Maryland Art Place

William F. Pelham, a retired Towson University physics professor who photographed nature and still-life scenes, died of cancer Thursday at the Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Tuscany-Canterbury resident was 79. Born in Queens, N.Y., and raised on Long Island, he earned a degree in chemical engineering at Clarkson Institute of Technology in Potsdam, N.Y. During World War II he served in the Navy, where he worked in an experimental gunnery unit based at Norfolk, Va. After the war, he earned a master's degree and doctorate in science education at Columbia University and simultaneously taught at Manhattan College.

COMING UP Join the Johns Hopkins University in welcoming spring at the 33rd annual Johns Hopkins Spring Fair tomorrow through Sunday. The Homewood campus will be filled with carnival rides, inflatable extreme games, craft vendors and food ranging from gyros to funnel cakes. Performers and interactive workshops will entertain children. Bands such as the Silent Groove and Snoozebox will rock the Hopkins campus. On Saturday, Guster will bring its alternative sound to the Ralph S. O'Connor Recreation Center.

Smith book sale Stock up on summer reading this weekend at the Smith College Club of Baltimore's 46th annual used-book sale. Tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, stop by the Exhibition Hall at the Timonium Fairgrounds to browse and buy texts from a collection of thousands. Paperback and hardcover books in more than 30 categories will be available at the event, which will also have CDs, tapes and sheet music. Hours are 10 a.m.-8 p.m. tomorrow, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday.

Colorful installations and subdued drawings contrast in Territory/Ambiguity, on display at the Maryland Art Place. Artists Paul Bartow and Richard Metzgar's massive collaboration, a site installation called "Collection Intersection," is bright and busy. Panels of wood, many of which are coated with candy-colored paints, collide with upholstered furniture, industrial building materials and Plexiglas-encased ferric chloride drawings in a large work that fills two of the gallery's three rooms.

Is there such a thing as a Baltimore aesthetic? The idea of a uniquely local style of art-making has been kicking around since at least 1996, when it became the subject of the inaugural issue of Link, Baltimore's homegrown journal of the arts. In that issue, editor Peter Walsh decried the "cultural imperialism" of New York and celebrated locally produced art as a potentially powerful "site of resistance" to the "homogenous anonymity" of the media-driven mainstream. His essay ended with a stirring call to "end the cultural blood-sucking of the art capitals and put the nourishment back in the provinces."

Sculpture at Hood The human body combines with landscape forms in Alice Robrish's work, on display at Hood College's Hodson Gallery. Many of the clay sculptures depict the female form - some clay works stand alone while others intertwine with natural objects, such as driftwood. Also included in the show is a six-piece series that explores the progressions caused by aging. Robrish said the series, which begins with a work depicting a 4-year-old and ends with the form of an 80-year-old, shows "the transformations that happen from our youth to our old age."

Shoes are necessary tools for walking, expressions of style and fashion and even objects of desire. In a new installation at the Maryland Art Place, shoes are also objects of art. The exhibit, Soft Shoe, explores shoes as artifacts of the human condition whose sculptural qualities have inspired artists Lesley Haas, Ruth Pettus, Lauren Schott, Leonard Streckfus and Monica Tinker. The artists interpret shoes in their own ways. For example, Streckfus uses shoes as found objects and creates whimsical sculptures from them.

Art exhibitions at Artscape On-site Loco Motion, an outdoor installation featuring spray murals and guerrilla sculpture. Through Aug. 24 at 1200 Mount Royal Ave. median strip. Electro-Box, video works in outdoor viewing stations. Tomorrow through Sunday at 1200 Mount Royal Ave. Art Car Show, artist-altered cars. Tomorrow through Sunday at 1300 Mount Royal Ave. Oddstruments and Sound / Shift, two-part exhibition about music and instruments. Through Aug. 4 at Decker Gallery, MICA. Three Strong Painters, works by three New York artists.