Nearly 200 years ago The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was established in Philadelphia for the purpose of teaching, exhibiting, and promoting artists in their field of endeavor for the benefit of an American audience as the first academy of art in the United States. Painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and other forms of fine art were beginning to be part of our culture with origins in America rather than from Europe. In 1805 Charles Willson Peale established, from his early museum in Independence Hall- and his even earlier museum called the Columbianum- an art museum connected with a school of art that could educate young aspiring artists as well as exhibit their work before the public. The museum, first conceived to display Peale's collection of natural history artifacts, quickly expanded into portraits of notable Americans, plaster casts of antique sculptures, and American paintings, and soon exhausted the space allotted to them. His archaeological excavation of a gigantic mastadon in 1801, for example, needed a home to be seen by a curiosity-seeking audience, housed amidst stuffed animals and birds as well as his works of painting and sculpture. "An academy for the encouragement of the Fine Arts" was Peale's vision which was ultimately supported by some seventy American statesman and businessmen when the current academy was founded in 1805. Since that time, art academies have grown up throughout the United States to perpetuate this notion, including Fine Art instruction in colleges and universities as well as in dedicated schools of art. Susquehanna University contributes to this tradition in teaching art, awarding degrees in art, and exhibiting art in the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Exhibitions in the gallery's eleven years of years of operation have brought paintings and sculpture as well as decorative arts and ethnographic artifacts to Central Pennsylvania audiences from major museums and private collections as a function of the scholarly process of its professional staff and the sharing of varieties of exhibitions with its sister institutions. In the spirit of perpetuating a place in our society for art of the academy, the Lore Degenstein Gallery has brought together the work of artists who were educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and who have a working relationship with our university. William Gannotta, Michael Moser, and Kevin Strickland all contribute to the Lore Degenstein Gallery's operation through various activities from transporting museum works, to mounting and framing art and installing exhibitions. It is important to note that these artists, credentialled through the Academy's educational program, are actively working and exhibiting their art. As professional artists they each endorse the tenets of their training while adding their significant skills to the academic pursuits of other museums to keep the spirit of the Academy alive and well. A Range of specialties in the works of these artists is on view: Ganotta is a painter, Moser, a sculptor, and Strickland, a printmaker. William Ganotta, graduating from the Academy in 1978, paints the landscape of Pennsylvania environs and rural scenes from other states as well.His vibrant color and modernist perspective bring to his large paintings a vitality and a sense of immediacy in his relationship with the outdoors. Ganotta lives and works in Philadelphia. Michael Moser, who attended the Academy in the 1990s, works in a sculptural method related to "direct carving," a means of intuitively allowing the stone, metal, or wood to direct the artist's movements as he works the medium to create warmth and tactility in his sculptures. Moser's studio is located in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. Kevin Strickland, graduated from the Academy in 1996, takes exception to the traditional printmaking process of creating aquatints by line and color. His meticulous prints engender intimate illusions of simplicity in their verisimiltude, likening reality to shadow and form. Strickland is developing an art studio community in a historic area of East Phildelphia. The Lore Degenstein Gallery is priviledged to present these artists' works which give out students and audience the opportunity to not only experience the products of the working artists but to witness the evidence of process found in professional artists today. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has established a foundation for the teaching of art that continues to this present day, a tradition which Susquehanna University is grateful to pursue. We appreciate the support from the endowments of Charles B. Degenstein and Florence and Saul Putterman which sponsor our programs of fine arts and the facilites that house our exhibitions and permanent collection of over 2,500 works of art at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Dr. Valerie Livingston   Umapati, William Gannotta, oil on linen mounted to panel, 60 x 35"