The Medialia Gallery in midtown Manhattan hosted a reception on July 16 to accompany "New Ideas in Medallic Sculpture, 2015-2016," an international traveling exhibition. This eighteenth annual program features work from more than two dozen students from one Portuguese and one Japanese university.

The work, part of a longstanding effort of encouragement for young sculptors by gallery owner Mashiko, is the latest in a program begun during the 1998-1999 academic year when she was associated with the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

At the same time the gallery is displaying more than one hundred medals and other art as part of a "microUniverse" collection. These include work by well-known artists, including Mashiko herself.

A third special collection, and one which especially impressed me, is entitled "Medals of War, Protest, and Peace." This group of thirty-eight medals is from the collections of Dr. Jay Galst, Scott Miller (author of Medallic Art of the American Numismatic Society, 1865-2014), Normand Pepin, Dr. Ira Rezak, David Simpson and Frederic Withington.

Although many of these medals could be singled out, among the most notable are two rather eerie ones from the Simpson collection: Weltkieg Land Und, a 98-mm medal by Hans Lindl, a 1915 piece; and Military Wisdom, an especially haunting 115- by 90-mm work by Michael Reed, from 1995.

The gallery's permanent collection of medals, most of which are for sale, includes those by such prestigious J. Sanford Saltus Award winners as Eugene Daub (1991), Mico Kaufman (1992), Leonda Finke (1997), Bernd Gobel (2000), Ron Dutton (2009) and Joao Duarte (2011).

More information on the gallery can be seen at:
http://medialiagallery.com/