Plenty of kids doodle, draw and dabble in art, then drop those pursuits as they grow older. Karen Singer and Peter Handler never stopped.
The Germantown couple, activists who believe that art can build awareness and connection, have been making things all their lives. Singer, 70, works in ceramics, creating large-scale tile installations for nonprofits and other institutions, along with individual pieces. Handler, 77, is a furniture maker and photographer whose work speaks directly to his concerns about climate change.
For the first time in their 20-year partnership, the two are exhibiting together at Germantown’s iMPeRFeCT Gallery, 5539 Germantown Ave., in a show that features Handler’s large-scale photographs of stunning landscapes — from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Chesapeake Bay — and Singer’s bas-relief tiles depicting Philadelphia row houses, Schuylkill bridges, and vintage cars.
The show, which will be up through May 3, also includes a few collaborative pieces, part of Handler’s “Canaries in the Coal Mine” series, each capturing a tangible, alarming outcome of climate change.
One cabinet, a reliquary made by Handler, holds several ceramic golden toads glazed a brilliant yellow-orange, creatures once native to the cloud forests of Costa Rica. They are now extinct — the last one was spotted in 1989 — most likely due to severe droughts and a fungus that thrives in warm, dry conditions.
In another piece, a glass-topped table crafted by Handler, viewers peer through the transparent surface to glimpse an underwater reef made of Singer’s ceramics. It’s a colorful seascape flanked by pale, gray hillocks to represent corals bleached and dying from warming ocean temperatures and pollution.
“I think art reaches people in their hearts as well as their heads,” Handler said. “It’s a way of getting past political inhibitions.” To nudge viewers to think about the abstract topics of the “Canaries” series — sea level rise, thawing permafrost — “the work had to be beautiful to get the attention the piece needed to understand what it is, what it’s about.”
Singer’s activism has a more local lens. As the survivor of an earlier, abusive marriage that ended in divorce, she speaks openly about domestic violence and is on the board of Women in Transition, a nonprofit that provides support to people in abusive relationships.
Through her business, Karen Singer Tileworks, established in 1991, she works with hospitals, schools, faith communities and nonprofits to create donor recognition walls that honor contributors while reflecting the organization’s mission.
Her smaller-scale work includes a new series titled “Where Are We Going?” They are round images, each depicting a road winding toward an unseen destination. Singer made them in January and February while reeling from the results of the 2024 election.
“They are a direct response to … the feeling of total bewilderment and fear,” she said. “We’ve got to stay on course, whatever that course is.”
Her other pieces in the show — row homes, cars, and river glimpses — capture bits of Philadelphia neighborhoods and landscapes, calling attention to fragments of history and culture that often go unnoticed.
“I’m fascinated with row houses,” said Singer, who was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and moved here in 1978. “They’re so Philadelphia. There are so many varieties; they change as people adapt them.”
Both artists started young. Handler received his first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, when he was still in elementary school; later, after majoring in political science, he taught himself to make jewelry, completed a master’s degree in fine art at the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology and began creating furniture of wood and aluminum-epoxy resins.
Singer still has sketchbooks from her childhood and recalls a Saturday morning ceramics class she took in junior high. “That’s where I felt like I was me,” she said. In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, studying sculpture, she realized that medium wasn’t what she wanted to pursue.
She took a tile-making class at Community College of Philadelphia, then completed an apprenticeship at Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown. She’d found her form: a genre that blends aspects of print-making, creation of items in multiples, and a semi-sculptural texture.
“I’m fascinated with bas-relief, this magic realm where something flat becomes something three-dimensional,” she said. Singer bought her first kiln, quit her waitressing job and started her business in 1991.
She first met Handler in the early 1980s, when he was working in a wood shop in Manayunk; he was already exhibiting in craft shows and offered her artistic advice. Each of them had married other people, but by the turn of the millennium, both were divorced; their first date was to the movies on a Monday night. They married in 2005.
“I see in both [artists’ work] a love for the world and a concern for humanity,” said Rocio Cabello, co-founder of iMPeRFeCT Gallery. Her partner, curator Renny Molenaar, invited both Handler and Singer to exhibit. A third gallery space holds the whimsical, colorful cityscapes of Germantown artist Mason Carter.
“Peter’s going to change the world,” Singer said. “I think about changing the neighborhood.”
IMPeRFeCT Gallery is at 5539 Germantown Ave. For more information, visit imperfectgallery.squarespace.com or call 215-869-1001.
Anndee Hochman is a Mt. Airy writer, teacher and storyteller.
