Tag Archive "pma"

Office Hours – Zoe Strauss at the PMA

“What the hell?” sums up Zoe Strauss’s rationale for choosing one of three paintings from the archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to hang in her temporary office at the museum. This could easily also be the reaction of unsuspecting passers by to one of Strauss’s billboard photos. Countless people must by now have stumbled on the citywide series of  billboard prints while dozing off on SEPTA, crossing Gray’s Ferry Ave., or looking up from their iPhones. As the familiar city landscape reveals a less familiar face or empty storefront pictured where an advertisement once was, viewers have been ... More » »

The real Zoe Strauss show

[Note: This is a republish of a post that got lost in the transition to our new format.] Billboards, dances, office hours, Megawords installation, the artist’s own blog–these may seem like the sideshow for Zoe Strauss’ photography exhibit, 10 Years, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But we think it is an integral part of the art itself. After all, Strauss conceived of her Under I-95 exhibits, which lasted 10 years, before she even owned a camera.   The photographs were a part of something bigger, part of a grand vision of uniting all the people of Philadelphia–especially the forgotten, ... More » »

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?

News: Fleisher @ the White House, Barnes educates construction workers, and lots of opportunities!

News Fleisher Art Memorial @ the White House Student Zulmarie Nazario, 16, attended a ceremony on November 2 at the White House where she received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from First Lady Michelle Obama on behalf of the Fleisher Art Memorial. The prestigious award is for Fleisher’s work to develop learning and life skills in young people through the arts and creative experience. Nazario is one of many students who participate in Fleisher’s after school program in which a number of activities help young people explore their artistic and creative abilities.

Zoe Strauss on what matters, on artblog radio

Artist Zoe Strauss was preparing for her important mid-career retrospective, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, when we talked to her at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The exhibit opens at the PMA Jan. 14, 2012, but Strauss was hard at work in August, getting ready. As excited as she was about the upcoming show, she was even more excited about the part of the show that was going to go up on billboards around Philadelphia, where the general public could see the photos. Her populist spirit and loyalty to community is behind all of her work and behind her fabled series ... More » »

News Roundup: Knight Arts Challenge, LOOK! Lancaster Ave, new Barnes logo

News Philadelphia Knight Arts Challenge Year 2 The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is opening up their second year of applications for the Philadelphia Knight Arts Challenge. They are investing $9 million over three years in ideas that engage and enrich Philadelphia arts and culture. In the first year, 36 ideas were awarded a total of $2.7 million… including artblog’s own Art Safaris! Applications for the Knight Arts Challenge will be accepted from October 3 – 31, 2011. Be sure to visit the Knight Arts website on October 3 to find out how to submit your idea!

Michael Taylor appointed director of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum

We got a note from Michael Taylor, the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘s Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, this weekend.  He wanted us to pass on to you, dear readers, this news (maybe you already read it in the Inquirer). Quoting Michael, “It is with mixed emotions that I have to tell you that I am leaving Philadelphia after 15 wonderful years at the PMA. I have accepted a director position at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, where I will begin work on August 15. I would love it if you could share this news with your ... More » »

Studying the body, not just the figure – Anatomy/Academy at PAFA

By Kaitlin Kylie Pomerantz With little-seen gems from Philadelphia’s historic scientific institutions, as well as side-by-side art history ground shakers including Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (no. 2), and Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photographs, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art’s new exhibition, Anatomy/Academy, rephrases the dusty argument over the continued importance of human anatomy studies in art education while touching on a number of important sub-topics along the way. Rather than advocating a backwards or stodgy interest in the figure, this exhibition shows how the study of the human body progressed side by side with ... More » »

Weekly Update – Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive drawings at the PMA

This week’s Weekly has my review of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  More photos at flickr. Explosives and gunpowder aren’t typically materials used to create fine art. But for Cai Guo-Qiang—who ignited a fiery, one-minute art memorial to the late Anne d’Harnoncourt on the Art Museum’s east plaza last month—the unstable chemicals and their noisy explosions are consummate art matter. They create beauty and excitement, and the burns that result are perfect metaphorical expressions of the birth, life, death and memory of a human being.

Gorky at PMA–an artist ahead of the curve

The Gorky retrospective that opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is an eye-opener–one of those exhibits that shows the artist as a thinker, working out problems and solving them. To see the drawings (and the gorgeous and bold handling of line in them)–sometimes multiple drawings–preparatory to paintings is wondrous, at once belying the idea that the paintings are casual and improvisatory abstractionist expressions and belying the idea that the paintings are static reproductions of the drawing ideas.