Posts By libby

Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha Logan deliver White Boys at Haverford

The show White Boys, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas and co-curator Natasha L. Logan at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is a lively reminder that a wide range of art is social and that arguably all art is social. The show of work by 17 artists serves as an addendum to the previous show at the gallery of work by Thomas, whose own conceptual photography explores images of African-American men in popular culture. The current show’s name is a bit of a red herring. Fortunately the art is strong enough to push well beyond stereotypes. And it’s worth noting ... More » »

You don’t have to be Jewish–Fran Gallun at PMJA

Fran Gallun’s shimmering landscapes are showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art. What’s that? you ask. It’s the art museum in Rodeph Shalom, which has put on some swell shows in the past. This show, Imagining Israel, is another reason to revisit (or visit) the place. You may have seen some of this work in her recent solo show at Rosenfeld Gallery, and some in a 2009 solo show (reviewed on artblog) at Fleisher Art Memorial, where she has been teaching for 25 years. Gallun’s landscape abstractions, spiritual quests for connection to ancestors and the land, have a Turner-like ability ... More » »

Jay Walker at the Crane

The main hallway at the Crane Arts building is a hallway with a lot of presence–so much so that it’s often a place where good art goes to die. Not so Jay Walker’s Istoria installation, presented by InLiquid. The stalking figures–made mostly of tape and laser-cut vinyl applied directly to the wall–can be anything from Medieval knights to Middle Eastern potentates of the desert to the Virgin Mary. Whatever reference you bring to their towering menace and decorative emanations, they are up to the challenge of holding the space and delivering an emotional frisson and visual thrill. Walker also has ... More » »

Theaster Gates talks at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

The Martin Luther King Day of Service at the Fabric Workshop and Museum featured a talk by uber-international hot-ticket-artist Theaster Gates (pronounced with “aster” at the end). Gates, whose work includes making utopian spaces in cities, where people can meet and work, also does performance, clay and so much more. He is a guy who is hoping his art can rebuild how the world works, one brick at a time. He is installing a workspace at the FWM that goes by the stop-you-in-your-tracks moniker Soul Manufacturing Corporation–To Make the Thing that Makes the Things. By time he was done speaking, ... More » »

The Female Gaze at PAFA

I enjoyed a tsunami of memories at the newly opened Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibit The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. The memories were of work by so many of the artists represented in the show, work that had made me fall in love with art in the first place. The exhibit includes 200-plus works selected from nearly 500 works of art by women donated to PAFA by Philadelphia collector Linda Lee Alter in 2010. Alter collected the works with the express ambition of donating them to an institution to make women’s art more visible. PAFA’s ... More » »

Rafael Ferrer in Lancaster

Measuring an artist’s life–Rafael Ferrer Rafael Ferrer was Philadelphia-based for many years, teaching at University of the Arts and University of Pennsylvania and creating what he created. The traces of his sojourn here have left traces–with a beloved public sculpture El Gran Teatro de la Luna restored earlier this year to North Philadelphia’s Fairhill Square Park, and also in the memories of his students and friends. A survey of 150 of his works on paper to date, curated by Edith Newhall who writes about Contemporary Art for the Inquirer, is currently at the Lancaster Museum of Art until Nov. 11, 2012. ... More » »

Full Spectrum–Brandywine Workshop prints at PMA

Full Spectrum, the exhibit of prints from the Brandywine Workshop that opened this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows off one of those little-sung organizations that quietly do amazing work here in Philadelphia. Here’s a bit of history–The Brandywine Workshop, founded in Philadelphia in 1972 to encourage and support racial and cultural diversity in printmaking, gifted 100 of its prints representing 89 artists to the PMA three years ago in memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt. The workshop, founded by African-American Tyler-trained artist Alan Edmunds, has stayed true to that mission, working with artists from around the world and from ... More » »

Fringe Festival – Headlong’s This Town is a Mystery

One Fringe evening this week, my friend Wendy and I left Center City via the Broad Street Subway to the Erie stop, and then caught the 56 bus for a long and winding ride to Torresdale Avenue in Tacony. Along the way we saw miles of factory buildings and warehouses. Once we hit Tacony, the landscape changed to small shops and blocks and blocks of row houses. The performance we were going to was in one of those row houses, performed by ordinary people, not dancers, not performance artists–the people who actually lived there! The show was part of This ... More » »

On time with Christian Marclay’s The Clock

Shared memories of Star Wars and Buster Keaton serve as a lingua franca that crosses international and personal borders. Unlike art, which in so many ways aims at an elite audience and serves to differentiate the into-art group from other people, the love of movies unites us all. When Christian Marclay created The Clock, his 24-hour video cycle that mashes up movies by the minute, who did he have in mind as his audience? Only visual art lovers? Or everyone? Was he hoping his bouquet to the movies and to time would earn him a new audience, a crowd of ... More » »

Consider the artists residency, or not

Matt Kalasky called for a discussion about artists residencies on his publication, The St. Claire. The event, July 19 at Fjord, turned out to be a sort of grad school bull session about the nature of and usefulness of artists residencies. Their usefulness turned out to be the more useful topic of discussion, and by time the 20 to 25 people in attendance were finished, they realized ARs might not be so much about punching a ticket and decorating a resume but rather something they could find useful–or not. I tried reporting the discussion via our Twitter, @theartblog, but didn’t ... More » »

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