Guest contributor Mina Zarfsaz describes the power of “Letter to the Public,” an interactive installation currently on view at Icebox Project Space through January 26th.
Read MoreScience tells us that Earth has had five mass species’ extinction events in its history. Writer Elizabeth Kolbert, in her Pulitzer-prize winning book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” argues persuasively that we experiencing a sixth extinction right now, one caused by man, and not by volcano or asteroid. Shawn Sheehy, in his haunting “Beyond the Sixth Extinction: A Post-Apocalyptic Pop-Up,” speculates on the dire circumstances of vast and irreversible climate change and suggests how some species may adapt, hybridize and succeed in the future. Our guest writer, Colette Fu, is an award-winning Philadelphia-based artist, whose pop-up books are owned by many museums and collections. Colette writes a cogent review of the cautiously optimistic book.
Read MoreDear readers, this week we are publishing articles by the honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, this week we are publishing articles by the honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, today we begin publishing articles by the cash prize and honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, today we begin publishing articles by the cash prize and honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, today we begin publishing articles by the cash prize and honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, today we begin publishing articles by the cash prize and honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreDear readers, today we begin publishing articles by the cash prize and honorable mention winners in the 2017 New Art Writing Challenge. Thank you to all of you who submitted your writing. Co-founder of the New Art Writing Challenge, Matt Kalasky, penned this lovely introduction for you…”I often use the analogy that art writing has become a fixed tool in the service of criticism. Like we are stuck using the same monkey wrench no matter what type of art we are talking about; no matter what type of art viewer we are; no matter what reader we are trying to reach. The winners of this year’s New Art Writing Challenge have, each in their own way, thrown aside the usual tools and have shown us the power of cooked spaghetti — or a flower — or a diary entry to talk about art. The best stopped trying to make sense of the work and started to unravel the art deeper into a personal mystery that epitomizes the experience of two humans looking at each other through art. This contest didn’t generate these new perspectives and manners of looking but rather it has illuminated the spectrum of writing that has always existed. This is an art writing landscape as complex, enigmatic, and empathetic as the art it examines. Get reading!” — Matt Kalasky, Co-founder, New Art Writing Challenge
Read MoreIn the midst of the current national crisis over the President’s Executive Order banning Muslims from seven countries from entering our country, and just now, the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, where are the voices of Philadelphia’s Arts and Culture leaders?
Read MoreResponding to Aldouri’s mandate to make art mean something again, not just produced for First Friday consumption, might we be able to create the requisite “distance from the imperative to make and exhibit” by rediscovering the energies that animated Plato, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and subsequent moral philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and secular humanists to engage in the agony of confronting art with morality, thereby suspending this malignant “superabundance of production”?
Read MoreI give this exhibit 3 out of 3 wishes, which means it made me wish for three things. It is a nice view of designs. The designs with bright, bold colors are like dresses I have never seen before. They are a fierce combination of a lot of different colors and shapes like chicken heads on straight fabric with a stained glass design on the ruffled fabric all on one dress! I wish there were kids’ fashions in the exhibit, too. I also wish that I could see how they are sold in Africa. What do the shops look like? Who gets to wear these clothes? I wish I could! They are interesting fashions and would make the person wearing them look bold and fierce. Three wishes means it made me imagine 3 things and that is why I love to go to museums!
Read MoreEach time I visited the space to see “Shotgun Inversion,” fellow onlookers seemed more or less unaware of or unconcerned by its status as a sculptural object. People leaned up against the wall or brushed their fingers against it as they passed, chain-link fence-style. A friend and I hung our arms over the waist-high partition on one side like it was a carnival booth. One visitor wondered aloud what she’d do if she dropped her phone on the other side of the structure.
Read MoreAccording to curator Anthony Elms, Rodney McMillian: The Black Show is an exhibition about transformation. You might prefer to call it an exhibition about flux. It is about fictions, literally literary, with numerous instances of homage to Octavia Butler, and metaphorically historical, as McMillian himself expounded in a preceding interview. It is about mutable spaces, fluid identities, the distance between material and perception, the so-called experience of this ‘reality,’ and the staking out of that reality itself as a constantly undulating landscape.
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