What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? This is the timely and ambitious question that the folks at Mural Arts posed to their 20 selected Monument Lab artists. Imani Roach interviews one of the artists, Sharon Hayes, and reports on her project, installed in Rittenhouse Square until Nov. 19.
Read MoreMatt tries an alternative method of constructing an essay, a playful and visual approach that encourages us to just keep swimming.
Read MoreIn advance of the Philadelphia Art Book Fair coming up on May 5 and 6, we present a think-piece by Vox Populi member Matt Kalasky, who asks, is arts advocacy the same thing as artist advocacy? He argues that the creation of empathy is one of the artist’s most important productions, and that artists’ labor should be oriented more towards people than products.
Read MoreMichael Lieberman and Roberta talk with members of the arts community and report on what arts leaders are doing (or not doing) to respond to the Trump administration’s threats to the arts and to our citizens in general. In their conclusion they ask for the leaders to stand up and do more.
Read MoreWith this constant flux of activity, the capacity to view, look, and reflect about art is rendered significantly more difficult. The upshot to the universalization of endless artistic productivity is a certain prohibition against thinking about the art made and displayed. What matters is not what the art means or does—a judgement that often takes time to work out—but participation as a free-falling spectator in the mad flux of artistic creation.
Read MoreThe art produced in Philadelphia is not, for some miraculous reason, outside of the problem of the unresolved status of contemporary art. It is, rather, like art produced in so many other places, subject to the larger social-historical problem of art’s function. To begin to reimagine platforms of reception, I believe that constant reflection of the unresolved problem of the social function of contemporary art needs to be made.
Read MoreThe question in response to this is clear—to what extent is Trump’s presidency unprecedented? Does it articulate a historical break in the fabric of American politics, one that requires thousands of artists to rise up? I do not think so. Trump’s victory is a result of a process that has been forming since the end of the Cold War. It is, in a way, the inverted consequence of the conjunction of globalized financial capital with Western democracy.
Read MoreArtist-run spaces are quite creative when it comes to naming their spaces. Recall a small handful (in alphabetical order) in Philadelphia: Fjord, Grizzly Grizzly, Little Berlin, Lord Ludd, Napoleon, New Boone, Pterodactyl, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Vox Populi. In light of these names, I think a naïve question needs to be posed: why do so many artist-run spaces organize their activities under the rubric of names that, on a formal level, have very little to do with artistic production?
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.
Read MoreRecently, I had a meeting with a director of an artist-run space in Philadelphia. At many points in our discussion we touched on the issue of selling artwork. This led to reflections on the state of the art market in Philadelphia and the strong anti-commercial ethos of sections of the Philadelphia DIY art community. It strikes me that this opposition is a good place to start, not least because it forms the elementary premise on which a number of conversations that I have had with people from the arts community here in Philadelphia about the state of art in the city and the rest of the United States are based.
Read MoreThis article concerns the restriction of contemporary art discourse to the specificity of Philadelphia in the city’s DIY art scene. It strikes me that the focus on the geo-political and cultural particularity of Philadelphia produces a strange contradiction in how we think about contemporary art in Philadelphia. The contradiction is between the parochial fixation of trying to speak for a Philadelphia contemporary art (distinct from a contemporary art in Philadelphia) and the global status of contemporary art. In what follows I want to develop an understanding of this contradiction by paying particular attention to some interconnected issues such as the notion of contemporaneity, globality and internationalism. I close with a couple of questions, both oriented by the attempt to inquire into the very possibility of a discourse of contemporary art within the context of an explicitly regionalist focus.
Read MoreInspired by the academies of ancient Greece and Byzantium, the new Temple Library is designed to create pleasurable–and hence optimal–learning experiences. The visual anchor of the building will be an updated take on a characteristic element of Classical architecture–the oculus, a round opening centered in the dome of a building. Like a latter-day Roman Pantheon, the new Temple library will have a giant oculus in the center of its 3-story atrium that will allow natural light to permeate the 225,000 square-foot structure and orient visitors no matter where they are inside the building.
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