News: Our Managing Editor, Imani Roach, is closing up her laptop and moving on from Artblog. We will miss her terribly! Please help us thank Imani and send her on her way to a new career adventure! If you’ve been interviewed by Imani, written about by Imani, on a panel with Imani, or edited by Imani, and wish to send her a little note, email her at hello@theartblog.org.
Read MoreThe new Velocity Fund, organized by Temple Contemporary and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, announces its first round of annual awards today. The Fund brings money to makers in Philadelphia, especially to those who work without the umbrella of a larger organization to support them. Congratulations to those who receive this year’s grants! We look forward to many more years of this new financial support to Philadelphia artists!
Read MoreCongratulations to Yolanda Wisher and Philadelphia Contemporary, and to Lisa Marie Patzer and Icebox Project Space! These are two great appointments. Philadelphia Photo Arts Center has two great opportunities. And there’s more! It’s your news, delivered for you, from us. News you can use.
Read MoreArtblog’s Imani Roach and Roberta Fallon talked with Taji Ra’oof Nahl about his complex art practice that includes collaboration at its core. Nahl ran his own gallery in Old City from the late 1980s to 2010, where he showed, among others, Terry Adkins’ work. Taji was a friend of Adkins, and their practices both involve music, found objects, and researching under-known African American historical figures. In the interview Nahl tells Imani and Roberta about discovering the Colonial-era polymath, Benjamin Banneker, who became the subject of his installation in ‘Unlisted,’ the big multi-curator, multi-artist show at Icebox Project Space in 2016. We interviewed Taji Nahl at Moore College of Art and Design’s TGMR radio station on Sept. 14, 2017, and the podcast is 37 minutes long.
Read MoreIn Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s paintings, faces go from cartoony (masks, he says) to realistic. The subject is the body, the black male body, the black queer body. Jonathan, who got his MFA from PAFA in 2016, is soft-spoken but intense. Easy to talk with and direct in his answers, no BS. Four of his works are in the current Fleisher-Ollman exhibit, up to Jan. 28. Among other things in this conversation, Jonathan talks about his materials. His works are filled with materials-brio.
Read More“I did it because I could,” says Rocky 184, the one woman graffiti writer who gets a deep look in the movie. The self-proclaimed tomboy from Washington Heights is not alone in her unfocused motivation. “I was bored,” says Snake 1. It was not political, say a number of the others. The best, nuanced comment is from Cool Earl, who says “It was a sign of the times, a sign of our youth, our lack of funds and perhaps our lack of paternal guidance.”
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