Bill Walton, Scarty, Painted wood, gesso, 8 1/2 x 10 x 1 3/4 inches, from fleisher-ollmangallery.com website

Also at the ICA, look for a Bill Walton solo show in the fall, according Miranda, the ICA’s  blog. Miranda reports that a student intern is cataloging every single object in the late sculptor’s studio–from slippers to tools.  Walton died about a year ago.

Gallery moves

Anne Seidman, image from schmidtdean.com

Schmidt/Dean‘s current show of work by Anne Seidman and by Krista Steinke is its last at the current location.  Rent went up and the building may be up for sale. Where to go? Old City was too far from where his clients live. So the gallery will be moving just a block or two away from his current location, to a building on Chestnut & 17th streets. The new place is on the 4th floor in a building with an elevator, and the gallery space has big windows, 18-foot tall ceilings with black beams, and 1600-square feet of gallery space–with an emphasis on square (i.e. not long and narrow).

Happy first birthday tonight to the Great and Terrible Collective which is also moving, but we’re not sure where, yet. For tonight, however, it is still in Kensington at 172 W. Montgomery Ave. So celebrate with them and with free beer and food, 6:30 to 9:30 (by time we get this up, the evening is half over, but there’s still time…).  If it doesn’t rain there will also be a bbq. The art will include performances and videos by Kerdieekrdaad and Sandy Frank respectively–and any artwork of your own that you bring along.

Possible Projects got its first show up ever in Philly, at 873 E. Thompson St! Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays 12-4 pm and by appointment info@possibleprojects.com.  The show, Cold Open, goes to May 1 and features work that uses the film narrative technique of dropping the viewer in the middle of a story without any intro or preparation.

Opportunities

Piffaro  is holding a contest for composers–rap meets the Renaissance. The First NEW R(en] Contest, A Mash-Up Composers Contest for All Ages & Skills is accepting entries through May 1.  Start with renaissance music and remix.

ArtPrize, the public art event/competition in Grand Rapids, MI, is once again calling for artists to submit their work. The $500,000 in prizes are determined by vox populi, not the usual art world insiders.

Art theory book club forms in West Philly
Manya Scheps and Becket Flannery are starting a book club called Talking Pictures.  First book up, Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. That should give you a sense of what they have in mind.
If you’re interested, contact Manya at manyascheps@gmail.com.

Help Japan
Play for Japan is a Japan Relief concert in Booklyn. We mention it because Marginal Utility‘s Yuka Yokayama is one of the organizers. And among the performers is the inimitable Hennessey Youngman, aka Jayson Musson. 100% of the admission will go to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund. The venue Public Assembly will donate 10% of bar proceeds to the Relief Fund. Other performances by Zugunruhe Sounds, Little Band of Sailors, Young Boys and Borts Minorts.
 Sunday 24 April, 8:30PM (door opens at 8:00pm)
at PUBLIC ASSEMBLY: 70 North 6th St., Brooklyn, NY 11211
Admission: $20 at the door.

We party for books
Speaking of books, The Graphic Unconscious (Philagrafika 2010) exhibition catalog is having a book-launch party May 5, 4:30-8 p.m. at 1616 Walnut St., Suite 918. Light fare and drinks and no shipping and handling charges if you purchase the $30. book that evening. Yes, there’s tax, of course, seeing as it’s Philadelphia.

A Guggenheim in town

Katherine Bradford, Ocean Liners, 2008 Oil on canvas 24h x 21w in. Image from edwardthorpgallery.com

PAFA graduate faculty member Katherine Bradford has won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Fine Arts.

Anne Seidman (2008 fellow), Untitled, 2006, water based paint, 15”x13” Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

Melissa Franklin of the Pew called us up to give us the scoop.

“We’ve thought about this for a while. We’ve had it on our minds that there has to be a better way to review materials. We want to put into place a more thoughtful and thorough review process” She also said the context for the grant making has changed because the art has changed.  We asked her if applications were down and she said they were down slightly and we think that has to be a concern.

Franklin said the grant criteria will remain unchanged.  Pew will award grants on the basis of artistic excellence, artistic commitment and on the impact of the grant on the artist and impact of the artist’s work on society.

The traditional categories into which they forced artists to define themselves have been given the heave-ho.  ”The categories have always been problematic for a lot of artists. We have artists who have to squeeze themselves into categories. Others work in ways that defy the categories. Now we’re looking at any artistic discipline this year.

Jennifer Levonian (2009 fellow), still from You, Starbucks, Watercolor and White-Out on found map, size varies. Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

As for the application, it’s been changed as well.  ”Our old questions are not very good. For example, we don’t need to know what people will do with the money.  But what we do need to know is what they’re thinking about and where they want to go with their art.

“Another thing, in the past we’d give $60,000 and say ‘See ya.’ And that’s not good enough. We need to engage more deeply with the recipients. We’re going to work out what each artist needs, whether it’s to make connections or introductions or technical assistance.”

The nomination process.

In the new nomination process, 30 nominators will select 2 artists each. The artists who are nominated are invited to apply. The categories will be literature, visual arts, dance and music, etc. (see all the categories on the Pew website).  The nominators — who Franklin said will be people with deep knowledge of the arts in the region — will change every year and they will be anonymous to protect them from undue influence and pressure from their friends. The nominators will have to write the reasons for their selection and that narrative will become a part of the information about the artist as they go through the selection process. ”An outside person can often talk about the work better than the artist.”

Charles Burwell (2008 fellow), Red Line with Three Figures, 2006, oil on canvas, 36”x36” Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

After the nominated artists apply they will be evaluated by  experts around the country, who will look at the materials. Only those artists ranked high enough will go to the final interdisciplinary panel (same as now).

“The old open application assumes it’s more egalitarian and it also assumes people know about us. But some people may not even apply to us.”  (Pew historically had a 97% rejection rate of all applicants –that gets around and people who ought to be applying sometimes get discouraged).

Now the 60 nominated applicants have a 20% shot.

“This new method gives us the freedom to be proactive about people doing interesting work right now.” We asked if she could give us an example of who that might be and she mentioned King Brit and young artists in general.

We asked if the names of the 60 artists nominated would be made public each year and the answer was no. When the 12 grants are announced Pew will release the 12 names and the names of the final evaluators.

Anthony Campuzano, Pew Fellow. Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships

Franklin told us she’d been working for a year on this overhaul. She said she worked with Cynthia Mayeda, head of external affairs at the Brooklyn Museum on the review. Franklin also said she consulted with USA Artists, Creative Capital and artists who had been on the Pew panels in the past like Amy Sillman and Kevin Young.

Over their 18 years in operation, Pew Fellowships has had 7,900 applications and has given grants to 237 artists.

“We hope people will welcome this change,” Franklin said.

For more information about this big change check the Pew Fellowships website which has a FAQ page and other information.

Last week, Pew announced its 2008 Fellows, recipients of the coveted $60,000 awards for artists in the 5-county Philadelphia area. These are the largest grants in the country that individual artists can apply for, according to Pew. This year 323 applied and 12 received the awards including 4 in painting and the three who we know who’ve been working in Philadelphia a long time we’re really excited about. Matthew Cox is a new name to us. Here’s who:

Anne Seidman painting
Charles Burwell painting 
Matthew Cox painting
Mauro Zamora painting 
Felix “Pupi” Legarreta folk & traditional arts
J. Rufus Caleb playwriting         
Russell Davis playwriting   
Katharine Clark Gray playwriting
Nana Korantemaa folk & traditional arts 
Vera Nakonechny folk & traditional arts
Venissa Santí folk & traditional arts        
Edgar J. Shockley III playwriting  


This is the 17th year Pew has given out the awards for a total of 220 fellowships totaling more than $11 million.

Anne Seidman
Untitled 2008
waterbased paint on wood panel mounted on wood.

We thought you might like to know who was on the jury (we wanted to know). The interdisciplinary panel members, who make the final decision, are listed below.

Of all the things I ought to write about, I have to skip them for now to write about something else–something I really want to write about.

Anne Seidman‘s exhibit, Touching, at Schmidt/Dean Gallery (until June 7) has already had an outpouring of words: She got a great review from Edie Newhall in the Inquirer when the exhibit opened. And the perfection of Sid Sachs’ amazing essay in the exhibit brochure, I can only aspire to.

Then there’s the fact that Anne is a friend, so who would trust me on this anyway?

Nonetheless, I was so knocked out by Anne’s work in this exhibit, I kept thinking Thomas Nozkowski thoughts as I looked, and he’s one of my all-time painter heroes, part of my pantheon.

Anne Seidman, untitled, water media on rag board mounted on wood, 13x 14.625 inches, 2007

Sure, Seidman’s and Nozkowski’s work have completely different aesthetics. Nozkowski has ’50s-design forms nudging each other around his canvases, like cheerful comic television graphics bouncing and interacting on the screen. Anne, on the other hand, has these blocky architectural forms–doorways, windows, alleys, stacked blocks, announcing their presence, sometimes as promises, sometimes with foreboding, and sometimes just as a sense of place and time and atmosphere.

The commonality is in abstract forms suggesting a narrative that exists totally within the work of art, a narrative between the elements in front of our eyes. The narrative is between the shapes, and the colors and the materials, between opacity and transparency, between gravity and balance, between gesture and worked-over areas. It’s between figure and ground as areas struggle to dominate yet always hang in the balance between front and back, edge and center.

But even in this formal, internal dialog, the real world enters. One painting looks like the light at the beach. One painting looks like it has captured a lozenge of light, a la James Turrell. In another, the light and color contend with darkness. Is it inside and outside, or the lit-up rooms and the dark ones? I don’t care. I just want to play with those possibilities.

Anne Seidman (I don’t know how I got this image, either Anne or the Schmidt/Dean, but I didn’t take it).

Whether the subject seems to be a dustup of a bungalow with the Cira Center and Liberty Place, or an almost cheerful wall of bricks (interrupting more provisional fields of color and balancing atop a racing swoosh of white), each element in the paintings hangs by the fingernails, holding on to the balance.

The deliberate irregularity of the elements in Seidman’s work–invading edges, offbeat colors, surprising drips and marks–suggests a defiance of expectation and convention, and a thoroughly original sense of a world so rich that every scintilla deserves our protracted contemplation.

I don’t know that I have said anything that everyone else hasn’t already been said, but I had to say it anyway.

Philadelphia’s art scene doesn’t take summer vacation anymore.

Miguel Luciano, interactive piece based on Puerto Rican saying that (loosely translated) means that children can be heard when hens pee (which they never do).

Miguel Luciano’s identity-fueled works at Taller Puertorriqueño use exaggerated stereotypes to poke fun at bromides about Puerto Rican identity. Luciano, a New York-based artist, turns Taller’s galleries into an interactive playroom with sculptures (including a slot machine) that let people “play” with their own identities.

Luciano’s work is filled with mordant humor. I love the framed t-shirt that comments on the disenfranchisement of Puerto Ricans who can’t vote for president.

Last year I saw a show of Luciano’s at the Cue Art Foundation in Chelsea, and this hot young artist’s paintings—parodies of ads for KFC and McDonald’s (picture a triumphant Ronald McDonald as a conquistador slaying natives)—were outrageous and right on target. Luciano’s Pure Plantainium necklace on a chain turns the stereotype of macho gold chain-wearing hoods into a wonderful mock-heroic embrace of Puerto Rican culture and cultural stereotypes.

Luciano’s painting based on 1930 era cans of yams which stereotypes Puerto Ricans as submissive servants.

Wexler Gallery’s “(In)Between” is a juicy little show about pleasure and death. Check out Damien Hirst’s toothless silver skull sculpture, a Philadelphia gallery coup that brings the British phenom’s high-end and much-talked-about objects to town for probably the first time. Beyond the skull (there’s also a Hirst silver heart sculpture and a print of the legendary diamond-encrusted skull), this art’s all about life being pleasurable. Short, sweet, then over.

Joe Boruchow’s announcement card for his new work at Wexler Gallery.

Joe Boruchow’s cut paper narratives in black-and-white are perfect noir—their content and craftsmanship is astonishing. Randall Sellers’ new oil paintings are mini fantasy worlds. Known for microcosmic graphite drawings of people amid scenes of ruined architecture and weeds, Sellers proves his painterly side as graceful accompaniment to his paper works. Adelaide Paul shows forlorn limbless ceramic and stitched-leather animals, while Tim Tate chimes in with tiny videos under glass vitrines. The show also features Anne Siems’ mannerist paintings and Dirk Staschke’s sculptural gargoyles. See Annette’s post on this show.

Natasha Bowdoin’s I am the sun in the morning, I am a dog at night, 2006; cut cards and gouache on paper, 36 x 54 x 9 inches. at Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Speaking of cut paper, Philadelphia Art Alliance’s second floor surrenders to the pulpy planes starting June 19 with “Paper[space],” an eight-artist show in which some of our best local practitioners flash their craft for cutting, twisting and fashioning paper into objects of art. Hunter Stabler, whose lacey, intricately patterned works feature gothic symbolism and mandalas, and Natasha Bowdoin, who paints and places words on ornate cut paper constructions, will provide youthful energy and angst. Nami Yamamoto’s taxonomic arrays of cut paper leaves marries Victoriana with a modern feeling of embattled and endangered nature. Others in the show are Jin Lee, Leslie Mutchler, Donna Ruff, Dawn Gavin and Sarah Julig. Also at the Art Alliance, new works by Jolynn Krystosek in carved wax, cut paper and other materials that complement the show upstairs.

Bill Lohre, Still Life, cardboard at Bambi Gallery’s Welcome to My World.

Meanwhile, there’s even more cut paper this summer at Bambi Gallery in a group show “Welcome to My World,” opening June 6. Philadelphia expat Bill Lohre (based in New York now) brings cut-paper fairytale constructions where damsels in distress definitely don’t get helped by Sir Galahad. Other works in the show include Marie DesMarais’ metal, glass and plastic abstracts, Joshua Erb’s Holga photos and collaborations with gallerist Candace Karch.

Samantha Simpson, one of her ballpoint pen drawings at Gallery Joe.

Steve Sherman, Figure with Breaking Wave, 2007, chalk on paper (the light reflections are not a part of the drawing)

My trip to The Galleries at Moore College this past week was a little frightening–mass competing exhibitions, four in all. My reaction to the deluge of art–dive into what interested me, forget the rest. In the faculty exhibition, which was pretty much expected, some drawings of waves by Steve Sherman knocked me out. Some were pastel, but the one above is chalk on paper.

I immediately thought of Richard Longo’s enormous charcoal wave, inspired by Hokusai.

Sherman’s waves are relatively small but they still succeed in creating a physical response. The level of control of the medium, the lack of horizon line, the visual envelopment in water, the tension between the realism and the overt mark making, all drew me into the power of the ocean.

I looked up Sherman’s exhibition record only to find he hasn’t show much in Philadelphia. I want to see more.

Anne Seidman, untitled 2007, colored pencil on arches, courtesy Schmidt Dean Gallery

I already mentioned James Johnson’s installation (see post); I regret not taking the time to pause for Kara Crombie’s two videos. The Michael Olszewski textiles, the Anne Seidman drawing and the Moe Brooker paintings also stood out.

The apocalypse

Joshua Levine, Trophy Room, detail

Also outstanding was a non-faculty exhibit, the installation in the window in the Goldie Paley Gallery–Joshua Levine’s Trophy Room.

The exhibit is of a futuristic den or hunting cabinet, with pristine–almost clinical–walls, modernist furniture, and mutant hunting trophies hanging on the walls–creatures that mostly look like deer, but with some differences. Some have more than one head. Some have four eyes, four ears, etc. Another trophy, a “stuffed” what-is-it kind of ant-eater dog-rat in a vitrine is posed on an elaborate pedestal topped with fake grass.

Joshua Levine, Trophy Room, installation shot

The installation takes on human meddling with genetics, hunting, and the environmental apocalypse now on our doorstep. Levine is a Los Angeles artist, and his installation lookes like a sci-fi movie set. The creatures, which are a notch smaller than reality (although who knows, since they are not real creatures), look like they are made from a resin.

This space, which I was able to walk into, is going to continue to be used for installations by emerging artists. It’s also viewable through the window on Cherry Street (the daytime reflections are a problem here, but inside, it’s great and light-filled). I see Eva Wylie is coming up in this space Oct. 25.

Both the faculty and the Levine shows end Oct. 14.