reviews, features & interviews
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Hidden City Festival 2013 — A spirited new Germantown Town Hall
Beginning May 23rd, artists became community organizers at the Hidden City Festival’s “Germantown City Hall” project, which opened inside the historic, long-abandoned Germantown Town Hall. “A lot of people have been asking, ‘Are you rehabbing the space?’ That’s been the top question,” said Meredith Warner, a member of the Germantown artists’ collective known as Think Tank that has yet to be named. More than a simple architectural renovation, however, Think Tank and Oakland-based artist Jacob Wick are activating the Town Hall building as a community gathering site for the duration of the 2013 Hidden City Festival (May 23 to June ... More » »
Hidden City Festival 2013 — Bibotorium imagines a world with or without water
As one of the nine projects that will revitalize lost parts of Philadelphia for the 2013 Hidden City Festival, Camp Little Hope arts collective will take over part of the Kelly Natatorium in Fairmount Park to create a “Bibotorium,” or educational saloon, in a forgotten former public pool. For the length of the festival, which runs from May 23rd to June 30th, guests will be invited to sit down for a cup of tea and then to ruminate on the possibly terrifying future of our access to viable, fresh drinking water. The Bibotorium site is steeped in Philadelphia’s historical relationship ... More » »
News post – Haas & Hahn celebration, Walter Plotnick’s World Fair visions, Hidden City kicks off, opportunities and more!
News Faveladelphia, the (you guessed it )Philadelphian contingent of Favela Painting is having a kick-off party for their Back to Rio campaign at 161 West on May 31. The night promises food, drink, dancing and an auction, not to mention paintings, documentary footage, photos and other artworks of past, present and future projects by the duo Haas & Hahn of Germantown-beautification-renown. Allergies, proms and grant announcements: how you know it’s springtime. PNC Arts Alive, now in its fifth year of funding, announced on May 1, 2013 the winners for the PNC Arts Alive program in Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. Winners include the ... More » »
Nora Salzman’s showcase of display at TSA
Nora Salzman’s first solo show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid is as much an experiment in curation and display as the art objects themselves. In “Studies and Specimens,” Salzman expertly constructs one centrally located cabinet which houses two opposing bodies of work – one three dimensional, the other painted. Both are based on the human form, but otherwise seem as if they were drawn from two entirely different collections. Salzman merges traditional concepts with distinctly contemporary aesthetic elements One side of the Plexiglas-laden structure in the middle of the gallery includes portraits of a man painted onto a series of panels. These ... More » »
Claire Ashley, Jeff Huckleberry, and The Happy Collaborationists at The Icebox
Claire Ashley is a Scotland-born, Chicago-based artist who fuses sculpture and painting with a smattering of the absurd. For her latest piece, distant landscapes: peepdyedcrevicehotpinkridge, Ashley has created a series of inflatable sculptures that fill The Icebox Gallery at Crane Arts, transforming the space into a lively and cartoonish environment. Walking around the space, my husband and I decided that the forms reminded us of cloud-watching; the nebulous shapes potentially evoke any number of references. Speaking with Ashley, she confirmed that some of the forms are deliberately naturalistic (horse and cow, for example), while others are intentionally more ambiguous. Even ... More » »
Hidden City Festival 2013 site preview – Rabid Hands Arts Collective creates The Society of Pythagoras at Hawthorne Hall
From May 23rd to June 30th, Hidden City Philadelphia will hold its second Hidden City Festival, hosting art shows and events at nine sites around the Philadelphia area. Hidden City Philadelphia was born out of its previous festival, held in 2009. Now a successful full-time online magazine, Hidden City also hosts tours and events, and boasts a developing Community Action program. The idea of the Hidden City Festival is to mount contemporary, site-based art installations in little-known or endangered sites throughout Philadelphia, preferably with some kind of connection to the city’s heritage. For the 2013 festival, which features taglines like ... More » »
A Novel Melody – Kuerner Sounds at the Brandywine River Museum
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania is home to something of an Andrew Wyeth (1940–2009) cult. Touted as one of the most well-known American artists of the 20th century, Wyeth spawned a wealth of imitators. His signature style gave rise to a seemingly never-ending procession of ersatz pastoral landscape paintings, replete with modest barns and farm animals. The latter are reproduced and displayed enthusiastically throughout Delaware County, found in many a living room or coffee shop. Meanwhile, N.C. (Andrew’s father) and Jamie (his son) maintain their own followings. Wyeth’s ubiquity tends to group viewers into one of two camps: devotees and fervent detractors. ... More » »
A Charles Searles celebration – Three concurrent exhibitions
The work and legacy of the great Philadelphia-born artist Charles Searles (1937-2004) will be explored in three concurrent exhibitions at LaSalle University Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, and Tyler School of Art. The kernel for these exhibitions formed when Kathleen Spicer, Searles’ wife and fellow artist, contacted Temple University’s art history program requesting assistance cataloging and organizing the Searles estate. This eventually led to a series of exhibition seminars, in which undergraduate and graduate students at Tyler School of Art and LaSalle University worked to fulfill Spicer’s request. The result is three different but complementary exhibitions, along with an extensively ... More » »
Not-So-Friendly Skies – Jason Varone at Grizzly Grizzly
Video installation has progressed greatly since the days of the chattering box in the darkened room. Jason Varone’s It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great seamlessly integrates moving and still images in ways that might not have been possible only a few years ago. Curated by Grizzly Grizzly member Michael Konrad, the installation cleverly combines painted textures, words and some rather disturbing footage of aerial bombardment. Varone has designed a diverse yet unified show Though it comprises very different elements, Varone’s installation is singular in its unity. A pair of large snake-like forms undulates floor to ceiling and wraps ... More » »
News – Hennessy Youngman’s found art discourse, Isaac Lin & Leah Bailis in Austin, Doug Witmer curates at TSA, opportunities and more!
News In the vein of similar endeavors by Rauschenberg, Hammons and Orozco, greg.org posted an amusing item about Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) selling found objects on the street via his twitter feed. The resulting tweets are predictably priceless, Athena Barat, long known to us as a powerhouse of art and social practice, was recently honored when the Women’s Center for Entrepreneurship Corporation jointly awarded her and her mother Chandri Woman of the Year. Athena, a former Philly resident, created The South Philly Biennial in 2008, and has been supporting her family’s foundation at their home base in Newark. Douglas Witmer ... More » »
