April 29th, May 6th. Two Maitin weekends featuring conversations, an art exhibit, a concert with Philadelphia Orchestra's Mondrian Ensemble. Conversations with Philadelphia and Cape May Friends of Maitin; Black Tie Dinner optional on weekend of May 5th-6th.

  Click the image to view event poster

ACCESS WEEKENDS CELEBRATE INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN, PHILADELPHIA ARTIST, SAM MAITIN IN APRIL AND MAY

Avalon/Cape May Court House.  Access to Art will spend the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May celebrating the life of internationally known Philadelphia artist, Sam Maitin, with concerts in his honor, conversations with his friends and colleagues, an intimate art show of area people’s art lent for the occasion, and a dinner event. Maitin mentored Access to Art, Inc. and drew up their mission statement. He died last December.

Maitin’s works are in the permanent collections of the MOMA, NY, the Tate Gallery, London, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  He showed everywhere from Tel Aviv to Toyko with lots of forays to England, Paris,  Poland and Germany in between. He created a public work in China, and decorated law offices in Florida. He had one man shows in Paris, Mexico, London, Toyko, and exhibited in the Graphic Biennale, Poland.  Over two dozen public works decorate hospitals, synagogues, the Christian Association at Penn, Wharton, Temple, Y’s, schools, community centers, and universities in Philadelphia. He was a Guggenheim scholar who studied and taught at Curwen Gallery affiliated with the Tate in England.  He headed up the Graphic Communications Laboratory at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania  from l966-70 and taught in most of Philadelphia’s art institutions including Moore College of Art and the Philadelphia Museum School, later to become the University of the Arts.

The event will be designed in a manner he suggested to honor his friend and colleague, world renowned architect, Louis I. Kahn. ”He told me everything he wanted me to do to honor Louis I. Kahn, and I want to do it for him. I never did the Kahn weekend, because I met Esther, in her 80’s, Louis I. Kahn’s wife.  She adored him.  Louis had two illegitimate children, with two other women, and they would have been there and I thought that it would be too hard on Esther, so I didn’t do it.” said  Barbara Beitel,  founder and director of Access to Art, said. The event, in Avalon and Cape May Court House, with dinner forays into Cape May, will bring together colleagues and friends of Sam Maitin to celebrate his life and to remember his special genius which was both in art and in personal relationships.  “Sam was a mensch, as people are fond of saying, his good works, kind deeds, sense of humor and humility were equal to his genius,” said Beitel. “He spent half of his life assisting the poor and disenfranchised, working for social justice, promoting the arts, and the other half doing art.”  she said. “He was always helping other artists, and people generally.  He thought that artists had special god given gifts, and should be reverenced for their contributions.”  she said. 

“He was incredibly prolific artistically and you can see public works of his all over Philadelphia, at the Annenberg Center for Communications, at the Christian Association at Penn, at Settlement Music School, at Hahnemann Hospital, Abington Hospital, Academy House, the Enclave, at the YWHA and around the world as well.”  she said.  If you go to doctor’s and dentist’s offices, all over Philly, and even to the Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour office, there is a Maitin work on many walls.  He designed cookbooks for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a poster.  He did the work for Wills Eye Hospital, created designs for runs at Jefferson, that appeared on the back of buses.  He created the cultural arts posters that appeared at bus stops across the city for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.  He did the covers for many magazines, including 20 for the Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine for Penn, seven for Holiday Magazine edited by Frank Zachary, who also edited Town & Country Magazine.

He assisted in creating the mission for our non-profit, he began our classical music series, created graphics for the music festival, and brought many talented friends and artists to the area from all over.   Prior to that he designed the Cape May County Art League’s 60^th Anniversary weekends which were fairly sensational.”  Beitel said. “We had Nobel Laureates, Penn Faulkner writers, musicians, art collectors, artists, poets, you name it.” Beitel said. “Thora Jacobsen from Fleisher Art Memorial, introduced me to him, when I asked her about artists from Fleisher.  Fleisher sat on the Baron de Hirsch foundation in Woodbine, and was also responsible for the free art school in Philadelphia when the art league began in l929.  He helped them occasionally. We wanted to reconnect with Fleisher and she gave me Sam because she said that he had a connection to Cape May having worked with Carolyn Pitts, also a Fleisher student,” Beitel said.

Carolyn and Sam met at Moore College of Art.  She was a Rhodes scholar;  he a Guggenheim, and brilliant sparks flew from that association.  She put Cape May on the National Historic Register, despite protests from locals, and he designed and assisted  Penn architect Hugh McCauley creating the Cape May Handbook

“The Cape May County Art League had a collection of antiquities that Fleisher had given them.  And Fleisher brought down quartets from the Philadelphia orchestra to perform here for them.  Sam devised all kinds of interesting arts weekends, on seminal subjects, like race relations, in l987/8, for us to present.”  Beitel said.  “We had Penn Faulkner writer, David Bradley, Clement Price from Rutgers, social activist and Episcopalian priest, Fr. Paul Washington, Sam Maitin talking about prints, and we discussed what it was like to be black in America.  Sam arranged for me to have the Macedonian Baptist Singers with Robert O. Davis, since he sang the Negro Spirituals,  head up the weekend since Fr. Paul Washington sang with them.” she said.  “Ben Shahn’s wife, Bernarda Bryson, who attended, an artist, and a classic liberal from the Roosevelt administration period, told me that it was the most interesting conversation series she had ever been to, in all her life in the arts, and since she was the first secretary of the first artist union in America, she had been to a few.”  Beitel said.  “It was because Sam Maitin brought all his brilliant friends together and they discussed real issues honestly.”  she said.  “That’s what he wanted to do down here.  He wanted to bring the best minds together, the best artists, and let people break bread and share ideas.”  she said.

“Initially I wanted to do a Louis I. Kahn weekend, which he suggested and I could find no non-profit with whom I had any connections, who cared a fig about it.  So I began my own not for profit, which would bring world class people in the arts to the shore.  Just because we live in a rural and beautiful seaside area, was no reason for mental atrophy.

What is the prohibition to thinking in a beautiful venue?” Beitel said.

He deemed our mission important, and so he donated his time and talents. He collaborated with me often, and insisted on excellence, with which I had no argument.  It was to be preferred to mediocrity.  Atlantic City could be all flash and dance, he said, but Cape May should be a cultural mecca.”  Beitel said.  He spoke about that in l987 and it is transpiring. He wanted it to be an “Aspen of the East.”  The musicians he brought me had met in Aspen, and he also suggested a classical music series.  He showed in Aspen himself.”  Beitel said.

“We just want to remember him as the joyful, playful  person he was, very serious about his commitment to art, very unserious about himself.  We want to celebrate and remember his humor and delight in life. He was a genius with a great case of humility, a very attractive attribute.  He hated Jewish American princes and people who were in love with every word that fell from their celebrated mouth. He found narcissistic people reprehensible. He hated major egos in the arts.  He thought that art should be in service to people, was about the human experience, belonged to and with people.

He wanted to remember Kahn the way he was, before they made him an icon. He suggested this prior to the big Philadelphia Art Museum exhibit which traveled to Paris, to MOMA, to the Kimball, etc. He hated it when arrivistes who had ignored and starved artists, during their life, suddenly arrived on the scene promoting them and making millions from their works, creating less than flesh and blood creatures after their death. Sam always said that artists put on their pants one leg at a time, they were primarily human beings with lives, and it was my mission to bring the artist to the people and let them enjoy their humanity as well as their works.  “Let them break bread together, he cautioned, and in the informality of the shore, let them tell some truth about what they were doing and how they felt about it and share it with an interested audience.”  Beitel said. “He wanted them to teach, to share, to impart some casual wisdom. He said: “the quick sketch is better than the final, foolish painting.” 

“Sam believed in spontaneity, and he could create a weekend in a flash, and bring all kinds of people together, which sparked great energy and artistic exchange.” she said.  “He thought out of the box, and he was never boring, nor were his friends.”  Beitel said.

Sam and Princeton University teacher and architect Carles Vallhonrot had worked for two years, with a committee, to save internationally known architect Louis I. Kahn’s works when he died penniless in Grand Central Station. Kahn worked in Philadelphia and taught at Yale and Penn. His illegitimate son just did a movie about his father, “My Architect.”   Maitin didn’t want the works to go to Texas but to stay in Philadelphia and be purchased for the University of Pennsylvania archives at the university where he taught and in the city he grew up in. He and Carles appeared at 7:30 a.m. in Milton Shapp’s kitchen, with Milton in pj’s and he dictated legislation which finally passed. The Kahn drawings and models are now the jewel of the School of Design at Penn.  They purchased them for $500,000.  Several years ago, they were evaluated at $2 million.

Artists, art collectors, critics, family members, assistants who worked for Sam, college presidents, executive directors of organizations at Penn, and architects who will participate in the conversation series, remembering Sam Maitin include the much awarded Dr. Luther Brady, famous radiation and oncology expert, who headed Hahnemann Hospital’s Oncology and Radiation Dept..  They named the Japanese wing at the Philadelphia Art Museum after him and he is a serious collector and patron of modern art and artists.  He sits on the board of the Philadelphia Art Museum, Fleisher Art Memorial, Settlement Music School, Santa Fe Opera Company.  Also participating are Seymour Mednick, photographer and film maker (Strut) and fellow student with Sam at the University of the Arts, and Dr. Beverly Dale, from the Christian Association at Penn, who commissioned Sam to do some original murals there.  

Attending will be Burton Wasserman, art critic from Art Matters and professor of Art at Rowan University, who covered Sam for years;  and  Dr. Happy Fernandez, President of Moore College of Art, where Sam once taught,  former city councilwoman for eight years, and current Chair of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. Hugh McCauley, AIA, will speak, who, with Carolyn Pitts collaborated with Sam on the Cape May Historic Designation project.  Sam Olshin, AIA, who designed the buildings and art gallery at the Enclave Community center project in Philadelphia,  for Philip Lindy, developer, and a place for his playful, colorful three dimensional sculptures to be displayed on the community center exterior will speak.  He will bring information about this community project that opened two weeks after Sam died..  Sam’s brother, David Maitin, and his young assistant, Chris Palmer, who worked with him in his studio for five years and who completed his Please Touch Museum sculpture, after he died, from his drawings, will reminisce.

All will share their memories, in a series of informal conversations, with questions and answers with the audience.  “Sam liked nothing better than a good conversation, and he was a past master of same,” said Beitel.  “We will have the Mondrian Ensemble give a concert on April 29^th at Our Lady of the Angel’s R.C. Church on the Garden State Parkway and Mechanic St. at 8 p.m. honoring Sam.  He began their association with Access to Art, beginning in l987 and continuing ever after.  They are Philadelphia Orchestra string musicians, formed by a concert pianist, Aurelia Mika Chang, who directs Access to Art’s annual music festival.   We will also have a dinner, where we will relax and socialize and celebrate Sam Maitin whose art has been called “An art of insistent optimism, humor and affirmation.  An art of celebration. “ by  Duncan Scott, British art historian and exhibition curator, and former head of Kent College of Art and Design, England, in his excellent essay about Maitin  in the book Sam Maitin:  Four Decades published by Woodmere Museum when they gave Sam a retrospective in l994.

“We are trying to create  a documentary, and next year an original piece of choreography using his art in the dance to honor him further.  Aurelia Mika Chang has obtained funding for an original piece of music composed to honor him.” said Beitel.

This will probably be finished this summer, or next year, depending upon the inspiration levels of the composer