I lived in West Philly, at 57th St. There was a small ginkgo tree in the back courtyard. It was impossibly hot, I had no money and spent my time at the house, reading, painting, and dreaming of food.
Read MoreMichelle Marcuse flirted with sculpture-making for a long while, but only when she started channeling her memories of childhood in suburban Capetown, South Africa, did she find her 3D voice. Marcuse, who along with her partner, Henry Bermudez, runs House Gallery also found her materials — recycled cardboard, glue — and aesthetic that is primal and playful, combining both pieces of her childhood experience.
Read MoreDespite all its problems and despite the efforts of artists, increasing concern about addressing pressing issues in Philadelphia could very well overcome its obsession with the past and become a city of the future.
Read MoreThe art activist group We Are Watching was organized by Amanda Silberling and her friends at the University of Pennsylvania, where they are undergraduates. Propelled to action by an email sent by a fraternity to incoming Penn freshmen girls to come to a party and be ready to, basically, put out, Silberling and her colleagues blanketed the campus with flyers outing the fraternity for its crass invitation, with its implied embrace of rape culture.
Read MoreSize can create competition in some shows, larger works demanding more attention than small, but these more typical relationships were somehow absent from this show. Holes were drilled into the sides of display armatures, perfectly framing a small Fishman sculpture covered in paint, encouraging the viewer to look. You did not get the sense that you were supposed to spend less time looking at the smaller things.
Read MoreBe respectful when a space has “success” in your city. Be proud of them, if that’s what they wanted. Call them out if they still use the word “alternative” to describe themselves, especially if they don’t talk about their stake in our community and society in general. Understand that “artist-run” does not mean anti-institution or DIY. We are being tricked by capitalism, which makes us believe that we are providing alternatives, that we are allies to social movements, while we are actually mirroring society’s systems of oppression. Work by yourself in your basement because, according to everybody, it is impossible to avoid capitalism. If we do participate at all, though, we need to own up to the fact that we are perpetuating deep-rooted systems.
Read MoreClean, neat, and unused are the words I think when I think of the new Mormon temple downtown. Pristine. It’s by the main library. I’m inside on a tour, and the walls are covered in photo-realistic, figurative depictions of piety, biblical scenes, scenes of a Sunday-school nature. It harkens back to simpler time when there was no doubt, in America at least, of who Jesus was ethnically speaking. Mormons, if nothing else, are unabashedly white, which gives me the odd feeling of relief.
Read MoreIf you haven’t done so you should read Hammam’s essay, Cultivating Competition: A Small Note on the Art Writing Challenge. After reading Hammam’s essay, I wanted to pull out a few points and add a few comments of my own.
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