Tag Archive "fabric-workshop-and-museum"

News – ONWARD 2012, The New, New Masses, and more…

NEWS The Nicola Midnight St. Claire (temporarily The New, New Masses) The gloriously quirky art publication The Nicola Midnight St. Claire held an auction in order to change the site’s name for a month. So if you go to the website looking for the St. Claire you will instead find The New, New Masses with a funny–but slippery–video message about the spirit of giving, consumerism, and internet freedom, plus some holiday “gifs” for everyone to enjoy. Macaulay Culkin, anyone?

We the People at the Fabric Workshop

Reclaiming American themes in art is a tall order, since Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is locked in the popular imagination in a space both vast and nebulous. Nari Ward offers instead to reinvigorate the experience of that space.

Weekly Update – Joan Jonas reads between the lines at the Fabric Workshop

Joan Jonas‘ “Reading Dante III” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum includes a 45-minute video of people reading excerpts of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  The lengthy, dreamy, stream of consciousness video also shows the artist drawing circles within circles  that suggest the poet’s description of Hell and Purgatory.   Despite these literal moments, however, Jonas’ installation on the whole is not literal.  Rather, it’s lyrical, and in places, beautiful.

Weekly Update – New American Voices sing

This week’s Weekly has my review of New American Voices at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.  Below is the copy with some pictures. The Fabric Workshop and Museum often collaborates with big-name artists like Cai Quo-Qiang, the fireworks and gunpowder ace whose show opens next month, but what the FWM does even better—as you can see in their current show, “New American Voices”—is work with lesser-known artists. Often, these collaborations produce the freshest and most unexpected results and help raise the profile of deserving, under-the-radar artists.

First Friday layer cake–pix galore

What a delicious First Friday–a layer cake of delights. I’m putting up a bunch of pictures, hoping they might entice you to take a taste.

Tristin Lowe: Big Mocha Dick at the FWM

The body is a trickster in the art of Tristin Lowe–it inflates, it deflates, beyond the owner’s control. It’s all a little embarrassing. And yet it’s not to be dismissed or ignored–so much ourselves and so much something beyond our control.

Weaving the new reality

Gabriel Kuri, Trinity (voucher), handwoven wool Gobelin (woven in Guadalajara) As soon as I saw Ed Ruscha’s Industrial Strength Sleep tapestry at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, this piece by Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri popped into my mind. I had seen it last year at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibit of work from Mexico (post here). Kuri’s Trinity is a faithful reproduction of a computer-register receipt with the color copies. And it’s handwoven in Mexico, which of course raises issues of the values of hand work vs. computer-generated stuff. At this moment of financial meltdown, it’s a ... More » »

Words, words, noise and a melon on First Friday

First Friday was full of goodies. We started at the Fab. Here’s some pictures and a short video and some gossip at the bottom so be sure to scroll down. Ed Ruscha at the Fabric Workshop last Friday night Ed Ruscha was looking like a little leprachaun in front of a packed audience at the Fabric Workshop’s new space last Friday.  The 2nd floor gallery space — which makes a great lecture hall — was certified for only 200 people with a live feed downstairs for the big spillover crowd.   Ruscha and his slide of the Barnyard Rembrandt According ... More » »

Weekly Update – Ed Ruscha’s woven words at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

Ed RuschaIn collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, PhiladelphiaIndustrial Strength Sleep, 2007Merino wool, cotton, and Trevira CS tapestry; edition of 7109 1/2 x 276 inches (278.1 x 701 cm)The Fabric Workshop and Museum, PhiladelphiaPhoto: Aaron Igler and Will Brown Last June the Fabric Workshop and Museum was bounced from its home at 1315 Cherry Street when its building was demolished to make way for the Convention Center expansion. In order to keep showing art, the Museum took up residence at an interim space at 1222 Arch Street while waiting for a new permanent home to be retrofitted. The new ... More » »

Construction, real and imagined, at the FWM

Storefront, by FWM’s artist-in-residence Mark Bradford in collaboration with Juan Carlos Avendaño and FWM; photographic images on static cling film-laminate stock adhering to the windows. If you are wondering just what’s going on with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, as in where are they and where are they going, you’re not alone. But at last they have dropped the coy stance about their plans. So, as you probably know (or you wouldn’t be asking these questions), no more Gilbert Building. The FWM is now ensconced temporarily in three adjacent store fronts on the 1200 block of Arch Street. It took ... More » »