Posts By roberta

Art movies for holiday pleasures – Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Waste Land

If you missed them on the big screen like I did, you can still see these two recent art movies on DVD — from Netflix or from your library. Cave of Forgotten Dreams I heard the interview with Werner Herzog, director of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, on Fresh Air and it sounded like a fantastic documentary. The filmmaker and his crew get special access to the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, with wall drawings made some 32,000 years ago, that were just discovered in 1994. Herzog’s movie, shot in 3D, has lots of fantastic footage of the cave paintings and ... More » »

Next on artblog radio, Matt Kalasky, artist and editor of the Nicola Midnight St. Claire

Matt Kalasky graduated from Tyler with an MFA in sculpture in 2011.  We’ve seen his work in several emerging artist shows in Philadelphia including Vox VI in 2010 and the Bambi Biennial, also 2010, which we juried.  He was also in one of Rebekah Templeton’s emerging artist shows.  His art is influenced by science fiction and fantasy movies of the Star Wars/Star Trek variety. Matt is the editor in chief of the newly launched online arts publication The Nicola Midnight St. Claire.  One of his final projects in grad school was a multi-media performance called The Last Symposium, in which ... More » »

Utopian impulses in wood – Francis Cape and Kevin Strickland

Francis Cape‘s 20 spare poplar benches at Arcadia University Art Gallery imply people sitting together purposely (if not comfortably) maybe in church or while eating a meal in a dining hall. Cape’s benches, all hand-made by the artist in the last two years, are replicas of seating used by the Shakers, Hutterites and 14 other utopian communities.  They are functional furniture, but more than that, they are a conceptual art project. Lined up in rows, each bench facing the center of the room, Cape’s benches represent the idea that sitting on the same bench is about something more than just ... More » »

Collective energy in North Philly

On a fair weather First Friday, Old City bustles with galleries full of people and streets lined with craft vendors, musicians and performers. It’s positively festive. But every day across Philadelphia, artist-run collectives present a different art scene that in many ways is more exciting. In the last five years, Little Berlin, Extra Extra and other artist-run spaces have sprouted up in neighborhoods such as Kensington and Chinatown, where rents are cheap and raw spaces lend themselves to edgy experimental art. This is a gritty scene run by young people who want to do it themselves. The artists know each other and ... More » »

Business genius and hippie, Steve Jobs – The Lost Interview

In 1995 Robert Cringeley, a tech expert and writer who once worked for Steve Jobs interviewed the Apple-co-founder and other Silicon Valley pioneers for a PBS miniseries, Triumph of the Nerds. He spent more than 60 minutes with Jobs, who at that time was ten years out from his wrenching ouster from Apple. But less than ten minutes of the wide-ranging and provocative interview made it into the PBS show. That ten minute clip is considered one of the best TV interviews Jobs ever gave. The master tapes for the other 59 minutes went missing until recently and now, dusted ... More » »

Jeffrey Eugenides at the Free Library – On keeping yourself in and out of your novel

The big question at the sold out “Evening with Jeffrey Eugenides” at the Free Library Tuesday night was posed mid-way through the Q&A after a marvelous reading by the author from his new novel, The Marriage Plot. The questioner fumbled around with words that didn’t make a coherent question but which Eugenides knew the meaning of:  Basically, how autobiographical is Middlesex, his 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning novel whose main character is an intersex individual (hermaphrodite) of Greek descent from Detroit named Cal Stephanides.

The adventure of landscape – Becky Suss at Vox Populi

By Hayley Tomlinson Imagine waking up from a vivid black-and-white dream, in which you explored a recognizable yet distant city dense with foliage and structure, where the most intricate details were highlighted despite a sunless, cloudy sky, and you weren’t quite sure whether you were looking at a mural or real life. This is exactly how I felt when first viewing Becky Suss’ drawings, on display at Vox Populi. Her landscape drawings, void of any human activity, made me reminisce about being a child and exploring the depths of my grandma’s backyard, or weaving in and out of the strange ... More » »

artblog Art Safaris – Episode 1 – Temple Gallery

October 15 we went on safari to Temple Gallery — it was our first run at a safari, and we thing the video shows everybody’s enthusiasm. Here’s the video we made. Or watch it at YouTube. This episode is recorded and edited by the intrepid Kim Paynter of WHYY’s NewsWorks.org — thanks Kim! Thanks also to the Knight Foundation for the matching Arts Challenge Award for the safaris. Thanks to the Miami Foundation, Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, University of the Arts, the Barnes Foundation’s Art Now class, and to all our supporters who helped us match and exceed the ... More » »

The craft of art told by two exhibits at ICA – Bill Walton’s Studio and Charline von Heyl

Libby and I met recently with the new brain trust at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Chief Curator Sarah Archer and Executive Director Molly Dougherty. In a broad-ranging discussion about Philadelphia’s art scene and institutions and the PAA’s long history as an on-again-off-again player in the city, Archer mentioned they were very interested in exploring their mission — craft and design — in a way that breaks the mold of the traditional craft exhibit with objects on pedestals and in vitrines. They want to broaden their program to include a discussion of the making of objects and the thinking behind the ... More » »

On the avenue – Lancaster Avenue that is

Queries, or queer eyes, as the show’s organizer, Blaise Tobia, pronounced the title when I visited, gathers human-centric works — mostly photographic — that take you on an exploration of the world. It’s a quirky trip, led by five able and idiosyncratic artist-explorers. And as Tobia says in his curator’s statement …”these works function…in a way that I wish more art functioned — playful, but by no means trivial; evocative rather than didactic; formally astute but not self-satisfied.”