On this Father's Day weekend, it might seem an unusual choice to take your dad to an art gallery.

But the show at the Lancaster Museum of Art might just be a hit for fathers out there.

"Play Ball" celebrates the art of baseball, both literally and figuratively, with 77 pieces of art by 50 artists from across the country.

Paintings, sculptures and some wonderful photographs are on deck. And the styles range from classic portraits to abstract works, filled with humor, drama and stunning beauty.

"We wanted a tremendous variety of approaches," says Stanley Grand, executive director of the museum, who put the show together and invited in artists from across the country. "But we didn't want to compromise on quality."

They didn't. The show is terrific fun for baseball fans and non-fans alike.

What is so intriguing about the exhibit is that for all the differences in styles, the show has a distinctly American feel to it. You realize just how present baseball is in our imaginations.

Some pieces put you right there in the big drama of a national league ball park, especially Max Mason's large images (oil on wood) of the Phillies in action.

Anonymous figures take on iconic status in so many of the portraits.

Contemporary artist Stacey M. Carter added acrylic, ink and pigment to a 1946 photograph of Winky, a bat boy for the San Francisco Seals, which will take everyone back to a certain era.

Vincent Scilla has fun in two oil paintings, showing how integral advertising is to the ball park, with huge, colorful posters for Ragu and Pope sun-ripened tomatoes.

Other artists pay loving devotion to the equipment of the game.

Hall Groat II details a mitt and ball that take on an epic quality in his oil "The American Dream," while Philip Michelson's portraits of a softball on top of a Spalding box and a catcher's mask hung up on a wall are both amazingly realistic, pulsing with significance.

Charles Hobson explores the human body with dreamy pastel/acrylic images of players. They somehow feel legendary, as they walk along a field or leap in the air to catch a ball.

Some pay tribute to a particular player. Wherever that is the case, a baseball card featuring that player accompanies the work.

Steve Carlton is in his windup in an oil painting by Dick Perez. Arthur K. Miller pays tribute to Satchel Paige in a colorful portrait done in acrylic on masonite.

And Will Johnson paints humorous portraits of three different players from the past (Al Hrabosky, Richie Hebner and Judy Johnson) with their bios as part of the painting.

Ed Paschke's 1970 color lithograph, "Mask Man," takes a famous photograph of Babe Ruth and paints red stripes over it, giving it a funky, anti-authoritarian quality.

Speaking of the Bambino, Ruth is featured in two intriguing photographs in the gallery upstairs.

In the more familiar one, taken in 1920, he is swinging, looking out to see how far the ball goes. In the other, he is passed out at Griffith Stadium in 1924, having hit a concrete wall.

The photographs in the upstairs gallery are a great part of the show. Many were taken in small town America on hot, languid summer days.

Eight of the photographs originate from an effort by the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program in the 1930s, to chronicle everyday life in rural America.

Arthur Rothstein has a great photo of a little barefoot kid swinging a bat with all his might at a desolate migratory farm labor camp in Texas, circa 1941.

Dorothea Lange perfectly captures a lazy afternoon in a 1939 photograph taken on the Fourth of July at a gas station in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where a team is waiting to play.

There are many other treasures in this show.

Perhaps the one that sums up the confluence of art and baseball the best, or at least the most obviously, is a photograph of abstract expressionist Franz Kline swinging at a ball in a 1959 photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.

That photo and the whole show prove that art and baseball fit together like a ball and glove.

Play Ball!

Cont. through July 24

Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Sun. noon-4 p.m. Free

Lancaster Museum of Art

135 N. Lime St., 394-3497

www.lmapa.org