February 2011 Archive

Next week on artblog radio – Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz on collecting the self-taught artists

Collecting came early in the marriage of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. She’s a respected artist and he’s a high-powered lawyer and emeritus chairman of Duane Morris LLP and together they’ve amassed a collection of work by lesser known self-taught artists as well as those well-known in the genre  – James Castle, Martin Ramirez, William Edmondson. The Bonovitzes live with the art they collect and have recently set up an educational foundation. Foundation STAART’s documentary movie about James Castle debuted at the 2008 Philadelphia International Film Festival. Below is a brief sample from our conversation with the collectors.  Listen next Monday for ... More » »

Artists wanted: Rebekah Templeton, Septa, Inliquid

We don’t have a community bulletin board page but maybe some day!  Meanwhile, three worthy open calls came in via email recently and seem like good opportunities. Open call from Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art Juried contemporary art show, May 12-June 18, 2011 Juror – Jon Lutz, independent curator in New York. More about Luzt at his project site, the daily operation. Open to artists from Philadelphia or elsewhere.  All applying artists will be considered for future solo exhibition opportunities. Entry Fee: $20

Dawn breaks thousands of windows in the city: Poets and Painters in Collaboration at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery

By Thomas Devaney The “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painter and Poets” exhibition is dream-like. The dream we enter is the salon atmosphere of the gallery’s early days, creating an overall effect of a group portrait of a handful of individuals who reached out to each other through their art. The exhibition reveals how these poets and painters employed numerous strategies to merge into one another’s work while simultaneously shaping their singular creative paths. The enterprising portrait that emerges has been much talked about—and even written about—but has yet, until this retrospective, to be assembled all in one space.

Erin Murray’s haunted architecture at Slingluff Gallery

By Daniel Forrest Hoffman The beauty of a city, a building, or a home has often been explored through natural signs of age. The “lived in” quality of a place is usually what allows it to speak about itself and its history. Erin Murray’s solo exhibition “Architecture Parlante” at Slingluff Gallery (through Feb 27) explores the subject of architecture and the way it describes its function and/or identity from a different perspective. The structures in her oil paintings and drawings are idealized and nostalgic. They are stripped of any sign of wear, yet they reference a history. Her images are soft ... More » »

Mel Kadel reinvents Superwoman, at Moore

I’ve always suspected that Superwoman was really a trannie (for sure Xena). Big shoulders. Big hair. Big powers. But she was nothing like any woman–or trannie–I ever knew. She’s Superman in a bustier–a weak copy of a guy’s dream of adventure and power.

Business privilege tax exemption would help artists

An article in the Inquirer this morning notes that the city’s business privilege tax hurts self-employed people — many of them artists. Like duh. But now Gary Steuer, our art czar, is trying to change the provisions in the law to create a deduction for the self-employed who make less than $100,000. Steuer notes that most artists’ income fall below that. Also, like duh. In the article Steuer says the business privilege tax “is clearly an adversity to the creative sector. We have good training grounds here. When they (artists) come here to study, we want them to fall in ... More » »

Weekly Update – James Hyde’s word play at Jolie Laide

“OR” talks with “OK” as “OH” hangs back in the corner. “Capital B,” the tall, gangly guy, is telling jokes while the host, “Big A,” though looped and upside down, makes everyone feel at home. What is this, a cocktail party?

Jane Irish’s Multiple Perspectives at Locks Gallery

As her third solo exhibition at Locks Gallery, The Home Front: Jane Irish’s Art of War continues a ten-year investigation of anti-war resistance. On view from February 4 to March 12, the exhibition brings together various perspectives on the Vietnam War through Irish’s appropriation of poetry from a Vietnamese civilian and American war veterans.

Amze Emmons’ shaky cityscapes–on artblog radio

Our series sponsor is Fleisher Art Memorial. Artist Amze Emmons’ forlorn cityscapes of shaky, provisional dwellings seem ever more pertinent as we view on the news the tent cities in the center of Cairo. We talked to Emmons about his name, his art, and about his Refugee Reading Room exhibit at Space 1026. For the show, now in its last week, he invited about 50 artists to contribute prints and zines, all is free for the taking. Emmons is prolific and networked. He showed in 13 shows last year, from Philadelphia to Seattle to Osaka, Japan. And Emmons, who teaches ... More » »

Picasso, Music and Negative Space; the Guitars at MoMA

Picasso Guitars 1912-1914, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through June 6, 2011, is an intense and thrilling experience for anyone concerned with art and visual thinking in the early 20th Century. What it reveals, at least to someone who has worked and thought in three dimensions, are Picasso’s first, profound experiments with one of the key concepts of Twentieth Century plastic arts: negative space. Moreover, the exhibition indicates that like abstraction, for which music was both inspiration and justification, Picasso’s interest in negative space grew out of thinking about music; not musical form and language, but ... More » »