and their four children, all artists.
“It has a real magical air about it," said Gerald Carter, a longtime friend, who runs the Sleeping Giant Art Gallery from his home a few blocks away. “You walk off a street in West Philadelphia and into a different world, like Alice through the looking glass."
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