Local artists launch Title Magazine online
Welcome, to Title Magazine! This new local online publication aims to contribute to the critical analysis of the dynamic Philly art scene. The first issue includes articles by Daniel Gerwin, Edward Carey, Avi Alpert, Jeffrey Bussmann, Andrew Gbur, and Elyse Derosia.

Free Library opens digital resource database
The Free Library of Philadelphia has just opened its “Free Library of the 21st Century” online.

Historic photo from Kensington in the Library's database

Now cardholders can download eBooks and audiobooks, check out podcasts, study with language software, read from their digital collections, use Freegal music service, and more — all for free!

Huge new installation by street artist Swoon for Boston ICA’s 75th
Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art commissioned street artist Swoon to wheat paste a 40-foot-tall installation in its lobby.

Swoon in front of one of her artworks

The Boston ICA is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. This artwork is the fifth and largest one installed on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall.

CAC joins French street artist JR’s Inside Out Project
Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center has gotten on board with French artist JR, winner of the TED international art prize,  to create murals as part of the Inside Out Project, a global, participatory art project. Individuals or groups wheat paste giant black-and-white photos of people on the wall to share their stories and connect with each other. Instead of just one project at one location, CAC has provided the opportunity for a variety of groups to get involved individually around the region.

Opportunities

Asian Arts Initiative is searching for artists to teach after school programs at the Taggart School, Southwark School, and South Philadelphia High Starting in the 2011-12 school year. For more information visit this page.

Amplify Action has put out a call for artists for an exhibit in Brooklyn on sustainability and art. The work should examine any aspect of sustainability including ecology, pollution, agriculture, health, and related fields. You can find the application here.   The exhibit is part of the Arts Implementation Fund of the Pratt Center for Community Development.   It will be at the Skylight Gallery, part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Center for Arts and Culture.  Deadline to apply is Sept. 9.  “There is no cost to apply, and we are definitely open to site-specific works. The gallery floor plan is referenced on the application page, and there is an outdoor plaza space which may be a possible site for installation, depending on the proposal,” said Rasu Jilani, the project manager.

Extra Extra is seeking submissions for its front page as part of its ongoing series of Web Releases. Anything is possible! The deadline is October 1. Send your ideas and supporting materials to mail@eexxttrraa.com subject line: WEB.

Breadboard has a very fun project in which it is asking Philadelphians to rethink the way they put out objects to save parking spaces. The intent of the Space Savers Project is to retain the ubiquitous (if illegal) custom of saving street parking, while also beautifying it! The deadline for ideas is September 4 and you can find all the details here.

Tribeca Film Institute has opened four of its grant programs for documentary filmmakers. $10,000 award to each winner and year-long guidance support. Deadline is Oct. 10. To learn more about the various grants available and the application process, visit the RFP page.

Artist News

Lindsay Wraga, "Before the Fall".

Artist Lindsay Wraga‘s installation Before the Fall sits on a specially-made 8×12 ft. billboard in Northern Liberties at 6th and Green Street now until September 5. The billboard is a prequel to a disaster depicted in her other work After the Fall (on view recently in the Vox VII exhibit).

Nami Yamamoto, "Radiant Flux (detail)," 2008.

Nami Yamamoto is working on a new project entitled “Fog Catcher” for the University of California Berkeley Botanical Garden.

Esther Klein Gallery

It may seem like Breadboard is on our radar a lot recently, but that’s because they’ve been up to some very interesting things! Ben Volta, along with students from a local school through the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership (PAEP) and Breadboard, have an exhibit highlighting the art and science projects at the Esther Klein Gallery in the Science Center.

Mary Blazic and Marie Ulmer

September First Friday, that’s Sept 2, the Fishtown community will come together to honor  long-time Philadelphia artists Marie Ulmer and Mary Blazic. The two ladies will be honored in a ceremony and one day only exhibit, “The First Ladies of Fishtown/Kensington,” all taking place at the former site of Goldfish gallery (now Michael’s Decorators), 2214 Frankford Ave (between Susquehanna and Dauphin). 5-9pm

Ulmer and Blazic will receive a citation for lifetime dedication to the arts, drawn up by Philadelphia City Councilman Darrell Clarke. Pennsylvania State Representative Mike O’Brien will present the citation. Other dignitaries expected to attend are Barbara Morehead, Founder and Vice President, Friends of Penn Treaty Park, and Board Member Carol Davis.

Before I knew it, I was implicated. Walking up to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, I noticed a man’s face, simple and graphic, stuck on a lamppost, looming from atop the ICA and plastered on newspaper dispensers in the lobby. LA-based artist Shepard Fairey had infiltrated my visual world without my knowing it.

A first view towards the ICA. Fairey's work had already begun. Photo by Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin.

The face is the simplified version of Fairey’s earliest work Andre the Giant Has a Posse (1989), a graphic appropriation of an image of a wrestler that he turned into stickers, posters, stencils and other media and has since evolved into the brand Obey Giant and populated most of Fairey’s work. The ICA show, running until August 16, is the first to survey Fairey’s 20-year career, ranging from skateboards to wall murals, from hybrid propaganda posters to graphic icon portraits.

Shepard Fairey, Obama HOPE, 2008, Mixed media stencil collage on paper, Courtesy of Obey Giant Art

While unfamiliar with his work, I knew Fairey’s most famous piece: his patriotically colored campaign poster of now-President Barack Obama gazing upward over the word HOPE. This image has garnered both great praise – the National Portrait Gallery acquiring the work into its collection – and negative attention – the Associated Press suing the artist (and the artist the AP) over the copyright of the photograph.

Shepard Fairey, Obey Bush One Hell Of A Leader, 2004, silkscreen print. Taken from Carmichael Gallery: www.carmichaelgallery.com/

Overall, the artist accomplishes his goal of his 1990 Manifesto to “reawaken [in the viewer] a sense of wonder about one’s environment.” By reusing imagery, both known and unknown, he asks the viewer to reconsider his/her visual surroundings. Fairey’s propaganda posters are incredibly strong, drawing well-known imagery from Russian and Chinese revolutionary posters and American counter-cultural iconography, as well as playing with common concepts. For example, in Presidential Seal (2007), Fairey turns the American eagle into a vulture.

Shepard Fairey, OBEY MIDDLE EAST MURAL, 2009, Mixed media stencil collage on canvas, Courtesy of Obey Giant Art.

Fairey’s strongest images by far are those that shy away from re-imagined propaganda posters and embrace the more complex tension between war and humanity. In a series of works mixing guns and flowers, children and war, Fairey creates compelling conflicting statements. Most striking is the installation created for the ICA Obey the Middle East (2009). Looking beyond the larger images of Arab women and weapons, I found in the works layers the face of Andre the Giant, a few of Fairey’s earlier posters, decorative passages and newspaper clippings. Fairey has evolved his work into more of an art, creating his own common imagery by reusing his earlier creations. Fairey creates his own icons in compelling, richly layered works of fine art.

Beyond being the Obama artist, Fairey’s oeuvre showcases his strong graphic style and textual wit coupled with an astute intelligence to appropriate and reinterpret symbols of modern visual culture. Fairey easily fits the mould of a modern-day Andy Warhol, appropriating common imagery, using advertising techniques of production (stenciling, screen prints, rubyliths) and distribution, and creating his own message, brand and icons in order to capture his viewer.

Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand runs at the ICA until August 16. The exhibit continues on to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh from October 17 to January 31, 2010 and then to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati thereafter.

I was in Boston last month for a college reunion (my first; it took me decades to attend one) and managed to fit in two important institutions devoted to contemporary art on my way in from the airport. First was the Institute of Contemporary Art in its prize-winning new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro; what they’ve given up in terms of walk-in traffic at their previous Back Bay location is made up for in harbor views, although the site’s more obvious for a seafood restaurant (one is just next door) than for a museum. The ICA’s cafe, of course, has smashing views as well as better than museum-average food. The really good news for out-of-towners is its proximity to the airport – about seven minutes’ ride on the MTA’s silver line (which is actually a bus). If you’ve a two-hour layover in Boston, you can easily manage a visit.

The major exhibit was Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future: fourteen pieces completed since 1980, running through September 7. Kapoor’s a sculptor who continues to get better and better. His early work involved seductive interior spaces that glowed with the high-keyed intensity of unbound pigments, and one wondered where he’d take it. Big, for one; and he pulls it off, as anyone knows who’s seen his extraordinary and extraordinarily popular Cloud Gate (2004-06) in Chicago. He’s also continued to work with materials that have a mysterious beauty even though they’re no more esoteric than acrylic, resin, wax and stainless steel.

I entered the exhibition to see my own reflection in S-Curve (2006, see above), a piece rather like a slice of a Serra torqued ellipse made of mirrors (actually stainless steel), only these were fun-house mirrors that variously contorted whatever they reflected. Sounds corny, but it wasn’t. To the left was untitled (2007), a translucent acrylic cube of approximately one meter which contained a suspended form – a void, really – that resembled an unknown marine creature somewhat jellyfish-like. Again it was of a magical beauty and a quiet restraint, a delicate and highly detailed sculpture made of nothingness, set within a minimalist cube

Further clockwise Past, Present, Future (2006) occupied a large part of the gallery’s end wall. It was a quarter of a sphere positioned to imply that half of it lay below-ground and the remaining quarter was behind the wall. It was covered with red wax and bisected by a thick slab of iron. It took some time to realize that the sphere actually did continue behind the wall, for it turned slowly back and forth leaving a messy accumulation of wax on the wall as the iron piece caught the wax and spread it rather like cake icing.

Anish Kapoor, Brandy Wine, 2007, Aluminum and paint, Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, Photo: John Kennard.

One of my favorite pieces, When I am Pregnant (1992), appeared to be a protrusion in one of the walls, its shape exactly replicating a pregnant woman’s belly. It was set so imperceptibly into the wall that the wall itself appeared to be gestating. Kapoor has a poetic genius for creating organic forms, colors, and reflections that transport his viewers back to the innocence of early childhood, when the entire world was a source of wonder. It’s a vision I’m always happy to recapture.

Chantal Ackerman still from D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), 1995

The List Visual Art Center at MIT really should be better known; highly respected among art professionals for the quality of its programming over several decades, it’s also renowned within the public art field as a rare example of successful collaboration between an architect and artists – in this case I. M. Pei working with Kenneth Noland, Richard Fleischer and Scott Burden. It’s a bit hidden but of easy access via the MTA’s red line and was showing Chantal Ackerman; Moving Through Time and Space (through July 6, it was organized collaboratively by the List, the Blaffer Gallery of the University of Houston, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Miami Art Central/Miami Art Museum), which consisted of five projects by the Belgian artist best known within the film world. It would be worth seeing if only for the first work: D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), 1995, which I think is one of the most important artworks of the last couple of decades.

The multi-part installation (two parts of which were shown in the traveling exhibition) evolved out of Ackerman’s documentary film, D’est, which traverses an Eastern Europe reinventing itself after the dissolution of the USSR. Ackerman has broken up the film and distributed it across 24 video monitors set up as triptychs and arranged so that one can see up to 14 or 15 at a time. There is no narration although there’s a certain amount of ambient sound. Ackerman’s hypnotic camerawork makes distinctive use of extended slow pans which follow figures, some waiting, others walking, as they progress through the changing seasons outdoors or through transitional indoor public spaces such as train stations; the figures progress through time and history in front of us. These are periodically punctuated by still camera views, mostly of a single woman in interiors. In other settings the work has been shown preceded by a room with a single monitor playing the entire film (as it was in 1995 at 7 museums in Europe and the U.S., I saw it at the Jewish Museum, New York ).

The second room has a single video monitor with a scene of the most minimal of activity: a Moscow street at night that slowly fades to a black void. A woman is narrating and it slowly becomes apparent that it is Ackerman herself discussing her original ideas about the film and reading from the Book of Exodus in both Hebrew and English. It becomes clear that the work, with its images of the everyday and of individuals and peoples in continual movement, exodus, displacement, is also a personal story; that Ackerman, the daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust, returned to Eastern Europe in part to capture her mother’s past. But the installation evokes a much more generalized notion of our living in a world of constant movement and exile, of peoples and individuals dealing with the everyday and enduring, despite the pain.

Chantal Ackerman still from Les Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women in Antwerp in November), 2002

Exile and the recovery of painful history are themes across Ackerman’s work. The exhibition includes the film Sud (South), 1999, which began as an exploration of the Southern U.S. which Ackerman knew from the novels of Faulkner and others and changed when she came upon the site of a recent racial murder in Texas. De l’autre Cote (From the Other Side), 2002,is a meditation about illegal immigrants at the Texas/Arizona border. Les Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women in Antwerp in November), 2002, intercuts what appear to be excerpts of various narratives linked by the imagery of women smoking and La-bas (Down There), 2006, the only piece screened in a conventional theater space, evolved from her stay in Tel Aviv.