The parade gear was color coded. We guess these are what pass for cheerleaders at Tyler!

Some of the instruments were real.

Here are the kazoos.

We wandered around during some of the speeches. That’s how we saw Frank Bramblett and Jude Tallichet.

Tyler Painting Prof, Frank Bramblett. They ran out of "Hello my name is" stickers so Frank made his own out of blue tape.

Tyler sculpture prof, Jude Tallichet, watching the student parade.

We stopped in the gallery and admired some work by MFA candidate Erin Riley.

Erin Riley, one of the weavings for the MFA thesis exhibit

Then we bumped into Erin herself.

When we ceased our wanderings, we saw that an enormous crowd had gathered in the lobby,  listening. Among the speakers were Tyler Interim Dean Therese Dolan, Temple President Ann Weaver Harte and Tyler building architect Carlos Jimenez. We heard bits of their talks but that was it for us.

Caterer running upstairs. Don't you love the yellow tie? Some of the staff had orange ties.

Honestly, we were there to see if any of the other schools responded to Tyler’s declaration of war. Here’s what PAFA delivered–

PAFA retaliation for the Trojan Horse/War declaration. Weak. we hope someone can come up with something that rises to the conceptual level of the initial gifts.

Everyone seemed thrilled with the new building. We were, and we were happy to see student work pouring out of the studios into the hallways and the galleries, giving life to what was already a terrific building.

Philadelphia real estate developer, culture lover and philanthropist Jack Wolgin, 92, has promised $3.7 million to Temple’s Tyler School of Art, to endow the annual international award in the visual arts.

Jack Wolgin, Sargent Architectural Photography.

The $150,000 Wolgin International Prize in the Fine Arts will go to one artist a year, nominated by international nominators and selected by a jury. The artist will also be the subject of an exhibition at Tyler’s slick new Main Campus digs. The very first of those exhibits is scheduled for October 2009. So they need to hurry up!!!

“The international nominators will come from 6 continents,” said Greg Murphy, Tyler’s assistant dean for development, joking, no offense, but Antarctica was left out. When we asked about the secret nominations and compared it to the MacArthur genius awards Murphy said, “MacArthur is the biggest but it’s not all visual arts.” The Wolgin Prize is only for visual artists. Wolgin’s endowment will support the $150,000 award and Temple will support the administration of the prize.

The director will probably be someone from Tyler. “It’s very likely that someone from the Tyler/Temple family will be appointed director,” said Temple spokesman Hillel Hoffmann. When we mentioned that Oct. 2009 was just around the corner he said about the process, “I think it will move very quickly.”

Jack Wolgin developed the Centre Square complex on 15th and Market and commissioned Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin, one of the city’s most beloved downtown landmarks.

The Wolgin Prize will support work that transcends traditional boundaries. Wolgin, who commissioned Claes Oldenburg‘s Clothespin in 1974, through the Redevelopment Authority’s Fine Arts Program, clearly has a history with art that pushes limits and breaks through boundaries.

Murphy told us that originally Wolgin and Tyler School of Art were talking about giving out three prizes with the money but as they looked at other national and international visual arts prizes, Wolgin decided he wanted his prize to be the biggest prize in the world — so one prize, not three — and a very large purse.

Wolgin, who is a Penn Law alum, is donating this through Temple partly because he likes Temple’s mission of access for everyone–reflected in Tyler’s move to North Philadelphia, and the mission as stated by Temple founder Russell Conwell to provide “quality education to all who endeavor to learn, regardless of economic status.” It matches what Wolgin himself is trying to do, Murphy said.

Jeffrey Fuller (Fuller Fine Arts) is a friend of Wolgin’s and he and his wife, Tyler Photography professor Martha Madigan have been instrumental in developing the prize, said Murphy. Madigan “kept [Wolgin's] ear for a long time” talking about the importance of a prize to Philadelphia, and to Tyler.

Wolgin originally got interested in Tyler’s move to the city when Temple President Ann Weaver Hart invited him to hear a talk by Carlos Jimenez, architect for the school’s new campus. Wolgin was not interersted in giving to the building fund but as time went on he because interested in the idea of a prize (Wolgin likes prizes–he has instituted two other major prizes, the Wolgin Award for Israeli Cinema, Israel’s equivalent of the Academy Awards; and the Wolgin Prize for Scientific Excellence, awarded annually by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.)

Tyler School of Art has been Temple University‘s best kept secret division for years. But now that the scrappy little art school–arguably the best incubator for new artists in a region filled with great art schools–has been forced by the mothership to give up its bucolic Elkins Park campus and move to 12th and Norris, the connection will be clearer.

It’s a good move!!!

Tyler’s $75 million new building, still under construction, is space-age spectacular.  Even with some windows and doors and finishes missing, it’s a beauty, with rakish angles, airy spaces, and dramatic light, designed by architect Carlos Jimenez, with support from Philadelphia architects H2L2.

The towering lobby of the new building also provides an entrance to the Presser Building of Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance, giving Tyler another connection to its new location. photo by Libby

We know all this because we took a hard hat tour, led by Gregory Murphy, Tyler’s assistant dean for development; John Coll, one of the three project superintendents; and Hillel Hoffman, assistant director for Temple p.r. We thank them for rolling out the terrazzo floors and the makeshift wood ramps for us.

The building is not just another pretty face. It’s a gift to the city as well as to Tyler and Temple.

The new professional gallery space, where Temple Gallery will relocate, is not only beautiful, but is enormous and equipped to handle 4,000 pound sculptures. The studios and equipment and high-tech air-handling (a must in a field like art, where toxic materials are commonplace) almost made us wish we were back in school!

Looking down on the atrium from the 2nd floor. Note green color on pillars. There will be bright colors all over the public spaces (white in the studios of course). photo by roberta

If you’ve been used to Tyler’s old campus, with its cubby-hole studios and cramped exhibition spaces, you will jump for joy at the amazing equipment and the wide open spaces. Here are some examples: eight glory holes for cooking glass, up from two in Elkins Park; a whole room filled with potter’s wheels; loads digital equipment for photography–plus high-tech safety-minded wet-process equipment; vast spaces and cranes for sculpture; nearly a whole side of the building with advanced painting studios with palatial doors and celestial ceilings high enough to handle enormous paintings).

We’re not even talking about amenities like decks for lounging and a cafe for cafe-ing and looking out the windows.

Entrance to new Tyler School of Art. Just picture your name above the door for a $75 million donation. photo by roberta

The building is scheduled for completion in October, and expected to go into use January 2009. While we were walking through, we learned that 160 workers were on the job. Everywhere we looked, there they were, practically tripping over each other to finish the building in time for its impending completion date. Six of the workers were women, and we saw three of them at work as we toured.

The building has about 240,000 state-of-the-art square feet of space, many of those with naming rights still available. For instance, for a $7.5 million donation, you can get the building named after you.  A gallery’s naming rights, $1.5 million. Or, if you are a more typical artblog reader (just kidding), you might want to consider having graduate studios named after you, for $25,000 each. Why stop at just one?

Workers moving a stack of plywood. Everywhere we looked, people were working to finish the building. photo by Libby

Green is big in this building. We’re not just talking about the green accent walls; or the green gardens for exhibiting sculpture. The building includes a number of green and health-conscious and art-conscious features. We especially like that the rain run-off from the roof gets redirected to slowly dissipate into the ground, said project superintendent Coll. The air handling system is massive because of the toxicity of art materials. It’s a closed building, said Murphy.

We took a lot of great pictures–of studio spaces, equipment, building mechanicals, and just things we liked looking at, but it was tough to capture the vastness of the spaces in this building. Here’s a link to our flickr sets to see more: Roberta’s pix. Libby’s pix.

So here’s a short picture post of some highlight from what I’ve seen.

Moore College of Art and Design’s graduating seniors show, at the Galleries at Moore, up until May 18, is great, and the illustration students rock the gallery. I admired every one of them. Here are a short sample just to give you a sense of the quality and the wit.

Kristen Travers’ pickle people look like the next generation heirs to the California raisins.

Lauren Albert with her video Like a Pen

The video Like a Pen by illustration student Lauren Albert follows an ordinary girl who becomes a supergirl shark of the sea and swallows and friend. Love and hate become confused and the imagery is delicious. You can see it on Albert’s website here.

Other illustrators who caught my eye were Katie Glisson, Angelina Wakely, and Ebony H. Segers, the latter drawing portraits of African American heroes for a retelling of history.

The fine arts were not as strong as a group, but here’s some of what I thought was great–

Stacia Eve Paul, Synthetic Experience installation

Stacia Eve Paul’s installation of black-light glowing hair and fabric turned a space into a funhouse. I don’t know that I got much out of this on the level of ideas, but it made great looking, and Stacia herself donned a dress that also glowed. I enjoyed the synthetic hair piece–it’s the 3-D ribbon painting update on the right, and it takes the girl identity thing into the zone of entertainment and light shows.

Donna Blichasz, My Mind Bridges the Gap Between Us, oil on canvas

Donna Blichasz’s large painting, My Mind Bridges the Gap Between Us, is German Expressionism with a sense of humor. She and her friend Kellyann Catenacci, whose painting was sort of similar, but not, and also pretty great, made some wonderful collaborative drawings together under the name BlinchiCat. Natch, I had a soft place in my heart for the collaborators. Besides, they made good work!

Here are a couple of Victoria Senseny’s what-is-it sculptures:

Senseny commanded the front space by the windows near the guard desk. Other work I admired was by Samantha Hill (she’s in a show we’re curating for Projects Gallery, so I don’t want to say more, right now), Cat Badger, Taryn Brooke Holloway and Krista Rothwell.

I was impressed by how well-organized the exhibit was. Each student stood next to her work on opening night, with business cards mounted on the wall for the taking. Very professional.

I also stopped at one of the Tyler School of Art exhibits of senior work in an enormous raw space at Broad and Cecil B. Moore.

Here’s some info sent us by Marilyn Holsing about the show, which is put on by the Department of Art & Art Education:

Tower Investments very generously loaned our department a huge raw space at the corner of Cecil B Moore and Broad Streets (1600 N. Broad St, second floor) for our 40th annual student show and our Senior Seminar Show which we have combined this year. Pepon [Osorio] and a small crew of students transformed the space into a first class temporary exhibition space by building walls. It was a huge undertaking.

Not only is the space spectacular but so is the student work which includes everything from traditional painting and drawing through digital work and sculpture.

The tone here reflected the tone of the school–hey, kids, let’s put on a show! Here are a few samples of work I especially liked.

Nicole Roche‘s suite of paintings about her friends partying hearty capture the wildness–and seediness–of drunken bar scenes. No one else’s work looked anything like these (one of the problems with this show overall were lots of class groupings with assignments flattening the individuality of the students).

Sarah Lu, The Urban Environment, 2008, series of 5, reduction print and lithography on newspaper with collage, 22 x 12 inches

I liked Sarah Lu‘s prints in which the newspaper page becomes the urban grid itself, and the way the print appears works kinds of the way that in real life the eye settles on something in the larger context and sees it in color while all else fades back.

Benjamin Tellie, Four Lonely Cabins, two color reduction print

Benjamin Tellie‘s prints interested me for how his ghostly outline style of drawing matched the ghostly, non-photographic quality of his subject matter–depictions of his grandfather’s experiences in WW I. The scenes look rather unlikely to me, with soldiers and the injured and men with guns all milling around–but that’s part of their charm and mystery.

There was lots more there worthy of mention, but I’m stopping here. The Tyler show will be up today and open until 6 and Thurs May 1 and Fri May 2 and Mon May 5 from 12 to 6. However part of the show may be taken down on Monday due to a time crunch.

Hauswerk, a series of installations by 15 Tyler students (with some alums also involved), continues until Jan. 4. I took the train to Paoli last Saturday for the opening and hopped the free Tyler shuttle to the Haus — the train/shuttle connection was wonderful! The place was abuzz with students, friends, family and others. A jolly good experiment in Haus beautiful, Haus scary, Haus friendly, Haus that’s not home.

The students are from Jennie Shanker‘s materials class, an occasional offering, says Shanker. (Last time she taught the class her students curated a show at Sharktown — see post). This time, they’d been looking around for places to work and nothing much was happening. They had but three months to pull it together. And one of the students, Athena Christakis, offered that her parents house in Paoli was being demolished and they could put something on there. The show was done with permission of the owners and because one outdoor work involves fire pits, with approval of the fire marshall, Shanker told me.

Everyone worked collaboratively which is nice and some of the students acted as curators for the others. The basement crawl space piece by Sarah O’Donnell and Andrew Brehm was one of my favorites. Tricked out with a translucent scrim, some lights and piles of dirt the crawl space became a miniature landscape evoking a desert and the ends of the earth.

The show’s been getting great pr. I heard an indepth report by WHYY’s new arts reporter, Alexandra Schmidt, and the Inquirer had a nice story with a video by Ron Tarver of the works in progress.

Hauswerk is up to January 4, 2008 by appointment. Contact Athena Christakis for an appointment by phone 215-900-0175 or by e-mail athena.christakis@gmail.com.

FRIDAY, DEC. 14, 2007

Street Button–5th annual emerging artist show
FLEISHER/OLLMAN GALLERY,
1616 WALNUT STREET, SUITE 100
6-9pm

Jacob Hellman photo collage at White Lodge Gallery (in School of Rock building)

Jacob Hellman
Photographs and Installations
White Lodge Gallery
1508 Brandywine Street
5:30pm-8:30pm

SATURDAY, DEC. 15, 2007

Oliver Herring
FLUXspace
3000 N. Hope St.
6-10 pm

See slide show below for more HausWerk images

Tyler student working on installation at the soon to be demolished house in Paoli. More photos in slide show below.

Hauswerk–15 Tyler students take over a soon-to-be-demolished house in Paoli
1497 Sugartown Rd
Paoli
3-6:30 PM
(also by appointment until Jan. 4. call Athena Christakis (one of the students) at 215-900-0175 or athena.christakis@gmail.com)

Jesse Greenberg, Nick Lenker, Kate Norton and Sarah Everton at Pageant Gallery’s emerging artist show

“Isskustvo Transmagica Provinces Animamina”
Sarah Everton, Jesse Greenberg, Nick Lenker, and Kate Norton
Pageant Gallery
607 Bainbridge
through February 3rd,
7pm-???

Mummer’s costume on display last week at the Space 1026 auction.

SEWATHON : A Mummer Happening
Space 1026
$5 donation gets you 24 hours of fun!
12 Noon, Dec. 15 to 12 Noon, Dec. 16

from the press release:
The Vaudevillains, the 1026 Mummer Brigade, will be hosting a 24 hour sewing marathon and telethon style variety show to help raise funds for the upcoming Mummer’s Day Parade.

This event will bebroadcast live to the internet. Watch online and make a donation. Broadcast begins this Saturday at noon. We will be sewing, dancing, laughing, watching movies and sharing food for 24 hours straight. Come visit and show your support.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I was late to see Dona Nelson‘s curatorial outing, The Fluid Field, up at Tyler Gallery on the campus in Elkins Park. I caught the short-lived show (Oct 3-21) at the closing reception and boy was I glad I did. The show of Tyler grads — all women whose graduations from the art school ranged from 1963 (Louise Fishman) to 2007 (Tanaya Neal, Natasha Bowdoin) — was terrific!

Nelson, respected painter and Tyler faculty, poured her heart and her considerable energy and intelligence into the show and produced a great installation and a terrific catalog with an essay, full color images of each work and lots of biographical information and insights into each artist’s works. At the closing, Nelson, a bundle of ebullience, was handing out the free catalogs to everyone in sight. I happily took a couple. “Spread them around,” she said.

Rosanna Bruno posing with her painting Pick Up Sticks, 2007, oil on linen.

The show is a wonderful mix of more and less abstract works that together created a force field with considerable forward momentum. Painting looks pretty great here in its diverse shapes and sizes. The one thing not in evidence was paintings that look like they’re photographs, and that was great. Because even one tight and representational work might have broken up the party, which otherwise slipped along on the ur-stream of dreams and poetry.

I had fabulous chats with some of the artists including the funny and friendly Rosanna Bruno, whose name and work was so familiar to me. I couldn’t place where I’d seen Bruno’s work until I finally remembered that artblog pal Brent Burket had done a studio visit with Bruno and posted it on Heart as Arena. Bruno’s Pick Up Sticks is such a friendly painting, its rhythms and colors so engaging that even without the reference to the old-fashioned non-technological children’s game a viewer is immediately at ease. This is not a grandiose abstract painting but one, like those of Mary Heilman, that is sunny and a little self-involved but in a gracious way that invites you to partake of the fun.

Read Brent’s great post (link above) which has lots of pictures, and be sure to read all the comments under the post and watch for the poem!! I am green with envy. Won’t someone write a poem in artblog‘s comments, please?

Tanaya Neal’s painting (left), Louise Fishman’s painting, right.

Nelson’s show sprawled over the two rooms of Tyler Gallery. The placement of works in the space, the curatorial choices, the scale choices and everything seemed perfect. Two small works, “Fixed Me There (2007) by Tanaya Neal and “What is it?” (1997) by Louise Fishman, made 10 years apart, created a great discussion about figure and ground and about the almost-always present landscape element in works of abstraction. Neal’s cartoon-like animal looks ready to launch out into Fishman’s grove of stick-like figures and knock them down like a hedge-hog bowling pin.

Anoka Faruqee, Freehand Asterisk painting, 2004

Anoka Faruqee‘s eye-popping asterisk painting — which I wanted 3-D glasses for, so dense and op was it — hung on a wall by itself. This work needed space and, with its peppy almost animated feel (turn your back on it and look again and the painting felt like its composition shifted) reminded me of kids playing jacks with the spiky metal pieces flying fast between hand and ground and hand again.

Fluid Field installation with Grant’s 70/30 Split (left), Liz Markus’s Making Love, Smoking Dope, Loading Guns, (next), Natasha Bowdoin’s Water Fable (center) and Rosanna Bruno’s Pick Up Sticks (right).

Liz Markus, coming off a recent show at ZieherSmith, showed a brushy piece in green brown and beige that I mistook for a pure abstraction. Wrong! Making Love, Smoking Dope, Loading Guns, 2007, fluid acrylic on canvas, is an abstracted impression of a Vietnam-era hippie soldier with an army helmet, RayBan sunglasses, a shaggy mustache and lots of long hair! I asked Markus if she was channeling Iraq in the work and she said “Yes!”

Natasha Bowdoin‘s cut paper Water Fable resembles the cut paper work she showed at Voxxoxo recently. See my flickr for the Voxxoxo image.

The dense Water Fable, with intricate lacey cuts of paper and hand applied words and letters everywhere is labyrinthine, Victorian and gorgeous. Having just installed a delicate cut paper piece by Barbara Bullock at our show Dig in Mt. Ranier, MD, I know how DIFFICULT installation of this work can be. And while I’ve never witnessed the making of such a complicated work, I can only guess that it’s a very slow process, and involves a lot of addition and subtraction like painting.

Tyler faculty and painter, Frank Bramblett, center. Tanaya Neal, right. I’m sorry I don’t remember the names for everyone else in the pic.

Rounding out the show are Rebecca Saylor Sack‘s volcanic Plateau, a modest-scale work by this artist also now having a Fleisher Challenge exhibit;Iva Gueorguevia‘s Vespers Pageant, a midnight blue Harry Potter-esque abstraction with ghostly jet streams that twist and turn in colors from hot red to icy white; Angela Dufresne‘s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Delusional Birthday Dinner Party for Big Daddy, also ghostly–and evocative of feverish outsider art; and Deborah Grant‘s smart collage works.

There’s been tons written about Dona Nelson’s abstract art. Here’s Roberta Smith on Nelson’s 2001 show at Cheim and Reid. And check out James Wagner’s appreciation of her September, 2006, show at Thomas Erben for an unabashed report by an art collector previously unfamiliar with Dona’s work who was blown away by what he saw.

I know there are many folks with mixed feelings about Tyler’ School of Art’s big move from Elkins Park to Center City. I don’t want to say this move has enraged people the way the Barnes move from Merion to Center City has but it’s definitely set some people’s teeth to grinding.

Thus when I heard there was to be a groundbreaking for the new Tyler building on Temple’s Main Campus I wanted to go and check out what is officially being said about it. Also, I love spectacle no matter how high or low. And the thought of ladies and gentlemen in hard hats, suits and high heels (at least the ladies), all wielding shovels appealed.

Richard Hricko and Jennie Shanker

So I’m not going to give comprehensive coverage of the speeches etc. But here’s a few factoids and some commentary:

1. Dean Keith Morrison said the new building, designed by architect Carlos Jimenez will provide 40 percent more teaching space. The building will have many common areas and will be equipped with cutting edge technology.

2. The building will be on 12th and Norris. The north facing side looks out on a neighborhood of row houses.

3. Frank Bramblett, painting faculty, said that the Painting, Sculpture and Drawing department will have its spaces on the north-facing side.

4. Temple President Ann Weaver Hart said this was Temple’s third ground breaking this year.

5. Every year Tyler is ranked in the top ten art schools in the country. Trustee Daniel H. Polett said US News and World Report ranked Tyler Painting as 5th in the nation, sculpture as 7th in the nation and printmaking as 12th in the nation.

6. Councilman Darrell L. Clarke said among other things that he’s very excited to be reversing the reverse commute up to Elkins Park.

7. Architect Carlos Jimenez mentioned that art schools are comprised of manyh principalities all with personalities and needs, ie, it was a challenge!

8. Helen Drutt English (Tyler 52) said she was just in Houston and walked through a building designed by Carlos Jimenez and it had beautiful light, great atrium space, floating stairwell.

Sheryl Conkelton (Tyler Exhibitions Director), Frank Bramblett, Vida, Susan Moore

Moves are wrenching and moves are upheavals. This one will be big for Tyler. Much was made by the dignitaries speaking at the ceremony of the new synergy possible between the art school and the music, theatre, dance and other arts departments nearby in what is being called a new arts district. That may sound great to some. It will not appeal to others.

Tyler’s airy acres of uninterrupted grass and trees will be missed for sure in the new Tyler (anticipated move-in date 2009). But really, who’s going to miss the physical plant, which was run down and problematic even when I took classes up there in 1989-91. And while a school might take some of its personality from its building the real personality comes from the teachers. And with new hire Mark Shetabi (and six more on the way my sources tell me) plus the existing teaching staff, the old institution will stay as full of personality on main campus as it is now up in Elkins Park.

The lineup of shovels and hardhats before the “big dig” by the dignitaries.

As an adult I took classes at Tyler for two years (1989-91) following a two-year stint as a student at PAFA (1986-88). So I’ve experienced the downtown art school scene and the sprawling campus scene in the suburbs. There’s a difference. Whether the difference is important in the long run???? I am not so sure. Discuss amongst yourselves. More photos from the groundbreaking here.

Postcard for BFA show at Tyler. Alan’s work is on the right, and Kati’s is bottom left and Paul’s is top left.

The show, with works by Kati Gegenheimer, Paul DeMuro and Alan Prazniak paired two makers of abstract art (Kati and Paul) with someone who’s working figuratively and mining literary sources. Apart from the show’s setting in the less than stellar venue of Tyler Hall’s l-shaped hallway outside the Dean’s office, the show was a good one. Nicely made works hung with thought and some care.

I don’t know Kati and Paul since they weren’t in our class, so don’t know how this body represented their thoughts and ideas. The works were colorful, playful and I enjoyed them.

Alan’s painting, I believe it’s called “Gli animali”

But I was very curious about what Alan had pulled off since at the end of our semester with him he had just broken with one body of works (based on photographs of sports figures in groups–very nice work and he actually sold a big piece) and moved to a much less safe material — working from his imagination using interiorized understandings of literary sources or places and people in his life.

What I saw in the new works is that Alan had pushed it and moved the work into a kind of meta-biblical, William Blakean realm. The works in the show are ambitious, and considering today’s vogue for teen sketchbook art, boldly oners. The combination of outsidery cartoon sensibility with bible or epic story telling, high Romanticism and maybe a little bit of politics ala Max Beckmann and Jorg Immendorff was pretty great. Needless to say, I loved them.

Kati wrote me to say that she’s in another short BFA show, Senior Printmaking, and this one is at the Crane Building tomorrow, May 5 with an opening 5;30-8 pm. Crane Godfather Richard Hricko is the senior printmakers’ professor, and according to Kati there are several openings at Crane that night.

Alan Prazniak’s pugnacious painting

See pictures at my flickr set which, alas, is a little short on Kati and Paul’s works. But you can see Kati’s works at her blog and see Paul’s works at his blog.

Very many congratulations to all the graduating students everywhere!!

And the RISD component of the swap, now on view until March 23 in the city’s most glam art spot, is a cool show.

The works by the 20 RISD students (both first and second year MFA’s) look pretty great. All the works are aware of the global art conversations going on and many of them could could hold their own at the dinner table. Ideas at play include: abstraction that has some figuration in it; figure works that are quite abstract; cut foam “paintings” and works that have sculpey-like outcroppings. Cartoons will be with us always, as will abstraction. Signs and symbols, ditto. Most surprising to me is the number of small to tiny works. Small is beautiful and here, small turns out to be a good strategy for a hall almost big enough to hold an international art fair.

I zeroed in on several works that are va-va-voom lovely or seem to advance a thread of contemporary art that I’m particularly interested in: critiques of the present, something we’re sorely in need of and a place where art can give voice to our collective frustration with our world of war and eco-disaster.

Ginny Casey‘s lush and lovely Finger Trap, an oil on canvas, reminds me of Aaron Williams’ flesh-invoking abstractions. This planet of flesh is set in a cosmic space which makes it all the more eerie. Instead of benign craters on the moon, these bright red craters are like worm holes that may lead who knows where. Disease is evoked with the lesions, and with the soft, over-ripe bulbousness of the shape. I would have liked to see another work by this artist to see where the thoughts are going.

More cosmic thoughts, this time in small packages, in Blade Wynne‘s two paintings, titled Orbit. The left work seems to be an ur-planet made of hot dogs in their buns and steel I-beams. And the god-like bearded character who is vomiting a rainbow is one conflicted dude. Rainbows are happy! So they are not to be vomited out. While I don’t assume anything, I would say that these works come from a larger narrative stream. Whether the creation story is the myth being told is not clear but it works for me. These are not obvious critiques of culture but ideas about overconsumption and unhealthiness of planet and person sit on the works.

Nadia Ayari‘s Re-election, an oil on canvas, with its obvious references to Philip Guston (the color, the truncated body parts, the political content) owes much to the 20th Century master. The work is painted beautifully and while I could have done without the jail of fingers in the background, on the whole, I find it encouraging that a young painter would attack a political subject straight on and come up with something so good.

Ricky Allman‘s Different doom, happier children, acrylic and ink on canvas, creates a dystopia of architectural space that seems to be a city with all parts connected and with no place of escape. Small windows in the sub-basements show what looks like raging fires. There’s an off-color rainbow spewing out of a window on top. And the whole thing’s colored in fleshy pinks, battleship grey and institutional green. Did I mention the brown-black sky and the two ominous castle-like structures…enemies or friends, who can say, in the background? Wow. This is hell for sure. A passionate work couched in cool colors, the piece spoke to me of the present, past and future. Something visionary and architectural and dystopic reminds me of Lebbeus Woods‘ great architectural visions. The pale colors remind me of Chris Ware‘s also dystopic architectural and human visions.

Cassie Jones‘ eye candy made of cut foam sheets = very much fun.

I photographed the entire show and have it at flickr. Go see it in person, though. It looks good and it will show you how small things can hold the wall in the huge space. Show’s up to March 23. Gallery hours, Wed-Sat, noon-6 pm. By the way, the Tyler part of this exchange already happened up at RISD. Anybody have any pix of that show online so we can see how the home team fared in Rhode Island?