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Reading: It's Not Just Outlet Malls Anymore
This is also art that invites repeat viewing. A swoop of color may conjure one idea on Saturday and be something entirely different by the end of the weekend. Visitors -- children especially -- are invited to touch the art, not just be touched by it.
Florida-born Deb Schlouch's studio is filled with variations of the big, wide-open eyes that captured the attention of the tiny dancers in the parking lot. "It feels so good to be surrounded by all this creativity," Schlouch said.
  Reading, Pa.'s GoggleWorks boasts a gallery (above), glass-blowing studio, along with dozens of resident artists, dance and choral groups and a movie theater. (By Matthew Mazurkiewicz) 
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The 40 or so artists must spend at least 20 hours a week at the center interacting with visitors. Many artists do that on Second Sundays each month, when the GoggleWorks teems with activity.
On the second floor, there was a sudden burst of applause, the kind you heard in your college days when a busboy dropped an entire tray full of dishes. There, in one of the studios, a 12-year-old ballerina with white makeup and perfect circles of gray on her cheeks, a white leotard and white gloves danced on a tabletop to live violin. When the 13-year-old musician attacked his instrument, the dancer became a pirouetting dervish; when his playing slowed, she moved with an elegant grace. After the music stopped, she lay down on the table, rested her head on a satin pillow and feigned sleep.
Around the corner is Peter Stolvoort's studio. A lithographer, Stolvoort best personifies the controlled collision between the determined industry of Reading's past and the spirit of renewal you sense at the GoggleWorks.
This Old World-style artisan works slowly, carefully producing one print at a time on his 1 1/2 -ton Charles Brand press. With an easy but intense bearing and soft features, he could be the subject of a Rembrandt portrait.
(If you want to see another side of Reading art, make time for an exhibit of native son Keith Haring at the Reading Public Museum. "Journey of the Radiant Baby" is on display until Aug. 6. Haring, who died in 1990, jolted the art world with vibrant murals and simple figures that remain popular today.)
You might even see someone actually wearing goggles at GoggleWorks. Penny Rakov often does; she manages the kinetic glass-blowing and ceramics studios at the center of the facility.
"The GoggleWorks is an incredible opportunity for young artists," says Rakov. "There is an energy here, a feeling that things are happening."
