reviews, features & interviews
First Friday dilemmas grow bigger
By libby
August 27, 2010 · 11 Comments
Amid the parking lots and barely passable maze of streets just west of Chinatown, Jolie Laide, the gallery that opened in July, has lots of big plans. The plans are short term and long term.
Parking lot land, where Jolie Laide makes its home
The gallery property is owned by the same people who own SAAW, Inc., a hip design firm that does interiors for retailers. Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie are two of their retail clients, but the firm does corporate spaces and residential ones as well. Jolie Laide Gallery Director Travis Heck worked there as an artist and a designer.
Installation shot of the gallery, with sculptures by Lasserre, and paintings (left) by Dean and (right, primary colors) by Smith.
That professional sense of space shows in the gallery’s exposed brick and fancy plaster finish on the walls (venetian plaster if you must know). And it showed in the first show with chair- and architecture-themed art. This month, their show includes fragile what-is-its with encrusted surfaces from Fabienne Lasserre (contributor Emmy Thelander recently wrote about Lasserre’s show in Brooklyn), and dark narrative paintings from two artists–Joel Dean’s torutured figures in abstract tangles and Leslie Smith III’s ordinary, even cheerful, pictures of menace. Lasserre was the stand-out here, with her not quite people and not quite furniture.
Fabienne Lasserre's piece looks like an exhausted table and many other things
Jolie Laide’s big gallery space is a beachhead for a virtual compound. In the long term, the gallery has a couple of project spaces, one right across the street and another in the works. And this First Friday, to augment the opening reception for a show of work by Robert Horvath, 6-9 p.m., the gallery will take over the surrounding, never-used streets with performance and installations from an exciting crew, including recent Penn MFA Heather Ramsdale and suddenly-he’s-everywhere Tim Eads. Plus it looks like a terrific party. There’s more incredible stuff coming up the next evening (8-10 p.m.) by another recent Penn MFA, Jacolby Satterwhite, whose video/performance blew us away at the Penn show at the Ice Box. Music, too!
Heather Ramsdale, A Separate Time of Alone, 8 feet high by 12 feet x 5 feet, Nathan Thomas demos the piece
What I’m getting around to, however, is that with Jolie Laide, the Chinatown art scene has achieved critical mass. Most of you know this, but for those who don’t, the neighborhood includes all the galleries in 319 N. 11th (Vox Populi, Marginal Utility, Grizzly Grizzly, Tiger Strikes Asteroid are the main players there right now), Space 1026 and the Fabric Workshop and Museum both on Arch, and the Asian Arts Initiative on Vine (I keep hoping their art program revives to equal the glory days; right now they seem more focused on performance and I have to assume that’s where there’s more funding money is available, a reflection of what’s wrong with the world of non-profits).
First Fridays has become delightfully impossible for us. Should we go to Chinatown? to Frankford? to Kensington? to NoLibs? or to dear old Old City? The city’s inaction in encouraging a gallery zone has had a happy result. All of these nabes are getting a boost. But this wealth of goodies means we are missing great stuff. And it has forced us to have lots of interns, fanning out across the city to cover each of the neighborhoods. We can’t do it all. But we want to.
Tags: fabienne lasserre, heather ramsdale, joel dean, jolie laide gallery, leslie smith iii, nathan thomas
Readers Comments (11)
Perhaps we’re at a phase of evolution that we can consider alternate evenings for openings, like NYC. The concept of first friday seems outdated for our town. If Philadelphia didn’t start the popular and successful trend of a unified opening night, then it seems it sure has taken it as far as it can.
to passyunk avenue and beyond!
i will be muscling past eeeveryone for jacolby satterwhite, with my big sicilian peasant shoulders.
Amber, I’ll be right next to you. But that is Saturday, not Friday, so no conflicts anyway!
Mike, No way is that an improvement. The folks at Crane have a Second Thursday. I can’t bear to go, after I spent so much effort on First Friday. I don’t want to spend multiple evenings out looking at art.
For now, from a coverage point of view, the answer is to deploy multiple writers.
I regard this discussion as a cause for celebration. But really, if the city made one sector into a gallery zone with tax breaks and other incentives, and some way to bar the gentrification that follows the galleries and pushes them out, that would be mighty nice. And YO SEPTA, LISTEN UP, another helpful solution might be shuttle buses/jitney service from one gallery zone to another.
“Mike, No way is that an improvement. The folks at Crane have a Second Thursday. I can’t bear to go, after I spent so much effort on First Friday. I don’t want to spend multiple evenings out looking at art.”
Hard to imagine Jerry Saltz or Robert Hughes saying this.
I understand the dilemma from a coverage point of view, but in the end, it’s probably better to have more opinions on the local art scene right? i think so…
and as for mike’s multiple nights idea, yeah, seriously, i think its about time for something like that… i hate picking one or two areas to go see the same few galleries in all the time. wouldn’t it be better for the artists and the art viewers? wouldn’t it make it easier for people to “take a chance” checking out new spaces they’re unfamiliar with?
and honestly, i’d rather spend every friday night checking out art than just one a month, what art lover wouldn’t?
Why does the city need a gallery zone? Encouraging galleries and visual art orgs to cluster in one area will give people who think that art is elite and not for them even less reason to engage with it. They’ll think, “why do I want to go THERE?” It throws down another barrier to accessibility. Art is for everyone and should be proliferated throughout the community, not lured into making itself some kind of “red light district” just because the municipality wants to encourage development in a certain neighborhood. It’s also not supposed to be a matter of convenience; hopping from spot to spot is an adventure where you get to sample the distinct flavors of each location.
Wait a second…..this whole discussion exists because a so-called “art critic” doesn’t want to leave her house more than once a month to look at art, and while she’s at it she doesn’t want to have to walk more than a couple of blocks to see everything?
Right on Paul.
Hi, Jeff and Ben, I totally agree with the points both of you make, and especially the accessibility in various neighborhoods. Also multiple opinions is great. But if there’s a nice locus of several interesting galleries, they are more likely to get traffic and get covered. That’s just reality.
Serendipity also plays some role in what gets covered. It doesn’t hurt a gallery to be in a location where people stop in just because the gallery and the art lover are in the same place. So a little knot of several galleries is helpful–not just to me, but to anyone who wants to see more than one show at a time.
But again, how about a shuttle service between the areas? That solves some of the problems while allowing multiple loci.
Hi, Paul, Well, Jerry Saltz has stated that he goes to more than a hundred shows in a week. He doesn’t do that by driving to kingdom come. So I don’t think he has the opportunity to say that. None the less, your point is taken, and I did write that at the end of the hottest summer in hell, when I didn’t want to go see anything at all. But guess what! Fall is a-coming.
Wait a second yourself…It’s not about me. It’s about getting the art seen by the maximum breadth of people. At some point there’s a trade-off. The neighbors? Yes, we want the neighbors to see the work. The art lovers? Yes, we want the art lovers to have access. The art lovers from out of town? Are they really going to go from hither to yon in multiple unfamiliar neighborhoods? All I’m saying–and all the post was saying–is that art needs to be seen, I want to see it, and I want others to see it, and not just the artist’s friends.
We want the art to travel–everywhere, be seen by everyone. Are you really saying you don’t want that?