August 2009 Archive

The Conceptual Eroticism of Marcel Duchamp: Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés at the PMA

Exhibitions devoted to a single work of 20th century art are extremely rare, and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), on view  through November 29, 2009 is exemplary.

Whole lotta shaking going on at PAFA

When an institution announces the receipt of a big grant for contemporary art programming we want to know more. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Curator of Contemporary Arts Julien Robson snagged a whopping $440,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation for contemporary art programing over the next three years, including support for the Philagrafika exhibit opening January 2009, five solo exhibits of young and emerging artists starting in May in the Morris Gallery, and the exhibit We’re All Still Here, scheduled to open October 2011.

Expanding the PMA’s Twentieth Century Collection

I’m happy that I finally caught the current exhibition,  Adventures in Modern Art: The Charles K. Williams II Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; assembled by a distinguished archaeologist with long ties to the Philadelphia area, the entire collection has been promised, with some works already donated to the museum.  It makes a significant contribution to the PMA’s ability to tell the full story of American 20th-century art.

Everyone’s a critic: Texting for the arts at Philly Fringe

Everyone can be a critic, and everyone can get the latest reaction to shows in the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival thanks to cell phones and texting. The new hot-on-the-hoof reviews by Jane Q. Public will be displayed online at Phillyfunguide.com and at livearts-fringe.org.

NYTimes hearts Philly art and food

A love note to Philly is in the New York Times Art & Design section today. We tipped it off in our Gossip Girls post Monday, but now we have the link–thanks to Dan Shimmel, exec director of Esther Klein Gallery. (SLIGHT CORRECTION: We got a comment first from that alert guy Tim Gierschick with the link, and then we also got emails from the ever-ahead-of-things Rob Matthews and artblog’s own Kelani). The story, by Randy Kennedy, captures Philadelphia’s quirky passions for art, collections and food.

Art comes out at Sage’s Dragnet

A very different crowd of artists (48 of them in all!) showed up for Dragnet, Sage Project‘s open invitation exhibit, from those who showed up for 2007′s Here and Now open invitation exhibit at Copy Gallery. In Dragnet, I got the sense of people struggling to find their inner artists and anxiously daring to reveal them. Quite the opposite at Copy, which featured mostly art-school grads–and peeps connected to them–eager exhibitionists I guess you could say.

The Abstracted Reality of Thomas Nozkowski at the National Gallery of Canada

There is something about Thomas Nozkowski’s work. Over sixty small-scale works seem to pose different questions and engage the viewer in different ways in the extensive show at Ottawa’s National Gallery (the first show curated by Marc Mayer, its new director). The paintings are mysterious; all are untitled, coded only with numbers. They deny the viewer information, but, consequently, unleash the imagination. Each of Nozkowski’s paintings is remarkably distinct; no two are alike.

Philadelphia and its Manufactures— Jacob Hellman, Phillip Taylor

August 20th, Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction.– Pretty tickled by this presentation. Jacob [i.e. speaker Jacob Hellman] and I have, on numerous occasions, swapped ideas on the arcane beauty of both former Philadelphian industry and its currently-aching hell-neighborhoods. But rather than getting lost in the mythos and delirium, as I always have, Jacob remained admirably embedded in the history of it all; drawing from research, anecdotes, and his definitive resource, Philadelphia and its Manufactures, by Edwin T. Freedley.

Weekly Update – Sidney Goodman’s life mirror at PAFA

This week’s Weekly has my review of Sidney Goodman’s drawing retrospective at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Below is the copy. Portraits and paintings depicting humans are perennial crowd pleasers. The best of these works hold up the mirror and speak psychological truth about the human condition.

The last possible minute–Quentin Morris in San Francisco

Oh, well, I was just a few blocks away from George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco. Little did I know that Quentin Morris had some of his drawings up there. And they are due to come down the 29th! If you’re around the area, you might want to check out his work. Morris is a dyed in the wool Philadelphian who has against all odds made only black drawings during his career. The blackness can be taken as a political statement–Morris is African-American–or as a purely artistic one.