Joan Mitchell Foundation grants
The Joan Mitchell Foundation announced its 2011 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program recipients — 25 artists who will each receive $25,000. Among the winners are Philadelphians Virgil Marti, Jackie Tileston, and former Philly artist Anabeth Rosen.  Congratulations!

Here’s the full list:
Diana Al-Hadid, Brooklyn, NY
Nicole Awai, Brooklyn, NY
Keith Benjamin, Cleves, OH
William Cordova, Miami, FL
Cicely Cottingham, West Orange, NJ
Florine Demosthene, Brooklyn, NY
Daniel Douke, Fallbrook, CA
Julie Green, Corvallis, OR
Tommy Hartung, Ridgewood, NY
Janelle Iglesias, Provincetown, MA
Gary Kachadourian, Baltimore, MD
Simone Leigh, Brooklyn, NY
Andrew Lenaghan, Brooklyn, NY
Anne Lindberg, Kansas City, MO
Virgil Marti, Philadelphia, PA
Liz Miller, Good Thunder, MN
Jiha Moon, Atlanta, GA
Catherine Murphy, Poughkeepsie, NY
Sarah Oppenheimer, New York, NY
Kanishka Raja, New York, NY
Duke Riley, Brooklyn, NY
Chemi Rosado-Seijo, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Annabeth Rosen, Davis, CA
Jackie Tileston, Philadelphia, PA
Sarah Walker, Brooklyn, NY

Artblog.net returns after hiatus
Franklin Einspruch’s Artblog.net began posting again in mid-December after a 20-month hiatus and complete technical overhaul. We’re glad to welcome them back to the blogosphere, and excited to see what 2012 holds in store for them!

BYO Print celebration and new members

BYO Print welcomes new member Chad Lassin, a new space, and new equipment with its New Beginnings Party on New Year’s Day from 1 – 5 PM.

Toast with a Ghost @ Powel House
The historic Powel House will hold a New Year’s Toast with a Ghost event on Saturday, December 31. The 75-minute tours will begin at 8 PM and include a candlelight ghost tour of the Powel House and Physick House and a champagne “Toast with a Ghost”. Some may be critical of using historical locations for such events, but it’s all in good fun – and educational too.

Whitney Biennial List for 2012 leaked…and now announced by the museum
Thanks to ADA Gallery for passing on the Huff Post article about the leaked list of Whitney Biennial 2012 artists (including George Kuchar of their gallery), however we also see there are no Philadelphia names…And now the Whitney has officially announced the list.  Looks like the same list to us….still no Philadelphia names.

Kai Althoff, Thom Andersen, Charles Atlas, Lutz Bacher, Forrest Bess (paintings selected by artist Robert Gober), Michael Clark, Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne, Cameron Crawford, Moyra Davey, Liz Deschenes, Nathaniel Dorsky, Nicole Eisenman, Kevin Jerome Everson, Vincent Fecteau, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Vincent Gallo, K8 Hardy, Richard Hawkins, Werner Herzog, Jerome Hiler, Matt Hoyt, Dawn Kasper, Mike Kelley, John Kelsey, John Knight, Jutta Koether, George Kuchar, Laida Lertxundi, Kate Levant, Sam Lewitt, Joanna Malinowska, Andrew Masullo, Nick Mauss, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Michelson, Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, Laura Poitras, Matt Porterfield, Luther Price, Lucy Raven, The Red Krayola, Kelly Reichardt, Elaine Reichek, Michael Robinson, Georgia Sagri, Michael E. Smith, Tom Thayer, Wu Tsang, Oscar Tuazon, and Frederick Wiseman.

Helen Frankenthaler passing

Helen Frankenthaler, "Small Paradise".

The innovative abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler passed away on December 27 at the age of 83. Her family released a statement about her death but did not provide an exact cause.

Purchase a piece of Miss Rockaway Armada

Miss Rockaway Armada on display at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Run over to the Philadelphia Art Alliance for your chance to get a piece of Miss Rockaway Armada! The show at PAA ends on December 30, but on January 3 from 10 AM until 2 PM visitors can stop by to find pieces that interest them, make an offer, and take it away with them – one more way to help recycle the Armada’s materials.

Opportunities

Asian Arts Initiative is seeking artists and ideas for its new Social Practice Lab. Proposals for programs to enliven the areas of Chinatown and Chinatown North are due by January 18, and more information is available here.

Scope New York 2012 has (via Wooloo.org) an open call for emerging artists–all mediums. Winner gets a solo booth at Scope New York.  The application deadline is December 31, so there isn’t much time left! You can find the application here.

Artist News
Tiger Strikes Asteroid member Alexis Granwell is in the International Print Center’s New Prints show in New York. The show runs Jan. 28-Mar. 24.

Videographer and friend of artblog David Kessler is sharing some clips of his upcoming video project Pines: A cinematic exploration of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. You can find one of the preview clips here: Pines Video Sketch – Day Five, Harrisville. Check it out–it’s beautiful!

Merián Soto performs a Branch Dance. Photo by Pepon Osorio.

Merián Soto/Performance Practice will be presenting the winter performance of her one-year cycle Wissahickon Reunion on Sunday January 15, at 10:30 AM at Bluebell Meadow. Visit the blog for more info and up-to-the-minute updates.

Jeffrey Stockbridge is featured in the online LPV Magazine for his photo series Kensington Blues, which deals with the woes of the North Philadelphia area that is a hot spot for drugs and prostitution.

Bill Smith combo of projections and sculpture and mechanical wizardry

Our first stop (Andrea and me), the Fabric Workshop and Museum was filled with crowd-pleasers from five artists from across the country.

Smith autographing a happy FWM member's exhibition brochure.

Bill Smith, from Illinois, merges an obsession with the natural world with delicate, lacy mechanisms that are next to impossible to photograph, but are easy to delve into in person. Each mechanism works differently, but each piece delights as its m.o. delivers a punch. The combo of hard mechanics with such delicate networks is a total crowd pleaser.

Tommy Joseph's prototype 3-piece suit, hand-painted w/ FWM artists, the imagery based on traditional Tlingit imagery, also on display along with masks that, with the suit, will be used in performance.

And Tlingit Alaskan Tommy Joseph has made a prototype of a performance costume–a three-piece suit hand painted with traditional Tlingit imagery. It’s a terrific merger of cultures. This is not your Mummer’s flash and dash. It has an elegance, a sense of serious intent and shamanistic power.

Robert Chambers, Ribbon Cutting, performance/ephemeral installation on Arch Street. The kids jumped right in.

On the street in front of the FWM annex, Florida artist Robert Chambers let loose 9 rolls of broad ribbons from windows overhead, creating a gorgeous streetscape in his “Ribbon Cutting” installation. I asked for a swatch of the ribbon and an FWM employee cut it for me–the future color of my bedroom, I hope.

Andrea snapped this picture of Joe Rishel and me. The ribbons made everyone feel happy! photo by Andrea Kirsh

Here I am with PMA Curator Joe Rishel and my swatch. Chambers’ other work inside the FWM is also concerned with how things work. There’s a curiosity about the way things are made in the modern manufacturing society and an interest in what these manufactured items represent in our culture.

The exhibit included a video of Ruben Ortiz-Torres’ low-rider inspired artist-modifed scissor fork lift, Hi ‘n’ Lo. Ortiz, like Chambers, is modifying what’s already out there, and talking to cultural values. I loved the pairing of these two. Also there, Seneca nation member Marie Watt’s womb-like, ultra-soft felt structure, called Engine (hope you get a chance to go inside–check out the shaman video, which is one of the features that makes this not just another yurt) .  It’s yummy in there.

A woman tries out a Dennis McNett print/papier mache wolf mask, in front of two fabulous wall-size collaged prints.

At Space 1026 and then at Vox, giant prints stole my heart. Dennis McNett takes over 1026 with Year of the Wolfbat, arguably a Halloween and Day of the Dead themed exhibit that includes two and 3-D work based on prints and collage. The 3 D is outstanding papier mache and sometimes wood–skull masks, birds and “wolfbats” covered with collaged prints. On the wall, enormous prints, smaller prints, and prints collaged to create wall-sized psychedelic explosions are all yummy and mesmerizizizng.

This Dennis McNett wolves-in-wolf print and paint collaged on panel includes carved-into mouth, nose and eyes.

Doing your Xmas shopping or decorating now? Check out the prints, some as low as $5 and $10! The quality of this work is top notch.

Rob Swainston's two-wall print installation suggesting a personal journey as well as a landscape.

A very different double-wall-sized print installation dominates Rob Swainston’s exhibit at Vox–mountain landscapes made of, well, there’s a shaggy dog back story here–that boils down to Swainston going to the Rockies for an artist residency and not having the space to print with the wood he brought along from Philadelphia. He threw the wood into the snow in disgust, where it swelled and warped. He screwed it together to flatten it and headed home, only to have his truck break down. After abandoning the truck and the wood, he was able to recover the wood and get it shipped home.

Rob Swainston is a great storyteller, and I wish I could have recorded his tale of his struggles to make this print and put it up as a podcast.

The prints are of the wood grain itself, raised up by the snow and the rain, creating an abstract landscape, mountainous with winding trails or streams–a symbolic map of the wood’s journeys and the artist’s. The work reminded me of Yan Kai’s digital photomontage landscapes at the InkNotInk exhibit of Chinese art at Drexel last spring.

still from Hiraki Sawa's 8 Minutes, video, 2005, courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, NYC, copied from http://www.screeningvideo.org/

There’s more about landscape at Screening Video, where Hiraki Sawa’s video shorts of animals and a landscape inserted into an ordinary bathroom are delightful meditations on fantasy and quotidian, real and not real, and the schism between modernity and nature. I want to once again give props to Screening for the most comfortable foam cube seating and egg-crate foam sound insulation on their walls.

Luren Jenison and a detail of her cactus installation at Copy.

Still another landscape fills Copy Gallery, where Luren Jenison’s “cactus” installation visits a lot of the same issues. Trash cans bristle with ratchet ties; pool noodles are topped with toothpicks and corn holders. A spot-lit giant white balloon is the moon or the sun, and the whole space manages to create a theatrical tongue-in-cheek faux nature.

The largest of Alexis Granwell's crumbling infrastructures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery

Landscapes were clearly the dominant theme of the evening. Alexis Granwell’s decomposing structures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid form dark, urban landscapes of our failure to overcome entropy. As in Sarah Sze‘s work, the walls have a precarious infrastructure that tumbles out and threatens immediate collapse.

Arden Bendler Browning's gouaches tumble across the paper, creating a world veering out of control.

At AHN/VHS, Arden Bendler Browning’s abstracts also have a sense of a landscape tumbling out of control, a sense of the precariousness of life, nature, and our own backyards.

I also want to give a shout-out to Caitlin Perkins’ collection of sea monster memorabilia in AHN/VHS’s The Cabinet–another meditation on human vulnerability fictionalized and projected onto a dangerous creature that doesn’t really exist.

At this point Andrea was wild with hunger, while I was worried that if I sat down to eat I’d never get up. Miraculously, we wandered into a real Chinese restaurant, a place with cow viscera, eel soup, and aromatic pig ears on the menu. We ordered the water spinach, and got an enormous plate of garlicky sauteed watercress. Fabulous. I’m not even gonna tell you the name of the place in hopes that it stays this way a while longer!

The amazing Beth, who curated Breaking News and was wise to resist her brother, who must have had groom-itis.

Our last stop? Little Berlin. We wandered in at 10:30 to the delightful show (not about landscape at all!) that Brandon already told you about. Our artblog gal friday Beth Heinly was the curator, too! Here she is at Little Berlin the night before her brother’s wedding, wondering if she was being a beast for refusing to have her hair and makeup done for the occasion. Just look at her! Are you kidding?

Working with six local artists new to her gallery, Pentimenti’s Christine Pfister organized Think Global, Go Local as a show about relationships.  It’s an exhibit of clean, sleek, beautiful work consistent with the gallery’s aesthetic and has two surprises — an architectural piece that bulges like a pregnant wall of a house and two sculptures that puncture a freestanding gallery wall, their “heads” on one side and “tails” on the other.

Christine Pfister with SURALtmWALL, various dimensions, plywood, vinyl siding, light, 2009. She was showing me how the piece swings on its hinge like a door.

The architecture team of Jason Austin and Aleksandr Mergold designed their bulging wall, called SURALtmWALL, to showcase vinyl siding, that utilitarian material used to weatherize suburban wood houses and cut costs of house painting.  It’s a funny choice for an art material but backlighting the piece turns the thin sheets of sometimes-translucent vinyl into not quite stained glass.  The piece is a weird and hulking beauty.    A massive plywood armature holds the sheets of vinyl and the structure is hinged on one side like a door.  It actually swings on its hinge, although in closed position the work charms the most, evoking not only human habitation but an insect’s hive.  I couldn’t stop thinking of children playing house by turning alternate materials (bedsheets, tablecloths) into “homes” and using flashlights to light them up.  And with today’s push to sustainable architecture the work evokes not only pre-fabs, but huts everywhere made of reused or recycled materials.

Piper Brett, Red Prepositions (49x12x27", red plexi, steel, wall. 2007 White Preposition 49x12x27", plexi, steel, wall. 2007

Piper Brett’s ribbon-like loops of plexiglas in bright red and white poke through the gallery’s one freestanding wall like they’ve been trapped mid-extrusion.  Sculptors– like architects– love to reference houses, walls and doors in relation to the human body.  Brett’s plexi ribbons are playful and turn the wall into a kind of party present with a bow on top.  Brett, by the way, is also in “Offerings” at Little Berlin and her project there was about the word “wow.”  Here at Pentimenti you can see a hanging steel sculpture of the word “wow” which is so completely deadpan it’s funny.

EJ Herczyk, Avalanche, 90x158" (15 pieces). Casein, resin, digital print on board. 2009

EJ Herczyk’s large and small shiny abstract mixed media panels reference the digital world. “Avalanche,” a 15-panel collage of digital prints under thick resin, is a cacophony of jagged-edge shapes that push forward like all the information in the world trying to get into your email inbox.

Gloria Houng, Persuasion 1, 35x3.5x5.5", 11 pieces. wax. 2009

Gloria Houng’s mixed media drawings and cast wax sculptures of rabbits concern the relationship between the man-made environment and nature.  And Alexis Granwell’s visionary etchings of vortex-like shapes – built up with dots and lines evoking Morse code or Braille — call to mind cycles of nature or perhaps man-made cycles in music or dance.

Alexis Granwell, Diagram for Tunnel I, 41x29", etching on waxed mulberry paper, 2008

I enjoyed many of the pieces in this physically-diverse show and I love that the gallerist took a risk on artists she didn’t know.

“Think Global, Go Local”: Through July 18. Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St. 215.625.9990.

There’s enough critical mass at the Woodmere Art Museum to pull a devoted sidewalk stomper to the almost-burbs of Chestnut Hill.

What got me out there first of all was the Emerging Artists Series show, in conjunction with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, with works from Christopher Hartshorne and Hiro Sakaguchi.

But the surprise for me was the excellence of the 67th Annual Juried Exhibition, with 68 pieces in the show (67 plus one for good luck?). Juried by installation artist Polly Apfelbaum, the show skews contemporary, and the quality is uniformly high. Even the few genre paintings–still lifes, landscapes–had something juicy about them that made them worth a second look.

Two Places for Contemplating the Afterlife, by Michael Grothusen. The places marked on these maps are Niagara Falls, Krackow and Oswici

Emerging artist Alexis Granwell, who just had an exhibit at Tower Gallery, is on the cutting edge with a wonderful spiderweb of cut-out fabric, “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart.” The work immediately brought to mind the freeform lacy cutouts of Dee Nicholas and Jina Valentine (Jina’s now up at Fleisher-Ollman, and Dee Nicholas I’ve seen at Seraphin). At the other end of cut-out shapes, Gallery Joe artist Michael Grothusen’s metal jigsaw maps contemplate the precariousness of life on earth.

Julian, by William G. Teodecki

Even the most old-fashioned pieces offered pleasures, like Izzie Barth’s N.Y. Shipyard II pointillist watercolor, William G. Teodecki’s Julian, an outsider-y portrait of a boy.

From Woodmere’s curator-in-chief Doug Paschall, I learned that this year’s show submissions were more adventurous than usual. He credited a switch to slides and jpgs for jurying (previously, artists had to deliver the originals), which drew in artists from a wider geographical area and more students than in the past. He said there was a wider range of styles, types, range of experience and age in the 450 submissions.

Bird Versions #1, by Gwen Maleson, has an ideosyncratic eco farmland look that subverts the grid into something more quilt-like

In a funny coincidence, showing in both exhibits is Gwen Maleson. Maleson, who shows at Rosenfeld Gallery, also is one of the 35 artists included in the show of work by Hiro Sakaguchi in his show with Christopher Hartshorne.

Nami Yamamoto’s contribution included some writing in Japanese, which of course works best in the vertical writing spaces the notebook provides. Yamamoto also included the temperature on the day she recorded this.

Here’s how that happened. Sakaguchi created a group Picture Journal, with 35 artists contributing. The picture journal is based on a typical Japanese school children’s summer vacation project, the journal a specific format with a place on each page for a picture, for words, and for the day’s weather. The friends-of-Hiro resulting display is pensive and exuberant and wonderful.

Over Clouds (From the Travelers Tale series), 51 x 66″, shows Sakaguchi balancing on the edge of a jet wing.

As a fan of so many of the artists included, I found myself poring over the images, guessing who did what. Included are some faves like Rob Matthews, Nami Yamamoto, Russell Sellers, Mark Shetabi–in short, too many to name.

Some of Sakaguchi’s acrylic paintings –poetic expressions of sadness and fear of the loss of his native country, Japan–and his miniature cellphone paintings I have seen before. But I think Woodmere brings in an audience that rarely makes it to the city’s galleries, and for them the work will be fresh as paint.

Girl Ignoring Stress, by Christopher Hartshorne

Hartshorne’s linocut prints focus on people and their relationships. My favorite, Girl Ignoring Stress, shows a girl ignoring a red snake weaving back and forth across her face. The acid-yellow background flecked with black only ups the pressure. I also liked his scroll like Drama, Part 1, with its figures reacting to eachother across time and the horizontal space.

More pictures from both shows are on my Flickr set.

Alexis Granwell, Navigating the Ecstasy, I and II

Navigating the Ecstasy, two small walls each made of foam, wood, wire, fabric and paint and each distressed and gouged as if eaten by a giant rat, reminds me how lovable and detestable is the impulse to decor. This piece, in which the gouged areas have been painted pink is like decor gone bad, like the cake on Miss Havisham’s wedding table, repulsive and poignant for all its dashed hopes and angry dreams.

detail, Navigating the Ecstasy

Granwell had some drawings and prints as well, abstract works with thunderous titles about falling to pieces and tunneling. The 2nd year Penn MFA student was just in to take some pictures when I was visiting and she mentioned that two more Penn MFA students in her year were also in the DCCA show.

Hedwige Jacobs’ drawings are the basis for a 45-second animation that I saw on gallerist Jaskey’s computer since the AV equipment was not working properly. The drawings are line drawings with collage elements and it’s the animation that takes the idea to another level. This is another excellent Jacobs’ animation — although it’s a big departure from what I’ve seen before. Here, the subject matter differs in that its focus is on one solitary figure in a void of space, and not a multitude of figures in some kind of implied real space. And the one female figure, nude and looking like a young pre-pubescent alien steps through a limited set of defensive crouches all the while beset by things like roads, tunnels and and in one case an old-fashioned china doll.

Jacobs drawing at Tower Gallery

I would not have called Jacobs’ past works jolly–they;ve always seemed edgy to me. But the ones I’ve seen imply an eye focused on the outer world of communities and societies and about social issues pertinent to civilization (like green space versus overcrowding for example, in a piece I remember from the Green show at Klein Gallery.) This new work, called Second Impression, turns the focus inward and reflects a heated concern with the body as affected by outer pressures, obstacles and events.

The piece is very dark and quirky. The female is reeling from things beyond her control. The use of the doll in particular reminded me of Kate Moran‘s damaged and vulnerable Victorian-looking dolls.

Hedwige Jacobs drawing with marker on paper and cut fabric–the logo from a pair of Levis jeans.

I do have a second impression of Jacob’s piece. And all because she’s inserted one inspired and comic moment that implies freedom, humor, escape — things that don’t negate the dark imagery but do wonders to undercut it (whether intended or not).

Still from Jacobs’ animation showing the horse trotting out of the Levi’s logo. Thanks to the artist and gallerist Jaskey for the image!

At one point, a small horse, the iconic horse from the Levi’s jeans’ logo, is cut free from his or her moorings in the advertising scheme and trots away across the screen. This almost Chaplin-like moment, like when the comic eats his shoe strings for dinner as if its spaghetti, creates a mental space for the viewer to consider the improbable for its comic touch even though underneath there is poignance.

Chaplin was full of darkness but people mostly remember the antic bits. In Jacobs’ piece, too, it’s the little horse I will remember, and all the hope it represents.