podcasts
Downloadable podcasts of Libby and Roberta talking with art world figures from Philadelphia and beyond. New episodes available every other Monday.
Headlong Dance Theater’s Andrew Simonet and David Brick on dancing with art and moving with citizen dancers
Headlong Dance Theater’s performances often are humorous and inspired by pop culture and their fascination with human movement. Andrew Simonet, David Brick and Amy Smith, three college friends who founded Headlong in Philadelphia in 1993, use theatrical props, street clothes, and speech in their works, which honor movement in space. When a dancer was temporarily in a wheelchair from a broken bone, they incorporated the dancer and wheelchair into the performance. Their non-standard productions lie between dance and theatre and have garnered many kudos, and a Pew Fellowship (2006). More recently they have done some performances in galleries in response ... More » »
Matt Giel’s performance photography on artblog radio
Artist Matt Giel makes his photos the old-fashioned way, with film and chemicals. But they are hybrids, part sculpture, part performance–as in the time he wrestled his gigantic developer out of his cellar studio to truck it to a one-day performance of slowly printing an extremely long photographic scroll. Giel names Marlo Pascual and James Welling among his influences. Giel will be in a show organized by Tim Belknap and Ryan McCartney opening June 2 at the Icebox, the only art space in Philadelphia big enough to hold it. The 2012 Truck Show of work by 14 artists applies the car ... More » »
Cindi Ettinger of C.R. Ettinger Studio talks about traditional printing in the digital age, an artblog radio podcast interview
Master printer Cindi Ettinger created C. R. Ettinger Studio in 1982. Over the years the master printer and University of the Arts graduate has made prints in her small studio in Old City with the who’s who of Philadelphia artists. In this podcast, Ettinger talks about how digital technology is having an impact on her field of traditional printmaking, and on how she collaborates with artists to make print a print. There are lots of crunchy details about the printing world in this lively podcast. Here’s the full podcast interview: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Right click to download ... More » »
Daniel Heyman talks about prints, teaching, and working with dental plaster – a podcast interview
Daniel Heyman brings extraordinary empathy to his subjects–and never seems to run out of it. His widely shown Amman Portfolio–a series of portraits of Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison survivors on which their stories are handwritten — was at the Baltimore Museum of Art last month. Daniel’s mom started a special education school and his oldest brothers is a union organizer. Heyman teaches art at Princeton and at RISD. A solo show of his self-portrait prints, which he talks about in this podcast, will be on view at Cade Thompkins Gallery in Providence some time after Labor Day (see gallery ... More » »
Frank Bramblett on truth, small town Alabama and his imaginary friend Graham
Frank Bramblett grew up in a small town in rural Alabama where he played in the Alabama mud as a child. He also had an imaginary friend, Graham, who talked to him constantly. Frank’s large abstract paintings spring from his love of materials and from his need to experiment like an alchemist. You can see several marvelous paintings of his in the exhibit Elemental: Nature as Language now on view at Woodmere Art Museum (to April 22). Frank taught at Tyler School of art for many years and had a huge impact on many students. When he retired in 2010 his ... More » »
Gary Steuer to the rescue in City Hall
You have a friend in City Hall, artists. The guy in the white hat, Gary Steuer, tries to cut through red tape, to make art accessible, and to fight City Hall over unreasonable taxes on low income businesses of the sorts artists (and bloggers) have. Surprisingly enough, given city finances and his teeny baby budget, somehow he succeeds. That’s what he told us, and we believe him. Here’s the full podcast interview: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Right click to download full 15 min. interview with Gary Steuer And here’s the YouTube slide version of this podcast. This ... More » »
Maiza Hixson on artblog radio – full podcast with singing and great talk
Delaware Center for Contemporary Art curator Maiza Hixson, who is also an artist, sees curating as part of her art practice. In fact, as you can see from a video of hers included in the People’s Biennial at Haverford (until Mar 2), art and curating are completely co-mingled for Hixson. Hixson lives in Philadelphia and commutes to the DCCA in Wilmington; she’s a roommate of the Dufala Brothers and her art collaborator, Lauren Ruth, in a sprawling Chinatown apartment. A few months back Hixson and Ruth created a project space in their building’s tiny elevator. In February, The Shaft became the ... More » »
What’s driving Erin Riley, on artblog radio
Homeless, with a loom that she carries wherever she goes, artist Erin Riley is not living on the street. Instead, she has figured out her own way of surviving, moving from one artists’ colony to the next (the MacDowell Colony, the Bemis Center, the Vermont Studio Center, etc.), as she weaves her contemporary narratives on life and its dangers. A Fleisher Challenge winner for 2011-12, who’s part of a Fiber Philadelphia show in March 2012 at Space 1026, she provides a window into some of her personal life, her thoughts and her methods. Here’s the full podcast interview: [Audio clip: ... More » »
New podcast – Tim Belknap on teaching kids about space as Astronaut Tim
In early December Tim Belknap set up a small, pretend space station inside Temple Gallery that was an almost-convincing replica of the real thing. He called the set piece Destiny Module, a reference to the US Space Station’s Science Lab. Destiny Module was part of Belknap’s project to beam himself as Astronaut Tim into a Philadelphia 4th grade classroom for a science talk. All this would be done via the magic of a live Skype video feed. Tim — who is not an astronaut but an artist and Fleisher Challenge winner with a mischievous sense of play and a self-created ... More » »
Podcast redux–no such thing as too much Zoe Strauss
Missed our interview with Zoe Strauss? Here it is again–in honor of her show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that opened Saturday: Artist Zoe Strauss was preparing for her important mid-career retrospective, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, when we talked to her at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibit opens at the PMA Jan. 14, 2012, but Strauss was hard at work in August, getting ready. As excited as she was about the upcoming show, she was even more excited about the part of the show that was going to go up on billboards around Philadelphia, where the general ... More » »
