Comedy Night @ PhilaMOCA
This Saturday, October 1, at 7:00 PM, PhilaMOCA will be the site of I LOVE MITCH HEDBERG: Art for the Late Great Comedian. A number of comedy acts (including comedy by Andrew Jeffrey Wright), refreshments, and artwork are on tap. Special guest Lynn Shawcroft will screen a video of unreleased Mitch Hedberg comedy footage.

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours open this weekend
Philadelphia Open Studio Tours (POST) is the largest tour of artist work spaces in the region and it starts this weekend, October 1-2, for studios WEST of Broad Street. On October 15-16 there will be tours of locations EAST of Broad Street. The tours are free and run from 12 – 6 PM. Of particular interest for photo enthusiasts is Light Room Photography Co-op at 1909 Wilcox Street.

Artlog city guides
Artlog, in partnership with Société Perrier just rolled out The Fall Art Guides, featuring listings of all the best shows and events from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Paris. New York and LA already have their guides out, with more to be released soon. The real question is – where is Philadelphia’s guide?

Design Philadelphia guide books ready for kickoff

Guide books for Design Philadelphia are being distributed around the city, but they can’t reach everyone. If you want to lend a hand and help distribute some materials, pick up some guide books, posters, and postcards at their office at University of the Arts, 211 South Broad Street, room 1101, from 9am – 5pm, Monday – Friday. The festival kickoff is on October 13.

New gallery on Lancaster Avenue
There’s a new gallery down at 3820 Lancaster Avenue called Projects Gallery (that’s right, another Philly space named “Projects”). John Phillips and Carolyn Healy have a multimedia installation on display, along with work by other artists. Opening reception is today, Friday, September 30 from 5-9 PM.

Grounds for Sculpture adds new space

"Aerial Roots" by Steve Tobin.

New Jersey’s Grounds for Sculpture will open a 7-acre addition, “The Meadow,” on October 1 at 2 PM. With the addition, the Hamilton, NJ sculpture park and arboretum spans 42 acres in all. Featured work includes “Aerial Roots” by Steve Tobin.

24-Hour Comic Challenge
Atomic City Comics hosts the 24-Hour Comic Challenge on October 1 starting at 12 noon. A comic book can take up to three months for one person to produce, but six brave, local comic artists will attempt it in the span of a day! It should be quite the challenge, and it will be very interesting to see the results.

Nexus is not finished – it’s moving!
Formerly located in the Crane Arts Building at 1400 N. American Street, the rumors of Nexus closing are false. The true story is that they are moving. We will provide you with upcoming details when we get them.

PAFA’s Party on the Plaza and new installation

Griska in his "Grumman Greenhouse"

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will be partying on the new Lenfest plaza this Saturday to celebrate the opening of the new public space. The program starts at noon and includes kid-friendly activities and free art activities until 5 PM. In the evening there will be an unveiling of the new Claes Oldenburg sculpture “Paint Torch”, as well as the unveiling of Jordan Griska’s Grumman Greenhouse installation, a de-comissioned Cold War-era plane that is a greenhouse.

Opportunities

Last call for Institute of Contemporary Art‘s juried open video call. Monday Oct. 3 is the last day to submit. The jury selects from the submissions Monday night. This is a great opportunity to get your work seen by ICA jurors and possibly shown at ICA in their video roundup. Send DVD, CV, and artist statement to: Open Video Call c/o ICA 118 S.36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Project Basho is seeking photography teachers to lead classes, weekend workshops, and private lessons at their studio. Also stay tuned for the announcement of the artists in ONWARD ’12, Basho’s annual photography competition.

Via WooLoo, Richmond, VA non-profit 1708 Gallery has a call for exhibition proposals.

Murray State University in Kentucky is seeking work that explores the role of new media in performance, photography, installation, and video for the juried exhibition “White Hot Gold“. artblog‘s Roberta is the juror! Deadline is October 28, and the entry fee is $30 for 5 entries.

Artist News

Jury Smith, ceramics professor at St. Joseph’s University, has two upcoming shows in New York. You can find the details for both here.

A work in progress by Judith Schaechter.

Judith Schaechter gives a lecture,”Surviving Your Creativity” at the MIT Glass Lab on October 5 at 6:30 PM.

Phil Jackson is moving to NYC in January with his girlfriend Leigh Metzler who will be at the New School for Social Research. Also moving is Mary Anne Friel who is leaving the Fabric Workshop for a professorship at RISD.

Chris Lawrence has a solo show in Portland, OR, at Appendix Project Space.

The bull snake Anthony Campuzano confronted. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Anthony Campuzano is in a show at Churner and Churner in New York that opens September 30. While at a residency at Ucross in Wyoming the urbanite Campuzano had a close encounter with a big bull snake when he ran it over with his bike. (Both the snake and Anthony are fine, he reports.)

Amir Lyles will be part of Philadelphia Open Studio Tours at the Mt. Airy Art Garage this weekend, October 1 and 2.

Emily Brown is part of a group show at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, ME.

Diedra Krieger‘s Plastic Fantastic just made an appearance at Salisbury University in Maryland.

David Carrow has new work in a group show at the Grounds for Sculpture, opening October 15th.  Carrow made the metal door for Marginal Utility as part of Hadassa Goldvicht’s exhibition on view now at the gallery.

Former Philly artist Todd Gilens has made some pretty sweet bus wraps for the transit system in San Francisco.

Amir Lyles amid art work and artifacts the line his house.

Download audio file (Amir_promo1.2.mp3)
Right click to download Amir Lyles 43-second sample

Download audio file (Amir_final.mp3)
Right click to download full 12-min. 54-sec. Amir Lyles episode

This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes.

Photographers R. Alexander Trejo and Nicole Fusco; and mixed media by Amir Lyles
City Arts Salon at Sharktown (on Facebook)
155 Cecil B. Moore Ave. Studio 3D
opening reception June 18, 3-7 pm
hours Tues. 4:30-7:30 pm, Thurs.-Fri., 4:30-7 pm, and Sun., 3-6 pm

Amir Lyles 43-second sample

Photographers R. Alexander Trejo and Nicole Fusco; and mixed media by Amir Lyles
City Arts Salon at Sharktown (on Facebook)
155 Cecil B. Moore Ave. Studio 3D
opening reception June 18, 3-7 pm
hours Tues. 4:30-7:30 pm, Thurs.-Fri., 4:30-7 pm, and Sun., 3-6 pm

I went there with my friend Joanne for a studio visit, with not a clue of what to expect. A blackboard sign on the front porch, hanging next to the door, stated in colorful chalks, Study your lessons. The five children are home schooled, and part of that day’s lessons included the admonishment to do them! Patterson said she changes the message on the blackboard regularly.

Lyles with one of his five-year-old twins stands in the upstairs hallway crowded with art.

I don’t know how all seven people can live amicably, basically home full time, in so little space filled chock-a-block with art. Well not full time. The kids run out the play when the rest of the neighborhood children come home from school. When I entered the front door, I felt like I had walked into the idealistic 1960s when the personal was political and the political was personal, a time when people talked about making love and not war, a time when rowhouse communes spilled over with large, amorphous families reconfigured to create their own pocket utopias in the city.

But those times had a dark side, when the politics of protest raged, when couples and partnerships could suddenly turn fluid and even dangerous, and when packs of kids pinging off adult jealousies raced around those communes, underfoot and unhappy.

Amir Mark Lyles, Hard Wired, 2009, mixed media on wood, 32 x 32 inches

No kids in this Germantown house looked or acted unhappy. The children were busy, active, bright and yet not underfoot. These children clearly know how to think for themselves and be themselves. They don’t need the constant attention of the adults around them. They aren’t numb in front of a TV, partly because the family decided they couldn’t afford the cable bill. But the decision is bigger. Lyles says of the passive experience of sitting in front of the TV, They tell you what to think.

Amir Lyles, Black President, 2009, a portrait of cult figure Fela Kuti

Lyles, 38, caught my full attention when Patterson sent us a notice of a show he was having in Texas. The notice for Africa Create Us, the exhibit in Austin at Diverse Arts gallery, came with a figurative painting of Nigerian Afro-beat artist Fela Kuti (you can find on the internet the photo of Kuti on which this is based), who well before his death had become a cult hero. Lyles painted Fela breaking out beyond the edges of a panel shaped like the map of Africa. I was intrigued–by the mix of surprising and conventional, pop culture and personal thoughts.

Amir Lyles, MCs Act Like They Don't Know, acrylic, rhinestones from the series Covers and Remixes, Vol. 1

Lyles’ paintings and collages are all about identity, culture, and politics. Some look like they target an African-American audience, but many speak easily to everyone. The distinction is mine, not Lyles’. And all the recent work with music-references, like the music itself, seems to me to be crossover work. All the work reflects his interests. He is inspired by his African roots and he is inspired by music by African American artists. He listens to a lot of hip hop, reggae and jazz. And he is sometimes put off by the messages that lurk in the lyrics and the culture. He trades on pop culture, design, kitsch, formulaic imagery and completely original ideas–whatever it takes to express what’s on his mind. The brew is sometimes indiscriminate, sometimes pretty amazing!

Amir Lyles, Ready to Live

He talks back to Biggy Smalls’ Ready to Die with an alternate lyric. “Why didn’t he say, Ready to live?” asks Lyles, who is disturbed by the negativity of so many hip-hop performers. The paintings alter the original message to reflect his own optimism and outlook.

Amir Lyles, Cubans With a Jesus Piece, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches,in hip hop slang, a cuban is a kind of neck chain and a Jesus piece is a Jesus pendant

He paints his own interpretations of the lyrics he hears, putting them in the context of his own life. He surrounds a beautiful Tracy Chapman with tiny TVs and borders the painting with her lyric “We’ve got a box to put in your brain.” He paints a satirical cartoon of blinged-out hip hop MC’s, inspired by the lyric “MCs act like they don’t know,” those words stenciled to create a border. He’s not limited by any rules. His MC painting is embellished with rhinestones. And behind the figures are words, lots of them, all beginning  with MC, from Mea Culpa and Murder Cartel to Mentally Challenged. He does not approve.

When he sees kids disconnected from what’s around them with headphones on, he’s worries. “I know you’re not listening to books on tape,” he says, quoting his imaginary conversation with them.

I wonder where Lyles grew up. The answer is Harlem, where it wasn’t always pretty. He studied painting in the New York City art magnet schools. He also studied with his older brother, artist Richard Toler.

A painting hanging around the cellar. I'm torn between the big toe and the lady with the attitude for my fave detail.

He tried to make it working in the corporate world where he discovered he was supremely unhappy. And he moved to Philadelphia to be with Naeemah. Now he’s home all day painting or taking care of the family. (I wonder how they get by).

We ask about an iconic painting with aerodynamic hair. “You hear this person killed that person. There’s more to us than that. This is somebody’s angel, this is somebody’s baby. To a Rastafarian locks are symbolic–the hair is angel wings.”

I ask about his five kids. He answers, “Angels are all around.” They also have mega hair.

Amir Mark Lyles, Watching for the Next Freedom Train, collage and mixed media

Upstairs in the hallway, Lyles has several collages, honoring Marvin Gaye. Watching for the Next Freedom Train is a complex salute to the civil right movement of the ’60s,with lots of well-thought-out details adding to the depth of the composition.

Amir Lyles based this mixed-media painting on an image from National Geographic

On our visit we discovered other Africa-shaped panels besides the Fela painting. The shaped panels are the basis for a series that covers a variety of subjects about African identity, painted in a variety of styles–an Ethiopian-style icon of Haile Selassie (Lyles mentioned he and his family are Rastafarians); Ndebele Girl, a stylized figure-ground study in which the Ndebele background pattern competes with the subject’s bright outfit, or a realistic mixed media scarified female torso (copied from a National Geographic) that becomes its own sort of map within a map. The scars are bits of leather easily confused for paint in a reversal of the idea of trompe l’oeil.

Amir Lyles, De-Evolution (top) and On Line, which is from a memory of drug addicts in Harlem

Down in the basement, which doubles as Lyles’ studio, the paintings range from Ash Can School to cartoons. Pop and glib mix with serious and complex. On our way out we notice a mixed media panel–a door–that captures the horror of the Door of No Return through which captive Africans boarded ships taking them from Africa’s west coast to slavery in the New World.

I wonder why an artist in Philadelphia gets a show in Texas but can’t get his best work shown in Philadelphia. Lyles says he’s done trying for a gallery. He’ll find another way. (He’s a little dreamy, but maybe he’ll do it.)

Lyles’ work comes from his heart. He is looking at everything, taking it in and using painting and collage and every kind of imagery he’s ever seen to process it all–the past, the present, the political, the personal, the spiritual world, the real world.

Italy to Cyprus by way of L.A.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, The Soft Epic, video still. click to see it bigger.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib go global this summer. (See a clip of their video Soft Epic on their Soft Epic website, a piece so epic it gets a site of its own!) See their works  here:

Pesaro, Italy, June 13th-28th
Moscow, June 22nd and 23rd

Los Angeles, July 11th-mid August

New York, NY, July 28th,

and Nicosia, Cyprus, Sept. 3

Boston

Alex Da Corte, Serge and Bacchus

Look for Philly alum Alex Da Corte’s Casual Luxury ultra-exhibit in New England! Now there’s a culture confrontation!
LaMontagne Gallery
June 18th to July 31st

Greensboro, NC.

Eileen Neff, photo from her show at Weatherspoon Museum

Eileen Neff is showing selected work from the last 10 years in her museum exhibit Eileen Neff: Photographs!  Are they real or are they art? Greensboro, check it out!
Weatherspoon Museum of Art
May 24,  2009  – August 16,  2009

Harrisburg

Sarah Gamble, painting that's in the Art of the State exhibit in Harrisburg

Mind-boggling: 157 works of art by 798 Pennsylvania artists, selected for more than 2,000 entries.

A shout-out to Matt Pruden for this breaking news about the Art of the State.
Here’s a selection of artists we’ve written about from some of the 66 artists from the Philadelphia area.
Arden Bendler Browning
Nanette Acker Clark
Dominic Episcopo
Sarah Gamble
Ed Bing Lee
Lisa Murch
Matthew Pruden
Kate Stewart
Ben Volta
Kip Deeds
Csilla Sadloch

Art of the State, June 27 – September 20
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

New York, NY

Adam Parker Smith, untitled plane crash

Adam Parker Smith  in A Greek Play with a Main Character Named Oblivious (Parker Smith is a Philly alum).

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

June 23 – July 31, 2009
Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6 – 9 PM

Jesse A. Greenberg, Invitation Station Arch 1, 2008, Plastic, foam, rubber, silicon, plexi-glass, acrylic, vinyl, mylar, fabric, glitter, urethane, wood, electric lighting 96” x 80” x 28” (243,8 x 203,2 x 71,1 cm)

Jesse A Greenberg will be going to Columbia for grad school this fall, but we still claim him as a Philly guy. He will be in
Wild Feature, a group show with Melissa Brown, Brendan Cass, James B. Franklin, John Hodany, Misaki Kawai and Taylor McKimens.
Zurcher Studio
June 25 – July 26, 2009
Opening Thursday June 25, from 6 to 8 pm

Austin, TX

Amir Lyles

Amir M. Lyles, Africa Create Us:  Art Exhibit and Gallery Talk
DiverseArts’ New East Arts Gallery and Pro Arts Collective
June 13-July 9