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In Philly galleries now: Modern photos of Caribbean heritage, meditations on Gettysburg, more

Shows of note include Mark Mahosky at Fleisher/Ollman, Craig Stover at Jed Williams Gallery, and the group photo show "The Expanded Caribbean" at Drexel.

Tony Rocco’s photograph “Small Town Gambler (La Florida, Colombia)” (2012), archival pigment print, from “The Expanded Caribbean” at Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery.
Tony Rocco’s photograph “Small Town Gambler (La Florida, Colombia)” (2012), archival pigment print, from “The Expanded Caribbean” at Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery.Read moreTony Rocco

A graduate course that Susanna W. Gold once taught at Temple's Tyler School of Art explored the Atlantic Ocean as a "connective cultural force" between the nations and peoples on its shores. That same perspective, now applied to the Caribbean Sea, informs "The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads," curated by Gold at Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery.

That cultural connectivity is borne out in the works of 16 photographers and artists Gold has selected for her exhibition. All have worked on Caribbean projects, covering 14 nations among them. Despite their diverse heritages, most of Gold's participants were born in the United States. Several of them work within recognizably contemporary trends, and all are clearly familiar with them.

Unsurprisingly, much of this work draws on the fraught histories of various Caribbean islands.

Adrián Fernández, who is Cuban and lives in Havana, photographs 20th-century, government-approved Cuban postage stamps that were intended to show the country in its best light. But Fernández makes them difficult to see clearly by zooming in until they're slightly blurred. He also enhances colors and crops his images.

The resulting prints suggest an alternative truth. His 2014 work Beyond What You Can See (The Great Rock), from a stamp issued shortly after the Cuban revolution, shows a family seated together on a rocky precipice, surveying a majestic Cuban landscape. Fernández has cropped the view that this family is enjoying to eliminate the far-distant horizon, subtly underscoring the uncertain future of the country at that time.

Ivette Spradlin, a Cuban American photographer and video artist based in Pittsburgh, is represented here by a series of photographs she took during a trip to Cuba in 2006 to visit family members. (Spradlin's mother fled communist Cuba in the late 1960s, and Spradlin grew up in Miami). Her large color photographs capture intimate glimpses of her relatives' homes, the details of which reveal their conflicted feelings about life under Castro, from an official portrait of the president laminated to a bedside table to an aspirational ceramic sailing ship placed atop a vintage TV.

In Barbados,  Haverford photographer William Earle Williams continues a project of three decades that has taken him across North America, England, and the Caribbean, shooting spaces, landscapes, and structures related to African and African American history. His silver gelatin print Whites Alley, Bridgetown, Barbados, 2008, depicts a quiet, unpeopled view of what was once the main trading street for the British Royal African Co., which delivered African captives to the New World. In Sunbury Plantation, Barbados, 2008, Williams presents an ordinary scene of a linen-covered card table on a lawn at Sunbury, now a guesthouse for tourists. Chillingly, nothing in this placid black-and-white image speaks of the plantation's history as the site of a famous slave revolt.

Barbados-born Kara Springer constructs minimalist white structures and places them in island seascapes as temporary installations, which she then photographs. Her 2014 series "Repositioned Objects" brings sculptor Donald Judd to mind — his 1965 essay "Specific Objects" addressed a new art combining elements of painting and sculpture. Springer's work also speaks poignantly of memory and loss, referencing the sense of displacement she experienced as the daughter of a Bajan father and Jamaican mother growing up in Ontario. (She is now based in Philadelphia).

Her photograph of a group of open cubes on a beach in Barbados, along with a subsequent photograph of the same structures lying broken on the sand, struck me as an uncanny foretelling of the current hurricane ravagings of various Caribbean islands. So did a haunting photograph of solid white rectangular forms floating in the sea off a Nassau beach.

"The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads" also features photographs, photo-based works, and videos by Susan S. Bank, Vincent Dixon, John E. Dowell, Jr., O'Neil Lawrence, Matt Levitch, Conrad Louis-Charles, Karyn Olivier, Tony Rocco, Erika P. Rodriguez, Sheena Rose, Ron Tarver, and Byron Wolfe.

Through Dec. 10 at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, 3401 Filbert St., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. 215-895-2548 or drexel.edu/pearlsteingallery.

Solo show for “Yellow Drawings”

Speaking of historic sites and events reimagined as contemporary art, the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield and environs have been the subject of Mark Mahosky's art since 1986. His "Yellow Drawings" from then to now make up his current one-person show at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery — one of the gallery's rare solo shows in its Arch Street space.

Mahosky's charcoal and ink drawings of landscapes, monuments, and houses on cadmium yellow backgrounds are as emotionally reserved as 19th-century documentary photographs of the Civil War. But their warning-sign-yellow backgrounds allude to much more: to future battles, as well as to the mundane fake-parchment facsimiles of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address sold at tourist traps.

You never doubt Mahosky's engagement with his subject, and it became even more passionate in 2015 when he became a resident artist with the National Park Service and began drawing the battlefield en plein air.

Seeing this body of work together, in one fell swoop, is gripping for its wholehearted dedication to a battle of unprecedented horror and loss — and for its relevance to our nation's current divisions.

Through Nov. 11 at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, 1216 Arch St., 10:30 to 5:30 Tuesday through Friday, 12 to 5 p.m. Saturday. 215-545-7562 or fleisher-ollmangallery.com.

Prints as individual as fingerprints

Jed Williams Gallery, which has never before devoted itself to a show of prints, has now given its small white space over to Craig Stover's vividly colored linocut prints, displayed unframed in floor-to-ceiling grids. His semi-representational images reference historical works he admires — Picasso and Matisse are obvious influences — but they are also said to contain hidden autobiographical elements.

Rather than produce multiple editions of any given print, Stover makes unique artist proofs by varying the colors for the prints and the sequences in which they are applied. In other words, there is no official edition of any image. Each unframed unique print is $200.

Through Oct. 31 at Jed Williams Gallery, 615 Bainbridge St., 4 to 6 p.m. Monday and Friday, 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. 267-970-5509 or jedwilliamsgallery.com