Two artists selected for the Bambi Biennial came from as far away as New Orleans and Oklahoma City. And both of them flew in for the opening. Hugh Meade, from Oklahoma City, was looking to meet artists with whom he could talk about exchanging shows between Philly and his city, which he says is full of great art and lots of artists. The other flyer, Alissa Eberle, recently moved to NOLA from New York, so she took a detour to the Big Apple before showing up in Philadelphia.

Candace Karch, Bambi proprietress, dressed for a prom--or art opening--gets a hug from gallery assistant, Joel.

We learned that Austin Lee (accompanying girlfriend Katrina Mortorff whose work was in the show) had auditioned for the reality tv show Work of Art; and we learned that sometimes work intended for a show doesn’t make it for the opening — it happened to Marie Perrin McGraw whose abstract ceramic creatures were tied up in some package delivery warehouse and haven’t yet made it to the gallery (we hope they’ll arrive this week). Here are snapshots of happy folks. We hope you enjoyed your weekend, too. We had fun playing hooky.

John Woodin (his photos are in the show), with his wife, artist Amy Orr, and their handsome pooch, Beau

Hugh Meade, posing with his wooden shoes. Meade flew in from Oklahoma City and hoped to meet folks and instigate some Philly/Oklahoma City art exchanges

Katrina Mortorff (with her $1M broom) and Austin Lee. Lee's in a show at Seraphin Gallery right now.

Michael Bednar is posing with Photoshopped doppelgangers that deserve an Oscar for world's funniest self-portraits.

Alissa Eberle from New Orleans who is the cat photographer. We told her all about the Kat Culchur show at FLUXspace this month.

Bobby Gonzales also has a couple of pieces in the show.

Emily Ledieu gets a kiss from Joel, while Jay Walker's art looks on.

Justin Rubich just graduated from UArts. He couldn't be happier about getting into the show! His word-art piece, all in sequins, is behind him, but it's virtually invisible here.

Phil DiWilliams, whose paintings are in the show

Montana Torrey and her boyfriend perched on her sculpture, Widow's Watch. They are decked out in their July 4th finest.

Tim Eads and Tiernan Alexander stopped in to see work by friend Marie Perrin McGraw, whose work alas was orbiting in shipping company hell.

Crowd watching The Art of the Steal on the big screen tv in the Piazza right outside Bambi Gallery.

Apart from one accident with a viewer knocking into the artwork and damaging it, a great time was had by all. But what about the scene out in the Piazza, you may want to know. Well, imagine our surprise when we discovered people sitting on chairs watching what the Friends of the Barnes call a documentary. We call The Art of the Steal bald-faced propaganda.

If you want to see some of the work, you can find it on libby’s and roberta’s flickr sites.

Among my favorites are two pieces about America’s long-term contentious issue–race. One is from a white artist, one from an African American artist, and as always, the subject is loaded with feelings.

The African American artist, Sonya Clark, has stitched a growing series of afros onto the Abraham Lincoln etching on five-dollar bills in her wry piece Afro Abe Progression. (I’m sure this is illegal, but it’s a darned good use of money). The afro grows until it becomes a black shrub that dwarfs Angela Davis’. There’s the obvious relation to Ellen Gallagher’s visceral pieces of pomade-like goop for hair, but Clark uses a light touch here. Plus she gets in loads of content, from population shifts to financial power to black power. Abe stays Abe and does not morph into our current president, although I imagine Obama was part of the inspiration for this. The piece hovers between triumph and wariness.

Whereas Clark keeps her serious subject light, Stephen Beal, a white guy, does not, although both use needle work to make their points. Here’s the back-story behind Beal’s monumental piece: He discovered, via Google, that his great-great grandfather Rittenhouse Nutt was a slave holder. The Rev. Samuel Turner Jr. of Memphis, Tenn., it turns out, had the same great-great grandfather. Turner, who is a lawyer, discovered a document in a Mississippi courthouse that confirmed his family’s oral history–that his grandmother Frances Nutt was both a slave and a granddaughter of Rittenhouse Nutt. The two great-great grandsons met via Google. And Turner showed Beal the document, which itemized the estate of Fauntleroy Plantation owner Rittenhouse Nutt. Turner’s 16-year-old grandmother Frances Nutt was listed in the estate inventory.

Beal cross-stitched the deed text onto three somber rectangles, forming a sort of grave stone. He also cross stitched prayer flags in red, white, yellow and blue for each of the slaves named in the inventory, draping them over his memorial. Slaves and livestock are included with their monetary value in the inventory, including Old Millie, at 76 valued at zero, i.e. less than a table or a chair, let alone a hog. The piece is stark, unbeautiful (although meticulously crafted), and deeply moving.

A third piece about race is by Joyce Scott, who is always excellent and is the only other African American artist in the show. Her grotesque, small beaded sculptures, which combine comic and outsider aesthetics, are pointed and ambiguous all at once. The one here is no exception.

Identity is a big theme (isn’t it always), in other works as well. Mary Bero’s self-portrait, a stuffed and stitched head–puzzling, expressionist and 3-D all at once–gets at an unusual, arresting self-image. In contrast, Kate Anderson’s sweet little knotted house, also 3-D, uses stylized kitsch imagery to express identity and emotions. Pat dipaula Klein’s grid of hearts floating on a watery firmament gathers momentum from the turbulence of the stitching–a starry night of survival.

Broader social themes appear in Adam Cohen’s Super Army Ant, which we saw at Pulse last year. He uses comicbook vocabulary and embroidered camouflage fabric to make a political statement. And Katie Henry’s whimsical Music Together embroidery of animal-headed girls strumming on a park bench captures a social truth framed in an embroidery ring.

The show includes some fabulous clothing, embroidery, quilting, applique, macrame, the works of expected materials. And then there are the less expected materials:

Pat Hickman’s stitched gut sculptures range from droopy to elegant symmetry, and evoke bodies and vulnerability–and Eva Hesse. Yvonne Bobrowicz’ frothy sculptures capture light with strands of monofilament. Amy Orr continues her credit-card quilt series, taking on China and the economy. C. Pazia Mannella goes for a pieced zipper boa (I had seen this one previously at Fleisher-Ollman) and paper take-a-number ticket leis.

In addition, there’s work here by other luminaries such as Lia Cooke and the fabulous Ed Bing Lee, who has pushed his wizardry even farther, finding new roughness and textures for his mineral series.

Philadelphia area artists in the exhibit include Lee, Henry, Klein, Bobrowicz, Manella,  Orr, Leslie Grigsby, Diane Koppisch Hricko, Mi-Kyoung Lee, Nancy Middlebrook, Lewis Knauss, Kathryn Pannepacker, Leslie Pontz, Sophie Sanders, and Deborah Warner.

The show, which was curated by Snyderman Gallery Director Bruce Hoffman,  will remain up through March 20.

6th International Fiber Biennial
Snyderman/Works Galleries

About 100 artists from far and wide were selected for this exhibit, now in its 6th year, curated by Snyderman Gallery director/exhibition curator, Bruce Hoffman. This show is the seed from which the full extravaganza of fiber exhibits in Philadelphia grew. The range of materials and methods is as astounding as ever, from quilted film to plastic discs arranged in a grid to suggest the grid of woven fabric. The craftsmanship was uniformly outstanding. Here’s what I found most interesting:

Xiang Yang‘s Uncertain Identity takes his two-faced embroidery frames to new limits. This Chinese-born artist, who used to live in Philadelphia, seems to be in the midst of wondering just how Chinese he still is, if I can read a bit of autobiography into this new piece. Xiang is now represented by Snyderman.

Susie Brandt‘s Beech Sampler unites good-girl stitchery with bad-boy tree carving and creates a love note to both practices–using neither the stitchery nor the beech tree. It’s a print on fabric.

Patricia Waller‘s Baby Ghost is my kind of kitsch. That the ghost would have a pacifier stuffed in its mouth, a big pink bow, and giant, innocent/scary black holes for eyes just strikes me as hilarious. Waller has it both ways–sentimental and not. Plus, it’s beautifully made. I also liked her crocheted bare lightbulb.

Marcia Docter‘s An Eye for an Eye Soon the Whole World is Blind, which is in the sampler tradition, is also a piece of political protest–in pinks. The warning, written as a rebus–or a text message–it is only for those who are sighted.

This little patch of grass took a lot of looking by Lewis Knauss. I realize the small scale was probably chosen partly because of the intense process, but that it’s a square patch and is so literal moves this piece into contemporary deadpan.

Lia Cook‘s Maze Doll, a computer generated tapestry of sorts, has a creep factor in the way the embedded doll’s face emerges slowly as the image behind the yucky maze, suggesting decomposition and neglect.

Everything by Joyce Scott pleased me, from this 3-D portrait of glass beads, Later Baby, to her necklaces. She’s fearless in her image-making and object making.

She’s a master of her medium and I wish one of those necklaces was mine.

Passage, by Norma Minkowitz, is a giant stitched drawing. It’s really hard to tell from this picture what the physical presence of this large piece is, but that small gray passage hole, with the maze of paths around it, goes in many directions at once–to death, to the cosmos, to the daily paths we follow, etc. etc. It’s also a little baroque, a little sexy, a little frilly and has a lot of quirky decisions in it.

Joseph Shuldiner‘s delicate “utensils” seem like people-surrogates to me. They are vulnerable and too tender for the task that lays ahead of them. Very nice.

Usually when insects are on clothes, they become quite decorative and lose their creep factor. Not here in Ambush, by John Eric Riis. These make me recoil. Excellent.

Ed Bing Lee has gone into high gear, turning out one knotted morsel after another, like this key lime pie, and a cupcake with sprinkles. The food must be selling for him, but I miss the variety he has previously brought to his intense process. It felt a wee bit like product this time.

The noir mixed media thread drawing by Kim Kamens speaks of chair as body, of nails as stars as well as structural devices and of the kinds of shimmering quality of penumbral spaces. I liked the moodiness of the piece and the disembodied arm. But it got subverted by the foot in a way that undercut the mystery.

Kamens’ methodology reminds me of Mark Khaisman’s packing tape drawings.

Joh Ricci’s lumpy stele is a Weeble and quite human.

In her Garden, Helen Frost Way‘s suggestion of roots and tubers, have some kind of battle going between the tender roots and the pokey horns. It’s this battle that pushes the work from preciousness to something worth thinking about.

This terrific little landscape in a moving truck, by B.J. Adams, is romantic and illustrative. It says New Yorker cover to me, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I liked the wittiness. This time, I’m just a wee bit puzzled why this complex image would find its expression in such a slow, exacting medium.

I’m ending on a local note here–Amy Orr‘s credit card shreds on velvet talk about more than just the possibility of identity theft. They talk about the American dream of spending and consumerism and our King George who is a true believer (hey, did he notice our economy is in the toilet under his reign?)

In this one, Credit Cards: Security Measures, she also pushes beyond identity theft and suggests there’s a whole underpinning of not just our economy but our entire culture in the digital world that is recording everything.

As always, Orr’s work is beautiful, smart, witty and finely crafted.

Anyway, there’s my list of fiber loves.

This year digital processes have taken over in the world of fiber and in quilts, but it almost seems irrelevant to me, except that warps and woofs talk especially loudly to the weavers and quilters and beaders who think in pixilated grids.

For the most part, the digi stuff is just a tool and a process. (Of course fiber folks are process crazy, just like print folks, and some of these artists are both.)

What’s relevant are the beauty and variety, and the input into the Contemporary Art conversation.

left to right, Lisa Whitley from Linden, NJ; Barbara Askew from Detroit; Bettye Blackston from Linden; Venetta Harbin from Jersey City and Gloria Saundra Blackston (Bettye’s sister-in-law) from Yeadon, PA, posing in front of their favorite quilt, Kauri 7, by Kathyanne White. All but one (I think) are quilters.

So if you’ve snored your way through this month’s fiber shows (see previous post), it’s your last chance to wake up and look around. The out-of-town fiber lovers who I met in the galleries, are beating you to it.

This year’s fiber exhibits, which are at a number of venues (see previous post), confirm that the selvages have unraveled and anything goes. Okay, so it’s not news, but it sure is fun to look at.

Number Five, by Pat dipaula Klein, hand-stitched cotton floss on linen, 2005

At DaVinci (I’m starting here because it’s all local artists), some witty contemporary work from Shannon Robinson and Pat dipaula Klein stood out. Klein sticks close to traditional technique and materials to make imagery that suggests the fecundity of the natural world via beautiful, cartoon imagery. Robinson goes outside the box with her compressed brick of unraveled baby-blanket wool and her Deer Head Doily, embroidered with machine stitching.

I’m not sure why deer are on every young person’s agenda, but they seem to have become the national symbol for nature under attack, innocence, and purity. I keep seeing deer heads–in glass, in paint, in graphite, cast in resin. It’s not like this was the first generation to survive Bambi. Robinson’s deer head, on a doily, strikes me as a stand-in for a teenage girl’s horse as well as a wild beast in the parlor. It has a saint’s halo behind, making it look a lot like a hunting trophy on a board.

Water Under the Bridge by Marie H. Elcin, embroidery on cotton, 2005

Marie H. Elcin’s If Only I Could See Under the Surface, withthe word “forget” stitched into the waves, also felt contemporary in the way tight stiches create a loose network over the surface, and the way language is incorporated.

Pam RuBert’s Whine and Dine at Sushi Zen

Cartoon and wit also turned up at the Philadelphia Art Alliance where the official theme was communication. Fortunately, artists will be artists and not comply. I loved witty Whine and Dine at Sushi Zen from Pam RuBert of Springfield, Mo. The stitching and material choices are meticulous and beautiful. The piece communicated just fine with its slice of contemporary life cartoon that would look swell on a New Yorker cover.

detail from Friendly Fire from Jon Eric Riis, 65 x 85 inches

And while I’m discussing what work looked utterly contemporary, I have to add to the list Jon Eric Riis and his tapestry “Friendly Fire,” at Snyderman, made of metallic thread with a blood spot of red Saworvski crystals. The work cuts both ways, being a serious comment on war at the same time that it comments on fashions in politics and on the body.

A Seasonal Spectrum (top) and A Quirky Attraction by B.J. Adams, free motion machine embroidery; these get high points for their incredible technique and the texture the layers of machine stitches provide

On another note, the shows had lots of crossover artists, like B.J. Adams, local artist Nancy Herman, Patricia Malarcher at both Klein and Snyderman, and Jette Clover and Jeanne Williamson at both Klein and the Art Alliance. Adams uses meticulous drawing combined with freehand machine embroidery to create images that pop. Herman is using felt.

Super Sized by Ed Bing Lee

Ed Bing Lee was at Snyderman as well as at DaVinci. At Snyderman, the ultra-amazing macrame artist of all times offered Pop hamburger and hotdog sculptures, knotted, while at DaVinci he showed a more austere 3-D take on a mineral. Last time we looked at Lee, his hamburgers and hotdogs were Pop 2-D portraits in macrame. I’m thinking watch out, Oldenburg.

detail of Best Wishes by Amy Orr, at the Painted Bride, bleached chicken bones and beads on velvet; Orr stated that the bones series was an outgrowth of 9/11. What I like is the way the beads and bones look like constellations in the night sky.

Some of the artists in InLiquid’s Exhibit 4 also showed up elsewhere–Amy Orr (Snyderman), and Jacqueline Unanue (DaVinci).

There may have been more crossovers, but those were the ones I caught.

Jeanne Williamson, Orange Construction Fence Series #28, monoprinted, hand painted, hand stamped, machine stitched

What seemed most prevalent was how fiber is being used to explore the same kinds of issues that are elsewhere in the art world. The Minimalist factory-made quality has had some influence, even in fiber, which has a reputation as the last bastion of the crafted and hand-made. There’s some synergy between minimalist grids and the quilt square, which gets some witty treatment in Williamson’s two meditations on orange construction fencing, at the Art Alliance and at Klein, but needle-less to say, grids were woven into every show.

Karen Perrine, Still Water

Continuing the theme of art movements migrating into fiber, we have impressionism, most spectacularly in Karen Perrine’s Still Water quilt at Klein. Also Deborah Anderson’s Fall Rain/Rain Fall picks up some impressionism and pushes it through some Asian, reductive seive to come up with her evocative Fall Rain/Rain Fall.

Kim Kamens, Max, thread and nails

Even traditional drawing makes it into fiber art, exemplified by Kim Kamens’ Max. The nail heads rescue what would otherwise be just an exercise in technique. In the same vein were Shisuzko Kimura’s airy croquis in needle and thread.

Mary Austin’s Look out! crocheted and beaded, 2006

For the traditional mix of fiber and clothing, standouts were Maris Fisher Krasnegor’s Leafy Jabot (felt) for its color alone and Mary Austin’s fear-factor Look out! hat with eyes all around the head, both at DaVinci.

Lisa Lee Peterson’s Pop Art

Narrative also was part of the mix. One that I loved was Lisa Lee Peterson’s Pop Art at Snyderman, an autobiographical piece that shamelessly borrows from Pop and comics in telling its story of a father (a shameless pun on Pop) who warns his daughter against a career in art.

Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik’s Roadside Shed, inspired by Japanese tin sheds and made with overdyed kimono liners

Then there are the color meditations, Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik’s beautiful Roadside Shed at the Art Alliance and Jeanne Butler’s White 10.92 at Klein. Take that, Robert Ryman.

detail of Bhutina Abu-Milhern’s The Needle Vanquished the Sewer 3

For some Middle Eastern flavor, check out Israeli embroidery/sculpture artist Lily Poran, who is inspired by traditional tattoos and Middle Eastern stitchery techniques, and Palestinian Israeli Bhutina Abu-Milhern, whose contemporary stitched, painted and drawn-on shirt looked like a cross between a crossword puzzle and a travel sewing kit.

Mi-Kyoung Lee’s untitled flowers as columns

On the sculpture front, I’d have to send you to Snyderman all the way. Mi-Kyoung Lee’s large and small red stretch flowers, Piper Shepard’s filligree of fabric, Lace-Like, Hisako Sekijima’s plant-fiber sculptures and Lewis Knauss’s grass-inspired landscape were standouts. But there was more of interest–so much more that I really didn’t digest it all.

KathyAnne White’s Kauri 7, influenced by tree bark in New Zealand (Art Alliance); it is also the backdrop behind the group of women at the top

It’s pattern and texture that rule in the world of fiber. KathyAnne White’s texture and exuberant shapes were the bar-none favorite of the troupe of women at the Art Alliance. Even when fiber goes digital, which much of it has, with digital photos applied to fabric, digital weaving and knitting, digital embroidery output, etc., pattern and texture distinguish fiber from most painting and much sculpture.

I thought I’d be able to tell you which show I loved the most if you only had time for one. Alas, this I cannot do. It depends on what you’re looking for. I’d go to both quilt shows if quilting were my subject.

I’d go to Snyderman for breadth and depth as well as sculpture.

I’d go to DaVinci to see where the local scene fits (and it does) in the larger fiber picture.

Take your pick. But pick and go.

I’m in the process of putting my fiber photos up at Flickr here, but at the time of this writing, they are not yet all up, nor are they completely labeled.