By now you’ve likely heard that Space 1026, one of Philly’s oldest collectively-run art spaces, is being forced out of its Arch street location. Here Chip Schwartz interviews current Space 1026 members and gives us the inside scoop on the organization’s bumpy beginnings and tenuous future. Read on to learn how these artists are turning a potential setback into an opportunity!
Read MoreChip Schwartz reports on the history of the Icebox Project Space and speaks with co-founders Tim Belknap and Ryan McCartney about how their vision for a multi-purpose arts venue has evolved over the years. He also gives us the scoop on future programming at the Icebox, including a Pew-funded haunted house that taps into our city’s rich LGBTQIA creative networks.
Read MoreMore than a year after closing its doors, CRUXspace, Philadelphia’s first art gallery dedicated to new media, is back on the map. Now operating out of the Piazza’s bustling WeWork Northern Liberties coworking hub, founder Andrew Cameron Zahn and lead curator Kim Brickley have creatively sidestepped many of the pitfalls inherent to operating a DIY art space in this city. Contributor Chip Schwartz reports on where CRUxspace has been and where they’re going, with a brief nod to their current exhibition, “One Minute Auras” — the first of several multi-month shows planned for this year.
Read MoreChip reviews the InLiquid show, “As By Digging,” at Painted Bride, with three artists whose work digs for emotional truth in personal and other human histories.
Read MoreChip tells us about the fever dream that is the scene that artist Nick Lenker sets for his semi-physical, virtual experience “Recreation: First Person,” which is currently on display at Moore College of Art and Design.
Read More“We Do What We Do” is a group show at Spillway Gallery connecting work by artists with a traditional training and artists who have intellectual disabilities and make together in a studio called the Center for Creative Works. Chip discusses how “the perceived barriers between these two segments of the creative population are demolished,” he says with a unifying theme of pattern and order, something we could all use a little more of at the moment.
Read MoreChip investigates an exhibition featuring two artists searching to find healing and acceptance through their work, and says their approaches create diverse and lively visuals.
Read MoreChip enjoys the nuanced perspectives on queer and transgender identities in the ambitious group show, Where We Find Ourselves, at the Gershman Y. He says curator Jordan Rockford does a great job looking beyond the rainbow flag, bringing together the voices of queer and transgender artists from around the world, including Zachary Drucker, Jamil Hellu, Ryan W. Kelly, Amos Mac, and Brice Peterson.
Read MoreChip Schwartz ruminates on a group exhibition that parodies a birthday party. The morose and irony-tinged paintings and sculptural objects suggest the artists have long since taken off the rose-tinted glasses of childhood.
Read MoreFjord’s gallery is brimming with Freedman’s assorted colorful papier mâché and found object sculptures that exist in constant dialogue with his ideas, stories, and sketches; they are the physical manifestations of his ceaseless cerebral exercises.
Read MoreEntitled The Artist Need Not Suffer, the exhibition quickly forces you to wonder how tongue-in-cheek the title is. Paternoster’s work is an unsaturated foray into anxiety, self-doubt, introspection, and dissatisfaction with the human condition… all of which seems suspicious considering the title.
Read MoreThe approach to Napoleon’s doorway is jarring, as visitors are met by the repeat-pattern, floor-to-ceiling American flag wallpaper inside that makes the average patriotic displays at a 4th of July picnic appear like an affront to the U.S. Constitution by comparison. Numerous visitors at the First Friday opening were visibly uneasy at this unanticipated, flag-waving jingoism in their midst, but beneath the edifice lies a powerful critique.
Read MoreNearly any contemporary art excursion around Philadelphia in 2016 is sure to yield a wide range of styles and spectacles, but one persistent–if scruffy–thread is certainly the DIY flavor of many Philly-based artists’ work. At Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery’s exhibit Circa 1995, this commonality is not merely present, it is represented in local art-historical context through objects crafted some twenty years ago. This juncture in Philadelphia’s visual culture would help give rise not only to the ongoing careers of the artists participating in this show, but to a distinctive artist-run flavor that persists in Philly to this day.
Read More
Support for Artblog has been provided by The Philadelphia Cultural Fund.