Our website uses cookies to understand how you navigate our content and to give you the best browsing experience.
Please read our Data Protection & Use Notification to learn more.
Out of the Heart: The Art and Life of David Ellinger
Extended through May 27, 2022
Harrison Gallery
Arcadia Exhibitions is pleased to present “Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger.” Featuring a selection of 60 works and related documentation, this survey explores the creative production of Pennsylvania native, self-taught artist, and antiques dealer David Y. Ellinger (1913–2003) who helped popularize Pennsylvania German culture in the mid-1900s. Curated by Lisa Minardi, executive director of Historic Trappe, the show was developed in conjunction with “Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale” an exhibition of new ceramic works and site-specific wallpapers referencing the influence of Pennsylvania German craft traditions on Apfelbaum’s hybrid sensibility. This exhibition will remain on view in the Harrison Gallery through May 27, 2022.
David Ellinger "Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” 2022, Installation view, Harrison Gallery. Photo by Sam Fritch.“Out of the Heart” is titled after one of Ellinger’s best known canvases, Out of the heart comes the issues of life (1943), which he based on Proverbs 4:23 (“keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life”). One of nearly two dozen paintings in the exhibition, it is joined by prints, drawings, theorems (paintings on velvet), and examples of fraktur, cut paper, and painted wood (a chest and boxes). The range of media and diversity of approaches—from impressionistic landscapes to interpretations of the more graphic idioms of Pennsylvania German folk art—demonstrate Ellinger’s evolution as an artist as well as his other career as a successful antiques dealer.
David Ellinger, Out of the heart comes the issues of life, 1943,oil on canvas, 21 3/4" x 17 3/4", Collection of David Bronstein, Photo by Michael E. Myers, Steadfast Imaging.Presented in the Harrison Gallery of Arcadia’s University Commons, the show is divided into three sections: early life, focusing on Ellinger’s earliest known artworks and his involvement with the Works Progress Administration; farm life, which explores his paintings of Pennsylvania German farmsteads and barns; and home life, delving into Ellinger’s paintings of household interiors, Amish quilts, and flower gardens. The exhibition also includes ephemera, including the artist’s palette and documentation of his persona as a female impersonator, who from approximately 1939 to 1953 performed as Una Hale, a stage name that appears in the title of Apfelbaum’s exhibition in homage to Ellinger and the freedom represented by his life and work. Among some the more significant items in the exhibition are silkscreen prints made in collaboration with Frances Lichten taken from his experience drawing objects in museum collections during the 1930s while working for the WPA. Other highlights include paintings depicting bank barns and auctions, a sketchbook containing nearly 400 drawings, and wallpaper designs made in 1927 when Ellinger was fourteen years old.
Curated independently of the Apfelbaum exhibition, “Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” nevertheless includes examples of Ellinger’s work that will inform visitors’ experience of Apfelbaum’s ceramic works and wallpapers, in particular his Tobacco Barn (or Yellow Barn), paintings depicting quilts, and a canvas representing a bonneted woman with a green watering can. Together, the two exhibitions serve to demonstrate the formative influence of Pennsylvania German folk art on different but parallel sensibilities.
Major support for "Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale" and "Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger" has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Creative Capital.
ABOUT DAVID ELLINGER
Portrait of David Ellinger from Femme Mimics by E. Carlton Winford, Dallas, Winford Co., 1954A Pennsylvania native and self-taught artist, David Y. Ellinger (1913–2003) helped popularize Pennsylvania German culture in the mid-twentieth century through his paintings of Amish farmsteads, bank barns, country auctions, and other scenes of rural life. He drew on his personal experience growing up in the vicinity of Trappe, in Montgomery County, where he worked on a dairy farm as a teenager. He also incorporated antique furniture, quilts, chalkware, and other objects into his paintings—taken from his experience drawing objects in museum collections during the 1930s while working for the WPA, first as part of the Federal Art Project and then for the Index of American Design. Ellinger was also an antiques dealer, buying and selling antiques to major collectors such as Albert Barnes, Titus Geesey, and Donald Shelley. He also revived the nineteenth-century art of theorem painting and made hundreds of examples—mostly still lifes depicting baskets of fruit—that are still highly prized today by collectors. Ellinger worked in a wide variety of media, including oil, casein, watercolor, and crayon. Earlier in his life, Ellinger was also a drag performer known as Una Hale.
ABOUT LISA MINARDI
Lisa Minardi is a noted scholar of Pennsylvania German art and the executive director of Historic Trappe, home to the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies. Her previous exhibitions include “A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans and the Art of Everyday Life” (Winterthur, 2015); “Quill & Brush: Pennsylvania German Fraktur and Material Culture” (Free Library of Philadelphia, 2015); and “Pastor & Patriots: The Muhlenberg Family of Pennsylvania” (Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, 2011). She is the author of numerous books, articles, and essays on Pennsylvania German art and culture including Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015).
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.
Exhibition Events
At this time, Arcadia University is not requiring, but welcoming the wearing of masks in our indoor spaces. Please visit https://gallery.arcadia.edu prior to your visit to check on any updates to Arcadia's on-campus public health requirements.
Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger
Lecture by Lisa Minardi
February 24, 2022
On Thursday, February 24, Lisa Minardi will lecture about “Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” in the Great Room, University Commons. Her presentation will begin at 6:30 PM and will be followed by a walk-through of the exhibition, directly upstairs. Advance registration required.
This in-person event will also be available for remote audiences via Zoom.
Queer as Folk: Exploring LGBTQ+ Identity through David Ellinger's Performance as Una Hale
March 28, 2022
7:00 PM
Zoom Presentation
David Ellinger as Una Hale from Femme Mimics by E. Carlton Winford, Dallas, Winford Co., 1954A panel discussion with
Leo Fahringer '19, BFA Illustration, Drag Performer
Tessa Bachi Haas, Independent Curator and PhD Candidate, Bryn Mawr College
Bob Skiba, Curator, John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives of Philadelphia, William Way LGBT Community Center
Dito van Reigersberg/Martha Graham Cracker
Credited with helping popularize Pennsylvania German folk art through his efforts as an artist and dealer, David Ellinger (1913-2003) also toured regional venues as a female impersonator whose stage name was Una Hale. This panel will consider Ellinger’s cross-disciplinary, creative practice as a platform for discussing the historical evolution of drag in the formation of queer identity as we understand it today.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Tessa Bachi Haas is a Ph.D Candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she earned her MA in 2019. Her research engages digital archives, embodiment, and net art, particularly through queer studies and material culture methodologies. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), the Center for Creative Works, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, and AUTOMAT. She has contributed to exhibition planning and publications at PAFA, Arcadia Exhibitions; the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University; and the American Philosophical Society. Haas is an archivist at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia.
Bob Skiba is the Curator of Collections at the John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives at the William Way Community Center. He is the author of the popular “Gayborhood Guru” blog and of the Philadelphia LGBT Mapping Project, where he’s documented over 1200 places important to the area’s queer history and culture. Skiba is a founding member and 6-term past president of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and is the co-author of two books on Philadelphia history: Lost Philadelphia and Philadelphia Then and Now.
Dito van Reigersberg is a co-founder of Pig Iron Theatre Company. He has performed in almost all of Pig Iron’s productions since its founding, including the OBIE-winning original pieces Hell Meets Henry Halfway and Chekhov Lizardbrain. His alter-ego Martha Graham Cracker performs regularly at Joe’s Pub and is famously "the tallest, hairiest drag queen in the world” – check out her album of songs about show biz, heartbreak, and libraries called Lashed But Not Leashed.
Leo Fahringer '19 is an interdisciplinary illustrator and fiber artist from rural central Pennsylvania. Graduating from Arcadia University with a BFA in Illustration in 2019, Leo’s thesis focused on the interconnectivity between clothing and queer identity/culture from the years 1950-2000 in the United States. Now living in Dundee, Scotland, Leo is a freelance artist specializing in textural embroidery as well as a drag performer under the name Eden Spaghetti. Leo uses his experience of growing up as a queer and transgender individual in a rural setting to inform his work in all its forms.
