Museums

March 20, 2017 by Kathy Cho

On intimacy in the age of technology, Brown Girls, and Dana Schutz’s Open Casket painting in the Whitney Biennial 2017

Kathy Cho considers aspects of art and the artist’s life and brings to the reader’s attention several web projects to explore. We find the question of race in Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, based on a photo of the slain Emmitt Till, especially important to ponder. Why did Schutz make this grotesque portrayal (based on a shocking photo of the young man in his open casket)? Why did the Whitney Museum choose to exhibit it in the Biennial, their signature show?

March 11, 2017 by Roberta

Checking in – Ayana Evans’s conceptual aerobics in Person of the Crowd

Ayana Evans is a perfect reverse-flåneur — a women (not envisioned in the 19th Century flåneur concept) and someone whose endurance performances are active, conceptual, aerobic and the opposite of idle. The artist works in prominent locations (the Rocky steps, one time in NYC in the middle of a busy intersection). And she dresses, purposely, in the most “girlie girl,” non-athletic garb imaginable. She will wear the tiger-striped catsuit and black stiletto heels she wore at the press preview in her 10-hour Philadelphia performance on May 6 at locations all around town.

March 8, 2017 by Roberta

Checking in – Virgil Marti’s “Poufs” in Barnes’ Person of the Crowd

When he was approached by the Barnes Foundation to be involved in the Person of the Crowd project, about flânerie (the art of strolling, idling), Virgil Marti thought to himself, I’m not a flâneur, am I? But then he thought again about the idea of walking the streets and thinking and observing and walking some more, and he decided that yes, maybe he was a flâneur — of Fabric Row, the fabric and notions mecca on 4th Street in Queen Village.

March 7, 2017 by Roberta

Drexel URBN panel on artist activism; Frieda cafe one-day celebration of octogenarian painter, Jean K. Hamburg, Black Oak House Gallery performance sounds great, Plus some good reads and mega-heaping helping of Opportunities from Mutter Museum, City Hall, Vox Populi, DaVinci Art Alliance, Cerulean and Woodmere

Elizabeth Taylor-Mead of Frieda wrote to say the cafe at 320 Walnut Street, is celebrating the art of octogenarian, Jean K. Hamburg, who has never shown her works publicly but agreed to show a selection of her life’s work and to speak about her work for one afternoon, Sunday, March 19, from 3PM – 4:30PM. The conversation will be between the artist and Anthony Latess.

March 7, 2017 by Flora Ward

Self-made saints – Dawoud Bey and Shawn Theodore at the AAMP

Moving between Dawoud Bey’s Harlem, USA, and Shawn Theodore’s The Church of Broken Pieces, both currently on view at the African American Museum of Philadelphia, is like shifting between worlds. Bey’s photos depict the streets and people of Harlem in the 1970s, a place that to us in 2017 seems like a lost world, his use of traditional documentary black-and-white photography enhancing that sense of distance. Theodore’s larger-than-life, staged street portraits are less documentary than metaphysical or theatrical, evoking a mysterious future through the drama of the set-piece in the street.

March 6, 2017 by Andrea Kirsh

Yayoi Kusama’s mind-bending mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn exhibition, curated by Mika Yoshitake, is serious and respectful of the artist, even if it overemphasizes the more spectacular work, and it accommodates an intimidating number of visitors with well thought-out and executed logistics. It offers those unfamiliar with Kusama an introduction to her world, and will undoubtedly leave everyone wanting more.

February 28, 2017 by Roberta

Panels everywhere, including art history activism and living the art life, Wiki-art+feminism-editathon at Temple, benefit for refugees at UCAL, Pop-up on forgotten Civil Rights heroines at Amalgam, Plus Eye of the Sixties, Dr. Johnetta Cole, Yes And…+Opportunities from Museum Hack and PVLA

Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is an international communal updating of Wikipedia content on subjects related to art and feminism. Universities and cultural institutions around the city of Philadelphia are hosting edit-a-thons throughout the month of March, where participants will gather in one place to edit, add, and improve Wikipedia entries.

February 22, 2017 by A.M. Weaver

Philadelphia Assembled – Four years in the making at PMA

Quietly building steam over the last four years, the community project, Philadelphia Assembled, will burst into the world this April, with actions, workshops, performances and art, in places all across the city, and will manifest itself in a big installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building this fall. Starting with a series of conversations with regular Philadelphians, the Dutch artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk, made connections and reached out to more and more people, in what sounds like a revolutionary movement to empower people and make their lives better.

February 12, 2017 by Flora Ward

Andrea Hornick’s metamorphoses – Unbounded Histories at the Barnes

Hornick wants to take us on a voyage through the collection that is both physical and spiritual, asking us to participate in her own mystical and shamanic experience of the paintings and sculptures of the Barnes.

January 29, 2017 by Michael Andre

Epic Tales in Princeton

Epic Tales from Ancient India is the thinkiest show I’ve seen here in years. It is no less than an introduction to the literature and history of India. The literature and history in the subcontinent’s various languages is concealed on the back of miniatures but this forced on me my second most favorite activity, viz., research.

January 22, 2017 by Donald Hunt

Daedalus Quartet transcends Friday the 13th

In contrast to the typical fear associated with this day, the Daedalus Quartet embrace it wholeheartedly, using the day itself as inspiration for their sold-out concert program of mostly new works in the Penn Museum’s Chinese Rotunda (co-presented by the Penn Music Department and Bowerbird).

January 20, 2017 by Justin O. Walker

Public notice – Jitish Kallat’s Covering Letter at the PMA

What Kallat seeks to explore in “Covering Letter” is a near miss between two of the 20th century’s most influential minds. This juxtaposition of these two is a near-collision of worlds, east and west, right and wrong, peace and war. One had spoken and maybe one had listened. The viewer is left with this—what could have been, what could be.

January 8, 2017 by Justin O. Walker

The master’s tools – Kerry James Marshall at the Met Breuer

From the walls of color in his series that continue throughout the Breuer, to his earlier work, the oversized snapshots, the smaller pieces that take on death, black identity in America, and his deep, painfully humorous comics, Marshall is an artist who has worked and played his way into the all-important arts conversation.

December 31, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Forging Mexican Modernism – Paint the Revolution at the PMA

The exhibition clearly demonstrates that the widely-known work of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and, in recent decades, Frida Kahlo, is but a small spectrum of a much broader artistic scene. It brings up topics such as the tension between work intended for private viewing versus the obviously propagandistic intent of work meant to be seen in public–both murals and inexpensive prints; the Mexican response to European modernism; European, Soviet, and U.S. responses to Mexican art; the tension between a cosmopolitan artistic language which reflects international ideas about modernity versus a local style that draws upon indigenous art, and with that, the ongoing attention in Mexican art to the spectrum of racial difference.