Spirit House is really a theater set waiting for actors to bring it to life. Viewers who surrender to its charm risk becoming collaborators in Birch's paean to community values and the idea of home as a sanctuary. To June 30. Joan Snyder's exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art addresses life and death through a dozen monoprints and two paintings that illuminate a fundamental problem artists often face when dealing with cosmic questions. Snyder tries a number of combinations.
Some pieces use text liberally, while others keep it to a minimum.
Freshly Plowed Field, for instance, a monoprint that symbolizes new beginnings, is reductively blunt. By contrast, Prayer II and Prayer V combine Hebrew and Latin texts, faintly visible. Text, often in a tremulous scrawl, doesn't usually make the ideas stronger or clearer, but does alter mood significantly. Because it's tightly packed, the show is visually overpowering initially, even a bit confusing, but a little time and patience sorts it all out and releases the underlying emotional current. Through April 30.