Perhaps 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 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 More2016 Pew Fellow Tiona McClodden makes documentary films and videos and sculptural environments. She’s also made music videos and her work is political, exploring gender, race and under-known history. In our talk she tells me about selecting Philadelphia as a place where community she found a community of black working artists. The interview was recorded live at the Galleries at Moore’s radio booth on July 7, 2016.
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 MoreJamar Nicholas wears a number of hats, as do many artists. He’s a teacher — he teaches narrative storywriting at Drexel and has taught at Moore College of Art and Design and Arcadia University; he is Fine Arts Curatorial and Administrative Assistant at Arcadia University Art Gallery, and he makes his art — drawings of narratives that become comic books about superheroes, like the Hip Hop Cop Detective Boogaloo, which ran — daily — in the Philadelphia Metro in 2015.
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.
Read MoreArtblog contributor and editor, Flora Ward, talks with me about her recent reviews of two exhibitions that intrigued her greatly. We also talk about her journey to Philadelphia from South Carolina, Toronto and elsewhere. Listen to the 18-minute conversation we had at the lovely Radio booth at the Galleries at Moore.
Read MoreKrimes seems to humanize art theory by putting it through a process of deep reading, personal reflection, and even letting the words suggest alternative readings. His current body of work, on view at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University, is the result of this approach, his intuitive pathfinding, and chance.
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