The 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 MoreAt 91, Lorrie Goulet’s dedication to the carver’s art is unwavering, even though she cannot wield the carver’s tools like she could as a young woman. Throughout a recent wide-ranging conversation I had with her at her home and studio in Chelsea, I was struck by Goulet’s deep commitment to the physical work of carving, its tools, techniques, and materials. Her eyes light up and her gestures become animated when talking about stone, its myriad types, colors, and textures. For Goulet, stone–her primary material–is alive, and each stone has its own personality. “I put my life with the stone’s life,” she told me, following up with “I don’t have many stones left.”
Read MoreArtist, Pew Fellow, and 2016 Guggenheim Grantee Eileen Neff makes photographs and prints them large, small, framed or unframed, and, recently, shaped–like her photo of a leaf is shaped like a leaf, which appeared in her 2015 solo show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, which represents her.
Read MoreBefore arriving at PAFA, Jodi Throckmorton was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wichita State University. Prior to that, she lived in the new media mecca of Silicon Valley, where she was Associate Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art for eight years. Now at PAFA, Throckmorton is bringing her considerable energy and wide-ranging interest in contemporary art to integrating edgy contemporary art with PAFA’s traditional strong suits of figuration and realism.
Read MorePerhaps you stopped by Reading Terminal last Friday and saw the pop up bookstore on Filbert Street? Ulises is the name of the store, and Gee Wesley and collaborators are the founders. The alternative/experimental bookstore project will open a more permanent home in October in a converted garage space at 31 E. Columbia Ave. Phila 19125.
Read MoreFrancis Kéré is a Burkina Faso-born, Berlin-based architect known for his adaptive use of vernacular materials in structures like schools and other gathering places, especially in his native land. The Artblog video shows Kéré’s passion for community participation in his projects.
Read MoreEarlier this year, I was invited to curate a week of content on Curate This, the peppy new online arts publication whose mission — like Artblog’s mission — is to tell the whole wide world that the Philadelphia art scene has great art and artists. Curate This, started by writers/artists Amanda Wagner and Julius Ferraro, is now almost one year old, and I sat down with them recently to talk about how their publication is coming along and what they’re excited about. Curate This is a platform for artists and writers to speak their minds about issues involved in the arts (yes, there is some complaining).
Read MoreRoberta interviews Pap Souleye Fall about his unique body suits, stitched up while he is wearing them. Pap is also a wonderful maker of sculptural installations, and he’s a dancer. Give a listen!
Read MoreEd Bronstein’s brushy, expressionistic paintings capture scenes — au plein air — that include buildings, parks, dogs (lots of dogs), trucks (lots of trucks) people and more. Ed was instrumental in founding Art in the Open, and if you visited that festival recently you may have seen him out there with his paints and easel chronicling the beauty that inspires him.
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Irish artist Elaine Byrne makes work that uses Dante, James Joyce and other heady source material for her works with political and social commentary on contemporary issues. In one case she is calling out an Irish bank scandal, using Dante’s Purgatorio and a pilgrimage location in Ireland called St. Patrick’s Purgatory; in another she’s raising issues about anti-Semitism in the context of Joyce’s Cyclops section of Ulysses. The videos are captivating, and give so very much to chew over. Elaine’s Irish accent is part of the treat of this 38-minutes long podcast.
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