I’m beginning this month’s reviews with an unprecedented—and not to be repeated—parenthesis, that will remind us all of where we really are. Judith Bernstein is a painter who draws enormous penises in that most traditional of materials, charcoal. One of these was accepted for a woman’s art exhibition in the Philadelphia Civic Center. Then a John Pierron, executive director of the center, stepped in and vetoed it. This flagrant piece of middle-American aggressiveness has resulted in Marcia Tucker, one of the show’s jurors, withdrawing her support of the exhibition, the circulation of a predictably ponderous petition protesting Pierron, and this brief note that footnotes the event for art history. Clearly there’s already one schmuck too many connected with the Philadelphia Civic Center.

—Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe