Galleries: Celebrating 100 all over the Print Center

Philadelphia's venerable Print Center is celebrating its centennial anniversary through December with exhibitions, events, programs, and projects on its own premises and elsewhere (it has partnered with more than 40 organizations in Philadelphia and beyond), all of which are listed on its website and in a guidebook available at the Print Center.

The best place to start is the Print Center itself.

On the first floor, "Highlights in History" documents the center's activities from its beginnings as a club to its current status as a nonprofit organization with an international voice in printmaking and photography.

Among the many other fascinating finds are Arnold Roth's sinuous, admiring caricature of the Print Center's second director, the remarkable Berthe von Moschzisker, who ran the place from 1944 to 1969; and a letter written in 1917 by Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and an early patron of the Print Center, apologizing to a founder of the organization for his tardy payment for a group of etchings.

Upstairs, one of its two second-floor galleries is devoted to "Recollection," a show of works by artists who have used printmaking and photography to document history in personal ways, among them Walker Evans, Ken Lum, Martha Madigan, Judith Taylor, Bill Walton, Kara Walker, and William Earle Williams. This lovely show, which strikes a decidedly elegiac mood, makes an interesting contrast to the solo exhibition in the other upstairs gallery, which also explores history.

Gabriel Martinez, a Philadelphia artist, has pulled out all the stops for "Bayside Revisited," his installation exploring the Fire Island of the 1980s and its mythical place in gay culture as told through films, slide projections, ink-jet prints, pieces involving laser-etched fabric and mirror, and gelatin silver prints.

You enter through a curtain printed with the image of the late gay icon Donna Summer's Live and More album cover; inside, the gallery resembles a club. In the dim lighting, the first work you see involves nothing more than a hanging mirror ball, a 16 mm film projector, and the wall behind both, onto which scenes from the 1971 landmark gay porn film Boys in the Sand are projected and refracted by reflections from the mirror ball. Nearby, an old-fashioned slide projector shows black-and-white slides of the beachy stretch of scrub pines between the Pines and Cherry Grove known as the Meat Rack. Many of the individual elements in the installation seem more simple and analog than they actually are - for example, I learned that Martinez shot these images with a digital camera, then had them made into slides - and they're often the result of multiple processes and combinations of materials, all seamlessly executed. A perfect example is Live Hard; it looks like a painting based on a photo collage of bandannas arranged in a grid (no easy trick in itself), but is in fact composed of laser-etched fabric attached to a wood support.

Martinez's most physically layered works, ink-jet prints of the bayside of Fire Island, onto which he silk-screened additional imagery and applied silver leaf (and may have rephotographed and reprinted them as a final step) suggest mirages and look as smooth and shimmering as expensive wallpaper.

His installation ends on a terrifying note, with his photograph Grove Hotel, showing the legendary gay lodging after it was devastated by a fire in March 2015, printed vivid red (think Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, c. late 1980s) as a Fujiflex Crystal Archive print, as though still smoldering. It's a poignant end to Martinez's reverie.

Print Center, 1614 Latimer St., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 215-735-6090 or www.printcenter.org. Through Dec. 19.

We know a few of Israel's contemporary-art stars - for me, the photographers Adi Nes and Orit Raff quickly come to mind - but the contemporary-art scene there is still woefully under most Americans' radar. Which is why Martin Rosenberg, a professor at Rutgers University, Camden, and Susan Isaacs, a professor at Towson University, decided it was high time to introduce us to it. Four years of their research have produced an eye-opening traveling exhibition that is making its debut in Rutgers University's Stedman Gallery.

As one might logically conclude, contemporary Israeli art is most typically a reaction to the region's divisiveness, though not necessarily in an obvious way. What you might not expect in this show of 36 artists - unless you are familiar with the art of such Latin American artists as Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), and Cuban-born Ana Mendieta - is how poetically this reaction manifests itself.

That is apparent in the lucent, measured films of Ariane Littman and a photograph by Toby Cohen, Sunrise at Masada, of three men leaping in the air on the edge of a cliff, and in Maya Muchawsky Parnas' scatter-floor installation of thin, colored fabric forms, The Dead Sea for the Time Being.

Certain contemporary-art trends that are familiar to us that derive from European and American movements and parallel developments of the past, and that have been so influential on contemporary art in the U.S. - particularly modernism and self-taught art - seem not to be of interest to contemporary Israeli artists. According to this exhibition, at least, they are involved mainly in the present.

Stedman Gallery, Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, 314 Linden St., Camden, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; 856-225-6245 or www.rcca.camden.rutgers.edu. Through Dec. 17.