studio visits/interviews
write-ups of studio visits and other interviews
Knight Arts Challenge year 2 winners announced!
Two years ago, the Knight Foundation roared into town with news of their $9 Million Knight Arts Challenge for Philadelphia. This year, the second in the 3-year Challenge, sees 35 winners whose projects will be funded by the Knight awards, which are matching grants that require local funds equal to the Knight amounts. The winners were chosen from 1,260 applicants to the contest, with winners from visual, performing, music and theater arts as well as some in more unusual pursuits. With this round of awards, $5.4 million have been awarded for 71 ideas. The third year of the Challenge opens ... More » »
Mark Kostabi – Move to New York, you’re not getting any younger!
Mark Kostabi is well known for his accomplishments and controversies. The biggest controversy surrounding Kostabi is his ability to market paintings that he may or may not have touched. This seems overblown considering successful artists have always used studio assistants to help in the mass manufacturing of art. Kostabi’s irreverence towards the artist’s hand is by design, I suspect he is involved in the creation of his paintings to a large extent, contrary to his media persona. Cult of personality is being carefully cultivated in Kostabi’s world. Mark makes no apologies for his pursuit of fame, fortune and what it ... More » »
Gary Steuer next Monday on artblog radio
Ever wonder just what it is that Gary Steuer is doing in City Hall? Mayor Michael Nutter appointed Steuer to a cabinet position, thereby making good on a campaign promise to restore an art czar to the city government. Steuer, who has to work with a slim budget, in hard times, has to find ways to live up to his ten-gallon title as Chief Cultural Officer and director of the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. Notice for our loyal RSS feed readers: Our regular full-length artblog podcasts will no longer be part of your feeds as of ... More » »
Letter From Paris: Markus Hansen’s Palindrome
“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” – Woody Allen Markus Hansen, the Paris-based German artist, is trying in more than a decade’s worth of projects to see what it might be like to be someone else, and then to confront that very notion of being someone else. Using a Felix the Cat bag o’ tricks to flesh out the narrative or even the feeling he’s someone else (you), one senses the tugging or nudging – imagine Peter Pan’s moment he lost his shadow – out of one’s singular identity. It’s a bit more than ... More » »
Maiza Hixson, curator at the DCCA, sings for us in this artblog radio clip
Delaware Center for Contemporary Art curator Maiza Hixson is also an artist, and she sees her curating as part of her art practice. You can see a video of hers in the People’s Biennial at Haverford right now and you can see exhibits she’s curated at the DCCA. Hixson lives in Philadelphia and commutes to Wilmington; she’s a roommate of the Dufala Brothers in a sprawling Chinatown apartment. A few months back Hixson and Lauren Ruth, another roommate, created a new project space, The Shaft, in their building’s tiny elevator. Last First Friday, The Shaft became the restaurant Le Shaft. See ... More » »
Shelley Spector Working at NextFab Studio and Sarah McEneaney at Tibor de Nagy
NextFab Studio is a high-tech shop in West Philadelphia that enables architects, industrial designers, and artists to create prototypes or small runs of products. Its staff of twenty includes engineers, designers, electronics specialists, photographers, and others who are available for training and technical help. I met Shelley Spector there last week to see what she’s been doing during the past six months that she’s had a residency at NextFab through Breadboard, an organization at the University City Science Center that promotes community outreach around technology and manages the Esther Klein Gallery, among other projects. Any artist who makes ‘things’ ... More » »
Interview – Sarah Stolfa on making your own opportunity and printing for Zoe Strauss
For the Daily News article on the Philadelphia photography community I talked with a number of artists and others in that community. Here’s the first of several interviews I’ll put up in the next week or so. Others coming up are Martin McNamara, Stephen Perloff, Grisha Enikolopov, Al Wachlin, Jr and Harris Fogel. Note: this post is a re-publish of one that was somehow vaporized in our recent blog transition. The day I talked with Sarah Stolfa of PPAC, their website had briefly crashed from all the traffic they were getting from Living Social, a coupon site, where they had ... More » »
Tim Belknap, next up on our podcast series, artblog radio
In early December Tim Belknap set up a small, brightly-lit open-walled cube inside Temple Gallery that was an almost-convincing replica of a space capsule. The cube, no longer there, was called the Destiny Module, a reference to the US Space Station’s Science Lab, and was part of Belknap’s project to beam Astronaut Tim via Skype video into a Philadelphia 4th grade classroom for a science talk. Tim — who is not a scientist or astronaut but an artist and Fleisher Challenge winner with a mischievous sense of play — harnessed himself to a cable attached to heavy metal beams ... More » »
Group hug – Togetherness in Philadelphia’s photo community
Stephen Perloff is plugged in to Philadelphia’s photo world via his esteemed quarterly publication, The Photo Review. A self-taught photographer with a graduate degree in history, he made himself invaluable to photographers and photo lovers, covering all aspects of photography in his journal and turning that publication into a virtual Philadelphia photo center — a place to read about exhibitions; read interviews with artists; and find the latest opportunities. Perloff launched the Photo Review in 1976, and he characterized that era in Philadelphia as a golden age for photography. As for the current photo scene, “We’re getting back to the ... More » »
Scot Borofsky – from street art to gallery, an interview
Scot Borofsky started as a graffiti artist in the East Village (NYC) and eventually made his way into the museum and commercial gallery art world. His work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum of Art, a rare accomplishment for a graffiti street artist. Borofsky’s art combines the depth of tradition with the uncertainty of the contemporary, linking the ages with a sacred line. The work (@Jules Goldman Books and Antiques) may appear to be simple abstractions but Borofsky is giving you the ARCHETYPE, layered. God knows what these images are doing to viewers’ ... More » »
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