Made Over Time Puts Two Half-Century Painting Practices in One Room

Made Over Time opens October 8 at Moody Jones Gallery in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, placing two painters with roughly fifty years of practice each into a single two-person exhibition. James Atkins and Dane Tilghman show together through November 13, with an opening reception on the eighth from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

Neither artist has settled into one style long enough to be reduced to it, which is part of what makes the pairing worth attention. Made Over Time reads less like two retrospectives placed side by side and more like two different arguments about what fifty years of practice does to a hand.

Made Over Time Opens on James Atkins’ Self-Taught Practice

Atkins, born in 1941, trained largely on his own, supplementing that with classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia. His first show came in 1970 at the Painted Bride Art Center, and the work since has moved across mediums and subjects without settling, most of it built from dream imagery and personal memory rather than observed subject matter.

That range hasn’t kept his work out of serious institutional company. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts holds pieces in its permanent collection, and Atkins was included in both “The Chemistry of Color: The Sorgenti Collection of Contemporary African-American Art” at the Hudson River Museum in 2011 and “We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s” at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2015.

There’s no single throughline connecting the work chronologically — a piece from one decade can look unrelated to one from the next, which is unusual for an artist this far into a career. What repeats instead is the source material: dreams and Philadelphia streets, reworked in whatever medium fit the image at the time, from painting to mixed media.

Dane Tilghman’s Made Over Time Paintings Draw on Roughly 9,000 Prior Works

Tilghman, a West Chester native with family roots on Tilghman Island in the Chesapeake, has painted professionally since 1979 and produced something close to 9,000 paintings in that span, working between realism, cubism, and impressionism with a palette knife and returning consistently to early-20th-century Black working-class life as subject matter.

One of his baseball paintings sits in the permanent collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and his work has had solo exhibitions at Howard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, and the Butler Institute of Fine Art in Youngstown, Ohio, alongside a mural at what was then Atlanta’s Turner Field.

The palette-knife technique gives even his flatter compositions a built-up, almost sculptural surface, and the subject matter has stayed remarkably consistent across that output — barbershops, sandlot ballgames, front porches — everyday scenes rather than the historical set-pieces more common in the genre.

Made Over Time Runs Through November at Moody Jones Gallery

Moody Jones Gallery, which relocated to 319 York Road in Jenkintown from an earlier Glenside location, positions itself around artists it considers underrepresented in traditional gallery spaces. Made Over Time is on view Thursday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., through November 13, with the opening reception the only evening hours during the run.

The gallery also runs artist talks, panel discussions, and workshops alongside its exhibition schedule, plus collection consulting for individual and institutional buyers — programming built around the same stated mission that put Atkins, whose reputation has stayed more regional, in a room with a painter as widely collected as Tilghman.

Fifty years can calcify into a signature or keep refusing to — Atkins spent his avoiding one, Tilghman spent his building a body of work large enough to constitute an archive on its own, and Made Over Time is where that difference actually becomes visible, one wall apart.