Pennsylvania at Work

In the auditorium of the Lehigh Valley Cooperative Farmers Association in Allentown, Pa. last week hung 290 paintings by 120 members of the Lehigh Art Alliance. The exhibits had one thing in common: each dealt with some phase of the dairy industry. There were pictures of barns, separators, milk sheds, bottling machines--and of course, cows. In style, the pictures ranged from primitives to abstractions; in quality, they ranged from pretty, good to just fair, but members of the Lehigh Valley Farmers Co-op were pleased and proud. Said one: "I guess an artist is the only one who can feel about a farm the way a farmer does."

Until two years ago, the Lehigh Art Alliance was a small group of amateurs and semi-professionals who periodically exhibited their work and attracted almost no attention. Then Alliance President Quentin Smith Jr. suggested that the members concentrate on a mass portrait of some regional industry. That year they settled on the Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. Their single-theme show, "Portrait of Power," was a hit with the community, and Penn Power bought up 25 canvases for a permanent exhibition. Last year, the alliance chose the Call-Chronicle newspapers of Allentown as their group subject, called the results "Portrait of a Free Press." The delighted papers bought up 71 alliance paintings, sent a batch of them on tour to other cities.

This year, President Smith had a talk with Farmers Co-op President Glen Boger. Boger, no special fan of painting, picked up the idea at once. Says he: "I went into it purely for public relations. When you can get 40,000 people into your front door, that's pretty good for any business." The alliance hopes to do business, too. Their paintings, priced from $12 to $3,000, will be on sale for six months. But, sales or no sales, the alliance is now well out of its old, ivory-tower doldrums and ready to paint anything at the dip of a brush, so long as it shows Pennsylvania at work.

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