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.

Matt Braun, Executive Director of Fleisher and Zulmarie Nazario with Michelle Obama.

Barnes continues education with construction workers

Construction workers listen to an art lecture courtesy of the Barnes Foundation.

Although the old Merion location may be closed, and the new building not yet complete on the Parkway, the Barnes Foundation has not stopped its mission of art education.  Philly.com reports that the construction workers laboring on the new Barnes building have been receiving in-depth classes about art and aesthetics every Wednesday courtesy of John Gatti, painter and education director for the foundation.  Classes are in the construction trailer across the street from the new Barnes site.

Mural News
Two upcoming mural programs look great. First is the The Roots Mural Project courtesy of the Mural Arts Program and South Street Headhouse District honoring Philly’s hometown heroes and internationally recognized band, The Roots. Catch Questlove at the press conference on Monday, November 7 at 10:30 AM at Headhouse Square. Second, on Sunday November 13 Sonia Sanchez will kick off Peace is a Haiku Song, also a Mural Arts Program, in conjunction with First Person Arts Festival. The project is a collaborative haiku poem in which anyone can participate. The products will become part of an art installation designed by Anthony Campuzano and displayed during the First Person Festival,  We think it’s inspired programming to have word artist (Campuzano) do a word art mural through First Person Arts (which is all about words) and the Mural Arts Program (all about imagery).

An exploration of recorded sound by Bill Moriarty

Bill Moriarty

Venturing into the ephemeral realm of sound, hipster Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is showing, er playing the sound art of Bill Moriarty this month. The mixing artist, recording engineer, sound designer, and record producer has worked with Man Man, Dr. Dog and lots of other bands. The audio show opens tonight, November 4 (reception 6-8 PM) and runs through November 27.

Anti-Wall Street art on Lancaster Avenue (and beyond)

Previously Occupied: 1984-1988 will showcase a number of works made by Virginia Maksymowicz during the mid 1980s, when she worked a day job as a temporary secretary for major Wall Street firms. The opening doubles as a fundraiser for Occupy Philly, accepting donations in the form of checks and warm clothing, blankets, etc. (please, no food). The reception is on November 11 from 6-9 PM.

Schuylkill Center Hawk Mountain trip

The Schuylkill Center wants to take you to Hawk Mountain, the best place in the Northeast to view the fall raptor migration now underway.  Check the Center’s upcoming trips scheduled for more (the next Hawk Mt. trip is November 5)  (Did you know raptors migrated?  We at artblog are amazed because they never come through our backyards.) Cost is $25 for members and $35 for non-members. Space is limited so call 215-482-7300 x 110 or email scee@schuylkillcenter.org for more info.

Opportunities

You’ve heard of CSA’s? That would be Community Supported Agriculture.  Now there is CSA, Community Supported Art, a new nationally-syndicated program in Philadelphia’s Office Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy that seeks to hook up collectors and artists to foster the economic stability of artists and the art community.   Community Supported Art Program is sponsored byf the Knight Foundation. The deadline for application is November 30 and you can find a PDF with more info here.

The Schuylkill Center is looking for artists and crafters for a family craft event December 4. There is a $20 fee for a vendor table, but, give a 45-minute children’s workshop the day of the craft fair and  your table is free. The deadline to apply is November 11.

Here’s news about Artspace and Artist’s Space, so don’t be confused now.  Artspace is offering a chance to win a free trip to Art Basel Miami Beach in exchange for signing up for a free membership. And Artist’s Space in New York endured a short occupation by a splinter group of Occupy Wall Street recently.  The group had its own hashtags (#Occupy38), campers, and a dance party, naturally.  via Art Fag City

Hello yogis and hard bodies. Culture Monster reports that performance artist Marina Abramović is “seeking dynamic adult men and women, 5’– 6’ tall, with excellent physical stamina, focus and discipline” for an upcoming show at LA MOCA. All ages welcome. For more info, visit her Facebook page.

The Gallery at Delaware County Community College is seeking fiber artists mainly working in a sculptural format for an upcoming group exhibition to be potentially included in FiberPhiladelphia 2012.  via InLiquid

Wexler Gallery is seeking a Gallery Administrator to replace current admin, Phil Jackson, who is moving to New York.  via InLiquid.

Artist News

Penn Design professor Terry Adkins has a major upcoming show at Tang Museum. This is a big traveling show with a catalog.

Sarah Moore, "Backwards".

Sarah Moore‘s photography series “Expanse” is featured in this month’s issue of the online Fraction Magazine.

Knapp Gallery has a show of furniture this month – a first for the gallery .  The artist is Karl Slocum, the gallery director.

Educator Janice Merendino recently had a write up about the art workshops she designs and conducts for people with cognitive, social and physical disabilities at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Jayson Musson as Hennessy Youngman

Former Philly-ite (he’s now a Brooklynite) Jayson Musson’s alter ego Hennessy Youngman is on the bill at a comedy showcase that’s part of the big New York performance art festival, Performa.via Art Fag City

MOMA increases admission rates
Thanks, Art Fag City for the depressing news that MOMA – following the Met’s lead back in June – has raised its admission rates from $20 to $25, much to the chagrin of many of its patrons. Is the extra five bucks worth the lost attendance? We shall see.

Newly opened Prelude Gallery highlights student artists
Prelude, the new Rittenhouse gallery, is on the scene with plans to focus on student artists and recent graduates.

Inside Prelude Gallery.

Certainly an underrepresented group, graduating students have had it rough in recent years. Hopefully Prelude Gallery will help make things a little easier on them. Rittenhouse galleries have openings on Second Fridays, so be sure to visit them on August 12! Also, see this write-up about Prelude on Knight Arts.

Women’s Caucus + Green Light Arts events
The Women’s Caucus for Art will be collaborating with Green Light Arts for the performance “The Dressing Room” at this year’s Fringe Festival. The performance and visual art piece explores the rituals and activities performed behind closed doors in dressing room environments. It runs September 3-17, and you can find all the details here.

Also, on Wednesday August 10 from 7-10 PM, WCA will host a meeting to create rag dolls for awareness of human trafficking. The dolls will be used in a September 2 flash mob to coincide with Philly Fringe First Friday.

More taxidermy art – with bling!
Angela Singer has been transforming vintage hunting taxidermy trophies into contemporary art since the mid 1990s.

Angela Singer, "Hedge Row", 2010.

Adorning these creatures with leaves, flowers, and gemstones, she sometimes reveals wounds taxidermists worked to conceal. Her work has also generated controversy, specifically around humans’ treatment of animals. Singer’s art work can be seen in the exhibition The Enchanted Forest at Musei Civici, Palazzo S. Francesco, Reggio Emilia, Italy, until 31 August 2011 and at Strychnin Gallery, Berlin.

Luxury blog in a recession??
The luxury blog Pursuitist has just launched its beta version. A luxury blog in a recession, you may ask? Our thoughts exactly, but it’s always good to dream – and besides, someone out there has to have expendable income. Regardless of your tax bracket, check out their site to learn more about the finer things in life.

PAFA Panel on role of “place” in contemporary art in conjunction with Urbanism exhibit
Libby and Roberta will be part of a panel on the complicated relationship between location and art. The panel is this Sunday, August 7, at 2 PM in PAFA’s Hamilton Auditorium of the Historic Landmark Building. The panel also includes Boston Phoenix critic and blogger Greg Cook, artists Ben Peterson and Arden Bendler Browning, and Director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati Mark Harris. To reserve a seat e-mail mzimmerman@pafa.org or call 215-972-2105.

Opportunities

PECO and Breadboard are taking submissions for their Art in the Air display on top of the PECO building.

PECO Crown Lights.

Artists may submit work to be shown on the Crown Lights system atop the PECO building at 23rd and Market. Visit their website and e-mail artintheair@sciencecenter.org with your submissions. The next deadline is August 23rd, although the displays are changed monthly.

Texas A&M University is seeking artists to create a major site-specific sculpture for their Memorial Student Center, which is currently undergoing renovation. The winning artist(s) will receive a commission totaling $350,000. Visit the sculpture competition website for all the details.

The Gallery at Delaware County Community College has an open call for drawings for an exhibit juried by Kate Kraczon from ICA. The application fees are low, and there is prize money available! Check out all of the details and then submit your artwork here.

Enter Blik’s competition for a shot at $2000 in goods from Threadless and Blik. Second prize is $500, and third place is $250… but everyone who enters gets a $5 Blik Bucks coupon to spend on art supplies!

Artist News

Sarah Moore is leaving Philadelphia and embarking on a six-week-long road trip to photograph around the country!

Photo by Sarah Moore from her series "Expanse".

Matthew Rose had his ‘A Book About Death’ project and its current exhibit in Bay Shore, Long Island covered by the New York Times.

Daniel Hoffman has been working on his residency at the Center for Art in Wood. The exhibition of all the artists’ work will be First Friday, August 5, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance from 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

David Romberg is in Brazil shooting for his new film Man of the Monkey. Also be sure to like their Facebook page to follow the updates.

Douglas Witmer is also a busy guy – running the Green Line Cafes as well as participating in plenty of shows, including his first solo show in Florida at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum.

Lindsay Chandler, Central Landfill, Providence, R.I.

I looked at Lindsay Chandler‘s fiber exhibit there after visiting the work online. The online images, although accurate, didn’t quite capture what I saw when I got there. My first visit to Cafe Lift was at the tail end of Sarah Moore’s show, which made me explore how her landscape photos were different from what seems like a relentless onslought of photographic landscapes out there. This post is about Chandler’s work.

Chandler’s fiber art is beautiful. The colors are voluptuous and tactile. And she’s not afraid to mix in some paint and silicone gel where it’s called for.

Most of the pieces are framed but bare of glass, allowing the content to burst beyond the rectangle and push out from the wall. A few are woven and unframed, pinned to the wall.

Lindsay Chandler, Davis Liquid Waste, Smithfield, RI

The framed ones are juiciest, with ripped fabrics and piled-up and stuffed-in snippets looking like segments of Shinique Smith’s bales or like a baby stuffed into a pregnant belly whose skin is bursting. Davis Liquid Waste is a particularly painterly confection that drips its furled yellow stalactite past the bottom of the frame.

The pieces are named after landfills, landfills in Rhode Island in particular. Chandler, who went to Rhode Island School of Design, earned a BFA in painting (2009). So that some of these pieces look like abstract landscapes is no surprise.

My only quibble is that the beauty of these pieces overwhelms and subverts the disturbing message. Even the torn bursting belly of Central Landfill brought to my mind the torn fabric and holes of contemporary fashion. Yet these pieces reminded me of the way Sheila Hicks revels in her fiber creations, daring naysayers to recognize something powerful and very female.

“Unravel”
Cafe Lift
428 North 13th Street | Philadelphia, PA 19123
215.922.3031
through July 2011

She is also in a group show at Arts Street Textile Studio, founded by Kathryn Pannepacker and Leslie Sudock:
You are Here
Arts Street Textile Studio
706 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
to Sept. 15, 2011

Kyle Ferino, Death of a Salesman, 2008, chromogenic print, 21 x 21 inches

Most of these photos depict ambiguous, uncomfortable scenarios of a damaged world. Kyle Ferino’s Death of a Salesman depicts a dishevelled, shoeless man in a suit under an overpass, draped like a river god. The scenario is a kind of netherworld glade, hidden from respectable eyes. That hidden world, a disreputable Eden, made me think of Jeff Wall. There’s a mix of magic, threat and myth–the powerful scariness of someone who has become an outsider. Or maybe the subject is nothing more than a homeless guy in a safe corner.

Xiomara Benavides, Don Hilario, 2009, archival inkjet print, 16.5 x 21.75 inches

Xiomara Benavides’ Don Hilario is filled with questions. Was this a photoshoot portrait with backdrop in which the edges of the backdrop show to exhibit the artifice? And what about the chalked words on the ground? Is this crazy? Is he crazy? Are these his words? Yet Don Hilario looks so dignified, even in his jeans, sitting on a flimsy garden chair in a garden with a phony backdrop. Is the garden his? If not, whose? Whose backdrop is it, anyway? The image brings up all the early 20th Century immigrant photo portraits,  with serious, dignified subjects posed in front of a pictorial backdrop. The color, the jeans, and the buildings peeking out from behind the backdrop are incontrovertible clues that this photo is not from a time past.

Felicia Perretti, Car Seat Fight, 2009, archival inkjet print, 20 x 20 inches

Snapshots may be the style of Felicia Perretti’s photos, but her on-the-fly photos are not exactly family vacations. Car Seat Fight, framed by a car window, shows a wailing child being roughly transported by a woman clearly irritated. It’s unclear who started the fight, and it’s unclear if the child is merely being moved or is about to catch hell on the side of the road. The view from inside the car suggests there’s a player in the scenario who is inside. The side of the road is a snatch of besmirched nature, a transitory world beyond the rules of orderly gardens and the home front. The photo becomes an emotionally fraught moral tale in which fairness and justice come under scrutiny.

Phil Jackson, Davis with Deer, Upstate NY 2007, 2007, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40

And speaking of roadside moral tales, Phil “Filthy” Jackson’s road kill photo with what I take to be a distraught Davis, may in fact be a hunter and his prey. Either way, Bambi is under threat from the human race. As in all these photos above, Eden is lost.

Daniel Traub, Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, 2008, archival inkjet print, 20 x 24 inches

The Eden theme comes up in a couple of photos by Daniel Traub, but in Traub’s cause, Eden isn’t so much lost as aspired to. His Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, is a scrappy survivor on a trash strewn rowhouse front lawn, nature’s toehold in an unwelcoming environment. Traub’s Two boys, North Philadelphia 2008, shows two slightly uncomfortable, vulnerable youths, one hiding behind his hoodie with his legs in a posturing wide stance, one with his hands clasped shyly in front and his legs close together, in front of a weedy array of growth. Their young good looks also suggest survival, as does the tree, and the weedy Eden behind them tells pretty much the same story. (Traub also has an exhibit up at the Art Institute of Philadelphia until Oct. 16).

Sarah Moore, Anterior Future, 2008, archival inkjet print, 32 x 26 inches

Formal issues also caught my eye–Sarah Moore’s surprising framing of shots–she splits a woman’s head in two in the diptych, Fall, which also is about textures of a scarf and the landscape–and a sort of Eden. Again using a surprising split to very different effect, Moore shoots the back window of a car in Anterior Future, putting the humans only partially in the picture, with their matching herringbone coats (are they friends or mother and daughter?).  The suggestion of time past/road travelled, out the back window, colors the story of the two women and their related coats.

Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District, 2009, archival inkjet print on rice paper, 20 x 60 inches

The rice paper surface of Matthew Thomas Cianfrani’s Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District suggests China as much as the title does. The atmospheric photo, with its sense of disintegration and insubstantiality rings true to its message. The domineering form of the destroyed building is far from the gritty urban environments of the other cityscapes in this exhibit. The photo communicates its own sort of horror and regret.

Hannah Price, Twin Day, Fall 2008, archival inkjet print, 24 x 20 inches

Some of the smaller photos in the show are given short shrift, hung too close together.   But all in all, this is a terrific show and a great beginning. Others in the exhibit are Martin Buday, Christopher Gianunzio, Jaime Alvarez, Samantha Sheehan, Chad States, Tom Goodman, Danielle Bogenhagen, Gene Smirnov, Bob Myaing, Elyse Derosia, Hannah Price, DM Witman, Kelsey Johnson, and Joshua Lanzara. The exhibit was juried by Ariel Shanberg, executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Woodstock! …speaking of metaphors for Eden lost!

The exhibit is up to Nov. 29.