Made Over Time opens October 8 at Moody Jones Gallery in Jenkintown, pairing two Philadelphia-area painters who have each spent something close to half a century at the easel. James Atkins and Dane Tilghman show together through November 13, with an opening reception that first night running from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

The gallery has made a habit of putting veteran Philadelphia painters in conversation with each other — it did something similar this summer with former PAFA president Eric Pryor. Made Over Time follows that same instinct, setting two long, very different careers side by side rather than treating either artist as a retrospective on their own.

Made Over Time Traces James Atkins Back to a 1970 Debut in South Philadelphia

Atkins, born in 1941, is largely self-taught, with formal training limited to classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia. He had his first show in 1970 at the Painted Bride Art Center, and the decades since have taken him through multiple mediums and subjects, most of it drawn from his own dreams and lived experience rather than a single consistent style.

His work has landed in serious company along the way — the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts holds pieces in its permanent collection, and he was part of both “The Chemistry of Color” at the Hudson River Museum in 2011 and “We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s” at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2015.

Atkins doesn’t work in a signature style the way a lot of career-long painters do — pieces from different periods can look like they came from different hands, which is part of what’s made him hard to place in a single school. What holds constant is the source material: dream logic and Philadelphia streets, filtered through whatever medium suited the image that week.

Dane Tilghman Brings Nearly Nine Thousand Paintings Into Made Over Time

Tilghman, a West Chester native whose family traces back to Tilghman Island on the Chesapeake, has been painting professionally since 1979. Over that time he’s produced something like 9,000 paintings, moving between realism, cubism, and impressionism with a palette knife, almost always returning to the same subject: early-20th-century Black working-class life, from street corners to ballfields.

That subject is what’s made him a fixture well beyond Philadelphia — one of his baseball paintings sits in the permanent collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and he headlined Arts in the Garden at the Inn at Villanova earlier this month.

He works mostly in oil, and the palette-knife technique gives even flat surfaces a built-up, almost sculptural texture. The subject matter has stayed close to one throughline across those thousands of paintings — barbershops, sandlot ballgames, front-porch scenes — everyday Black life rather than the historical set-pieces more common in the genre.

What to Expect When Made Over Time Opens at Moody Jones Gallery

Moody Jones Gallery, which relocated from Glenside to its current spot at 319 York Road in Jenkintown, has built its program around artists it considers underrepresented in traditional spaces — the same approach that shaped its Eric Pryor show this summer. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., through November 13.

Beyond exhibitions, Moody Jones runs artist talks, panel discussions, and workshops aimed at building an audience around the work it shows, plus collection consulting on the side. That mission shapes how it schedules a season — pairing an established name like Tilghman with someone like Atkins, whose reputation has stayed more regional, fits the gallery’s stated focus on artists it considers underrepresented.

Fifty years is long enough to become someone’s whole style, or to keep refusing to settle into one — Atkins and Tilghman have taken opposite routes through roughly the same amount of time, and Made Over Time is really a chance to see what that difference looks like hung on the same wall.

Images: Dylan Moody

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Allan Lane

Philadelphia born and bred, Allan Lane is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of digital magazines. He launched his first publication, SportBikes Inc Magazine in 2010, followed by dosage MAGAZINE in 2019. Recently, Allan launched his third online publication, Club For Man. As a journalist, Allan covers fashion, lifestyle, culture, art, and motorcycles.

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