Walk east far enough in Philadelphia and the city starts to shed its centuries. The glass towers give way to brick, the brick to cobblestone, and somewhere around Second Street the pavement itself begins to feel like it remembers things. This is Old City — the country's most historic square mile, where the founders bickered and printed and schemed, and where, on the first Friday of every month, the doors of galleries swing open and the sidewalks fill with people who have come to look at art. It is a neighborhood built on the idea that something can be made, unmade, and made again.

Which makes it exactly the right place for a gallery named after the art of changing your mind.

Pentimento is a painter's word. It's the ghost of a decision — the arm the artist repositioned, the object painted over, the earlier thought that slowly rises back through the oil as the top layers thin with age. Not a mistake, exactly. A revision made visible.

Its plural is pentimenti, and for more than thirty years it has been the name over the door of one of Philadelphia's most quietly adventurous contemporary galleries.

It's hard to imagine a better metaphor for the place — or for the city around it.