Tag Archive "pafa"

Weekly Update – art list of summer, just do it

Art Gallery at City Hall The new 700 square ft. Art Gallery at City Hall — with high ceilings, fixed walls, and lots of natural light – brings art into the seat of power like never before.  The brainchild of Gary Steuer, head of the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Art Gallery at City Hall lives at street level in Steuer’s new offices (near the Tourism office).  The gallery’s mission is to help arts organizations with their programs, thus “On the Rise” which opens tomorrow, has work by 12 artists from three non-profits – inLiquid, Center for Emerging ... More » »

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 109th Student Exhibition

As the first art college in the United States as well as a popular art school today, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts produces artists whose work bears the mark of that duality — formal, traditional techniques blended with contemporary currents. Viewers to the 109th student exhibition (certificate students and BFA and MFA graduates) can anticipate seeing a dynamic variety of artworks.

College Art Association Annual Meeting in Chicago; random thoughts

The plane to Chicago for the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Meeting left from a concourse I rarely use so I saw different art than usual  as part of the airport’s Exhibition Program,  which certainly provides the best distraction I’ve found at Philadelphia International Airport.  Nick Kripal’s Swarm was a terra cotta landscape of an alternative, multi-culti character with forms cribbed from the kitchen cabinets; what looked like a Moorish dome turned out to have been cast from a pudding mold!  I’d love to see him do animations based on them.

Mourning: Osorio and Munoz at PAFA and PMA

Maybe because Murray’s mother died a month ago (see his Op Ed in today’s Inquirer), two works in the big Philagrafika 2010 exhibit have been gnawing about me. Pepon Osorio at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has printed a blow-up of an X-ray image of his mother’s skull atop a thick, black bed of confetti, laid on the floor like a fresh grave. The installation is to honor the memory of his mother, who died recently. And the memorial suggests all the medical interventions that fail and the way an individual, irreplaceable and unique and loved, is quantified in ... More » »

Some conversations with Philagrafika artists

We’ve been making some of the rounds, talking to a variety of Philagrafika artists in The Graphic Unconscious and Out of Print exhibits. Here are some tidbits, mostly recollected, but I noted when the conversation is based on notes.

“Incarnational Aesthetics” in New York and Cool Conversations around Barkley Hendricks at PAFA

Jenny Jasky is Philadelphia’s loss and New York’s gain; she recently moved and already found an outlet, curating an exhibition at NYCAMS (New York Center for Art and Media Studies) with Stamatina Gregory.  Incarnational Aesthetics (Oct.  24-November 25, 2009) is one of those idea-driven exhibitions where I found the work provocative but couldn’t entirely reconcile it with the curators’ statement: to showcase artists who use embodiment or ‘role play’ in their work as a means of interrogating and deconstructing the public and private boundaries between self and other.

Weekly Update – Talking with Barkley Hendricks

This week’s Weekly has my article on Barkley Hendricks’ Birth of the Cool at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Below is an expanded version with more of the interview I did with the artist. Bashir, Jules, Tuff Tony and Angie wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. But in Barkley Hendricks’ “Birth of the Cool” at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, these seemingly ordinary people, depicted in nearly life-size paintings, become new icons for a secular age. The works have such a sense of stillness that they feel almost like religious images.

Philly portraits at Gallery 339 and PAFA

Portraits are everywhere, right now, major portraits. I had a nice conversation with myself after seeing two terrific shows of Philadelphia portraits in the same week–the show Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia, at Gallery 339;  and the paintings in Barkley L. Hendricks’ Birth of the Blues at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Barkley Hendricks posterized at PAFA

In an emotional opening ceremony at his solo exhibit Birth of the Cool, artist Barkley L. Hendricks lost his cool for a moment.

Weekly Update – Malcolm McLaren talks about video, art and his past

This week’s Weekly has my interview with Malcolm Mclaren, whose video Shallow 1-21 opens this week at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Morris Gallery.  Below is my copy with some pictures. Before he became the godfather of punk Malcolm Mclaren — founder and manager of the Sex Pistols — was an art student and a mischief-maker.  Mclaren’s new video at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts proves he’s still out to make trouble as well as art.