July 2011 Archive

You can find this on artblog radio!

The PMA anounced a bunch of new acquisitions today, including a promised gift of the Bonovitz outsider art collection. You can hear Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz talking about collecting in an interview we did with them here (just in case you missed it the first time around).

Savage Beauty – Alexander McQueen at the Met; and waiting in that long line to see it

Savage Beauty, the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met is something of a curio cabinet from McQueen’s studio. Sam Gainsbury and Joseph Bennett, the production designers for McQueen’s fashion shows, served as the show’s creative director and production designer, bringing a dramatic and potentially-narrative structure to the exhibition, all the while echoing the theatrical aspects of McQueen’s work, his thinking and his collection presentations.  

Lindsay Chandler’s landfills at Cafe Lift

Cafe Lift, a place with good food and coffee in the no-man’s-land two blocks west of the Vox building, also shows some art. Two recent shows there make me want to go back for more.

Vox VII – nice and easy

Not as wild as some of its predecessors, Vox VII, the annual emerging artist show at Vox Populi, is a whale of a good show. With 35 artists and all media except performance represented, paintings make a strong showing. No matter how many times people say painting is dead, it just is not, and here the variety of paintings demonstrates the media’s still got some tricks up its sleeve. Sculpture is literally all over the map, from a highly crafted fiber object to a sprawling found-object installation with a video embedded in it to a low-tech gizmo made of wood ... More » »

News: Pew Fellows, new Art Alliance director, Lancaster Ave. storefront opportunity and more!

News 2011 Pew Fellows announced-Congratulations! The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage has announced its Pew Fellowships in the Arts recipients for 2011: Charles Cohen (electronic musician and composer) CAConrad (poet) Jorge Cousineau (set designer) Joy Feasley (visual artist) Chris Forsyth (guitarist and composer) Jane Irish (visual artist) Tania Isaac (choreographer) Pattie McCarthy (poet) Brian Philips (architect) Tim Portlock (visual artist) Matthew Suib (visual artist) Jamaaladeen Tacuma (visual artist free-jazz bassist, composer, and band leader)

Kaleidescopes, both hard-edged and organic at Race Street Cafe

At Race Street Café this month you can wrap your head around the kaleidoscopic creations of S. Leser and the organic meanderings of Gaby Heit. As a somewhat unconventional gallery space, the café is a great little nook to grab lunch and entertain your eyes with some optical art all at once.

Clash of Alternate Universes at Space 1026

Post by Dennis D’Alesandro This month when you pull the homemade doorbell at Space 1026, you get buzzed up into Alternate Universes, a two person show featuring large installations that play off of each other, attempting to warp you far away from the hustle and bustle of Chinatown outside.

Next on artblog radio – Joe Leroux and Stacey Lee Webber

Joe Leroux and Stacey Lee Webber moved to Philadelphia from Madison, WI, not long ago. The couple lives in Port Richmond, where they also have a studio nearby. They both have MFA’s from the University of Wisconsin, and while they are both sculptors, their works are nothing alike. Joe’s work combines performance, photography and sculpture, in which the artist is the featured figure – kind of like Matthew Barney, only without all the makeup. Stacey’s a metalsmith and makes use of found coins and paper money which she transforms into new objects. She has stitched dollar bills and has made ... More » »

Summer book beat – Brian Peterson’s memoir, The Blossoming of the World

My pile of books is heavy with local fare: In addition to Brian Peterson’s memoir, the books that catalog recent local shows like Arcadia University’s Ai Wei Wei exhibit, the ICA’s Sheila Hicks exhibit and the multi-venue Philagrafika festival.  More on those in another post. The Blossoming of the World, Brian Peterson‘s follow up to his 2010 memoir, The Smile at the Heart of Things, is a book quite like the first memoir, in which the artist and Michener Museum Senior Curator weaves together biographical material and photographs (a mix of snapshots and fine art photos he’s taken over the ... More » »

The opposite of eye candy at Jolie Laide’s Dirt Don’t Hurt

“Dirt Don’t Hurt.”  But it sure do stick in the eye. The group exhibit at Jolie Laide, guest-curated by artist Bill Saylor, creates a double whammy of forlorn-ness by covering the gallery’s red brick walls with black plastic sheeting and then plopping on the dark and brooding art. This anti-beauty aesthetic is one big wallop of the downbeat.