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Posted by roberta

Darn! Contemporary galleries closed
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Don't go to MoMA expecting to see the Contemporary Collection installed in the second floor galleries. The whole area's shut for re-installation of a new collection, the Edward R. Broida Collection, a recent gift, with works from the 1960s forward. That installation opens May 3.

permanent link   roberta 8:46 AM
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Posted by roberta

Edvard Munch photo
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Christina's World by Wyeth (see previous post) may not have been travel-worthy but Munch's Little Mermaid, the triangular piece that the PMA just acquired and featured in a show over the winter travelled just fine to MoMA to appear in the Munch exhibition. It sits high on a wall and looks great.

The Munch exhibit is large and enlightening. The artist was a tortured soul who had at least one spell in a sanitorium. What I loved best were the prints and works on paper. It seemed to me that the artist got real in the smaller scale and with the more intimate processes, and so while he played out his familiar themes of love and loneliness, somehow the prints and drawing are fresh and have less grandstanding than the paintings.

The show's up until May 8 and is definitely worth a visit.

permanent link   roberta 8:43 AM
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Posted by roberta

Andrew Wyeth
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

The painting by Andrew Wyeth, which is NOT in the PMA's retrospective exhibition on the artist, sits on the wall at MoMA looking pretty great. The reason the piece is not in the PMA show? It is too fragile to travel. That may be but it looks in much the same condition as many of the Wyeth's I saw in the PMA show (i.e., pretty great shape)....

So here it is for you to view. Click the picture to see it bigger.

permanent link   roberta 8:34 AM
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Posted by roberta

3pennycast
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

I'm going to post a couple small items in the next hour or so. Just a few things from our trip to New York last weekend. For starters, I'll say that Three Penny Opera lived up to our worst expectations. It sucked. The leads had small voices that didn't project to the rafters; the class and politics theme (so near and dear to Brecht) was downplayed for a new gender theme that transformed Mack into a bi-sexual (and that was necessary because...?) The translation lost the gutteral Germanic monosyllabalism. In its place were lyrics and sentences that seemed passive and soft. (e.g., in the duet between Polly and Lucy who are fighting over Mack there is a moment when the music stops for a beat and the actresses face off and hurl -- in unison -- an epithet at each other. In the 1976 Joseph Papp production we saw at Lincoln Center, the ladies shouted "Shit Pot!" Here, the translation substitutes "Impossible!") It is a weakening that does nothing much for the production.)

Anyway, Mrs. Peachum, Ana Gasteyer, has THE voice to listen for. The staging is vaudevillian in that the actors come on, face the audience and sing. That's about it.

The use of neon signs is ok.

The whole production seems aimed at the lowest common denominator. Wherever they had the chance, whoever made decisions decided to create slapstick instead of finesse.

It may be the production for the times but at a time when class and politics are much on my mind I would have preferred this production to pump that theme up and run with it instead of substituting the more appealing (is it?) gender bending political theme which is soft ball as far as I'm concerned -- but which probably will sell tickets.

permanent link   roberta 8:29 AM
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Posted by libby

Bilderdepot Sammlung Essl Klosterneuburg I 2003, 2003. C-print, 60 by 70 inches (152 by 178 cm). © 2004 Candida Höfer / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

The proper date for when Candida Hofer will open at the ICA is May 3. (I got it wrong in the last post).

permanent link   libby 9:21 PM
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Posted by libby

the ramp window covered with a Zoe Strauss photo of a woman smoking crack

The Candida Hofers haven't yet gone up at the ICA (shipping problems? They're expected to go up May 1--correction: May 3) but the big news for us Philadelphia fans (oh, we're shameless) is local girl Zoe Strauss makes good, delivering her usual mix of art, charm and profanity.

Strauss is showing her photographs in the latest ICA ramp project. She's has shoehorned in her slides, a giant translucent image on the big windows and about 200 photos mounted on planks on the long wall (they will be rotated in, with 33 up at a time).


Strauss on the ICA ramp (in the rose-colored shirt) talking about her work

On opening night, Strauss was sporting a rose colored shirt over her usual tee and jeans. Dressups. I can honestly say, without a bit of local boosterism, that the Q&A; between Strauss and ICA Assistant Curator Elyse Gonzales, was the most entertaining moment of the members walkthrough.

Gonzales asked Strauss how she felt about being in so private a venue as the ICA. "It's definitely not who my primary audience is. But the space does have lots of windows."

Of the blowup of the crack-smoker on the window she said "It was fucking torture to do it." But she said it was important for her that that image change the degree of visibility throughout the day. Both inside and out, people could look at and look through the photo at the same time.


Some of these photos will come down in the course of the show to be mounted on telephone poles around Philadelphia

Strauss said she will make public the 200 mounted photos included in the exhibit by nailing them to telephone poles throughout the city as they get rotated out.

Not that Strauss doesn't want to be in the ICA. She said she did and added, "Who doesn't want to be loved?"

Talking about the slide show, she explained that it started as a works in progress, but has evolved into a full-fledged art work at the same time that it remains in progress. "Keep looking at it because it's really good and I think you'll like it," she said.


The slide show at the ICA; a rug is on the floor!

Talking about the issues in working with the ICA ramp space, she said, "It's like a frigid icebox," and then explained she meant, besides the geometry, both the temperature and the light. "Not much yellow comes in." To warm things up a bit, she had carpet installed on the landing where the slide show is.

I don't remember who asked Strauss the $24,000 question: How do you develop such intimacy with your subjects.

Strauss said, "I don't have a good answer for that. ...I always ask and there's a little give and take," which lasts perhaps five minutes. Almost every one of her subjects is a complete stranger. Probably the only answer to the question is talk to Strauss yourself for five minutes.

She said all the photos were taken with her annual under-I-95 installation in mind. If you don't know about it, it's May 6 this year, 1-3 p.m. at Front and Mifflin under the interstate, rain or shine, in which Ms. Zoe Strauss returns her street photography (why isn't it called people photography?) to the street and the people.



I'm going back to the ICA once the Hofers are up. The stuff on the first floor and in the project room were full of documentary material. But on the fly, some highlights were the funny, nostalgic reconstruction of Nils Norman and Stephan Dillemuth's artist-run space (above) and an Andrea Fraser video, both downstairs...


Sigardardottir (figure on the right) is talking about her portable landscape

and upstairs, Katrin Sigurdardottir's unfolding landscape-in-a-box.

permanent link   libby 9:27 AM
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Posted by libby

Post from Dennis Meredith

[I got this email from our friends Dennis and Joni, who retired to their cabin in the woods of North Carolina just a week ago. -- Libby]


Fire damage, viewed from the cabin

Murr, Libby,
Thought you'd be interested in this account of our harrowing first week in the cabin:

We'd moved into the cabin Tuesday, April 11. All our worldly possessions were crammed into the existing structure, while around us workmen hammered and sawed away putting on a new addition to give us more room. On Wednesday afternoon, Joni went out for a routine golf cart ride around Chinquapin, the 300-acres that surround our ten-acre plot. She came bursting back into the cabin to call 911, saying she'd seen the beginning of a forest fire -- an alarming event, given that we'd had no rain forweeks, and loggers working in the area had left dense piles of dry brush.

We evacuated immediately to the Christmas tree farm on the main road, and within minutes a Forestry Service truck came careening up the road and into Chinquapin. Soon followed half-a-dozen fire trucks and a trailer truck hauling a bulldozer. A spotter plane arrived to circle overhead. Many neighbors showed up to offer us help, to gossip, and to tell stories of other fires that had swept through the area over the decades.

Since the cabin wasn't threatened, and darkness was falling, we retreated to a motel in Wilkesboro. The next morning, we arrived back to find the fire under control. The firemen had contained it on three sides within roads, and on a fourth the bulldozer had cut a firebreak through the woods. About 10 acres had burned.

We patrolled the area over the next day, and watched the remaining smoking embers die out. We thought it was all over.

Fire Number 2

Then on Friday, the forest ranger called, warning us to get out immediately; that smoke had been reported rising from the area. We grabbed whatever essentials we could and took off at high speed over the gravel road leading out. We drove into dense smoke, and as we neared the entrance to Chinquapin, flames were rising on both sides of the road. I was vaguely aware of a truck parked beside the road, and Joni saw a man walking up from an area where the fire was burning. We assumed he was a forest ranger.

This time the fire was far more serious. It had jumped the road and the firebreak; a dry wind had begun to gust; and nothing stood between the fire and our cabin. We stopped out by the main road to wait. Fire trucks began to arrive again, but ominously this time they all stopped there. The firefighters had to develop a strategy for a fire that was out of control in extremely dangerous dry, windy conditions. The trucks showed the names of many towns from miles around, so this was a fire that required marshalling everybody available. We heard that the rangers were evacuating several nearby developments.


A bright yellow water bomber flew over and dropped the first of what would be many loads of water skimmed from a nearby lake

A 30-minute window

The lead Forestry Service ranger gravely warned us that they had about 20 to 30 minutes until the flames reached the cabin. They weren't sure they could save it. Shortly, though, the bulldozer backed off its trailer and began moving off into the smoke. The firefighter was going to drive it right down the road that by this time was probably blazing on both sides. The spotter plane arrived and began circling.

Still another hot spot

Smoke abruptly began to rise from an entirely different area, and we were told that a second fire had sprung up. A bright yellow water bomber flew over and dropped the first of what would be many loads of water skimmed from a nearby lake.

The "stager," a very nice lady named Sissy -- who brought her charming young daughter Savannah to help her -- said she'd be happy to answer any questions and help us in any way she could. She also asked us to move back to a nearby church, since there would soon be a great many trucks and firefighters arriving. She said "Now, I have to warn you there will be all kinds of commotion in a minute, with all kinds of folks coming in and hollering at each other. But that's normal. Just don't let it worry you."


An old firetruck to the rescue.

Indeed, volunteer firefighters, men and women, began arriving in pickups and pulling on yellow coveralls and donning hardhats. The lead Forestry Service ranger called a safety meeting. As they gathered around him, one firefighter cracked "Yeah, if you want to be safe, don't go in." The ranger told the men and women to be prepared to move quickly; not to pay out so much hose they couldn't leave in a second. Whipped by the wind, the fire was moving very fast and burning very hot.

Joni commented that it felt so surreal, sitting on a blanket among Christmas trees, beneath a beautiful old oak, butterflies flitting about us, and watching people going to risk their lives to stop a massive, uncontrolled fire.

A night of worry

Since it was growing dark, we decided we couldn't learn any more by staying, so we went to a motel. For the sake of our nerves, it's a good thing we did. A friend whose house overlooks the area said the flames lit up the night sky. All that evening in the motel, we pondered what we would do if we went back to find our cabin and possessions a smoldering ruin.

The next morning, having slept very little, we drove back. The lead Forestry Service ranger approached us. He smiled. He first apologized that the bulldozer had ruined the plantings around the cabin. I said we had absolutely no problem with that; I considered it free landscaping. Then he told us they had saved the cabin. Joni hugged the nearest firefighter.

The ranger said we could go in for a while, but although the fires had burned past the cabin, they were moving up the ridge across from us. So he wasn't quite sure it was safe. We followed a Forestry Service truck in, past acres of charred, smoking land. The masses of brush and grass were now reduced to ash.

We reached the cabin to find it intact but encircled by a wide gash of bare dirt where the bulldozer had cut a firebreak, clearing away all the bushes and all but the largest trees.


The fire heroes

Two small tanker trucks were parked beside it, and slumped on our picnic table were the soot-covered firefighters who had kept the fire from the cabin all night. It had come within 50 feet of the cabin. No doubt the flames on the hill overlooking the cabin had been huge, since the area was piled with dry brush from our logging.

The ranger told us the firefighters had only been able to stay to fight the fire because we had cleared the entire hill above the cabin except for a few hardwoods. Without a safe haven on the hill, the firefighters would have had to leave as the flames approached, and the cabin would have been lost.

Arson

He also told us that both fires -- the first one and the massive second one -- had been deliberately set. We realized that we had probably driven right past the arsonist on our second evacuation, since he couldn't have been a forest ranger; they had just received the alarm. Joni got the best look at him since I was driving, and she describes him as completely nondescript -- neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, young nor old. The ranger told us they will not likely catch him, since he must be seen in the act of setting the fire to be arrested and charged.

We thanked the firefighters profusely and cooked them a hot breakfast. I told them they were heroes, but they modestly mumbled something about "just doing their job." In fact, that was the response we invariably got from the firefighters when we thanked them all. Joni made it a particular point to holler out "Thank you!" anytime we passed a group.

Since the land around us had already burned out, the team that had saved the cabin moved on, leaving a spotter to make sure the fire didn't double back to ignite the unburned brush below the cabin. The forest ranger told Joni we could stay with the permission of the "incident commander." She rode out to the staging area to ask him, and to tell him we'd likely seen the arsonist.

We settled in for the rest of the day to watch the smoke rise from fires on the next ridge and a helicopter water-bomb the hot spots. We had electricity but no phone, because the fire had melted the junction box. Since the cabin had been closed when the fire burned past it, we could detect only a slight, lingering smoky smell inside.

We watched firefighters on the other ridge work to save two houses there. We also heard them on the hill above us, as they worked to save our barn from a fire that burned out large piles of brush and trees on the other side of the hill.

They were apparently winning that battle and in good spirits, because we heard them playing with the loudspeaker. One firefighter tested it as the world's loudest turkey call, issuing loud gobble-gobbles that echoed across the valley. I could not identify other noises I heard over the loudspeaker.

The cabin also gained a bit of media attention. It was a backdrop for a segment for the local TV news, and a photo of the cabin with burning brush in the foreground ran in the Winston-Salem Journal.

Despite the fact that the area had largely burned out, a firefighter patrolled Chinquapin all night on a four-wheeler to watch for flareups. And all Easter Sunday, trucks equipped with firefighters and equipment passed the cabin on search-and-destroy missions for remaining hotspots.

Log cabin, graves rescued

When we toured Chinquapin, we discovered that the firefighters had made a stand at its century-old log cabin and had saved it. The fire had burned right up to the road that runs past it, but they'd stopped the fire from jumping to the cabin. The two small gravestones nearby that mark the resting place of children who died in 1918 -- one of influenza and one of pneumonia -- were also untouched.


View from the porch (that's Joni)

There is no longer any smoke; only a vast acreage of charred forest and a slight smell of charred wood. Fortunately, the fire had remained a ground fire, rather than a "crown" fire that destroys trees. In fact, the trees have begun to leaf out normally.

While the area looks bleak now, we're told that, in fact, the fire will benefit the forest, rapidly returning nutrients to the soil and killing off pests. And within a growing season or two, there will be little evidence of the fire, except for some charred logs.

The wildlife is quite adept at avoiding fire, and there was only one report of a dead deer. We saw a very handsome male quail inspecting the unburned brush pile below the cabin, where he'll no doubt establish a covey. And on one trip to inspect damage, we saw a blacksnake slither across the road and into the ash, having avoided the fire and now looking for an unburned refuge. The large dogwoods by our stream were spared and are in full bloom.

The statistics

In the end, about 430 acres burned, no houses were lost, and none of the 180 firefighters were injured.

This story came to a fitting end for me just as I took a break from finishing writing it. I walked out on the porch to see a smoking ember flame up in the woods above the cabin. It had been fanned by a wind that turned out to be the beginning of a thunderstorm. I stood and watched with considerable satisfaction as the rain drowned that last fire.

I've attached some photos of the firefighters and the fire, showing how close it came to the cabin.

I wonder what our second week in the cabin will bring.
Dennis

--Posted by Dennis Meredith

permanent link   libby 9:16 PM
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Posted by libby

Shelley, my camera strap and some guy
Originally uploaded by libbyrosof.

The Philly art scene gets a video trailer of love from Shelley Spector here. With typical Spector enthusiasm, she narrates a quick tour that goes from her gallery (Spector Gallery) to First Friday in Old City to Space 1026 to the Art Museum, and even offers a plug for Rodin (not to mention assumes The Thinker pose). Cameos of Space 1026er Andrew Jeffrey Wright and of Isaiah Zagar in his disputed garden round out the picture.

permanent link   libby 2:59 PM
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Posted by roberta

Threepenny Opera - Review - Theater - New York Times


Neon over broadway. Alan Cummings as Mack the Knife, Cyndi Lauper as Pirate Jenny. Courtesy of NY Times audio slide show.

Steve and I bought tickets months ago because we love the music, had seen a marvelous production at Lincoln Center many years ago...and thought, with Wallace Shawn as providing a new translation -- he of My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd St. -- it would have to be another great production.

Apparently they've "Cabareted" it up with crotch grabbing and sexual slithering. They've put neon signs behind the actors as stage decor...and we'll let you know what we think on Monday. I'm holding my judgment but I'll say right now that this is not my vision of Mack the Knife.

permanent link   roberta 8:30 AM
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Posted by libby

The British Invasion by Washington D.C. artist Katherine Kisa, who was born in Nairobi and earned a couple of degrees in the sciences before she switched to a career in art; this is one of a series of assemblage pieces about music.

The surprise about the show closing after tomorrow at ArtJaz Gallery was it seemed to be related to a photography book by Grammy-winning recording artist Will Downing. The book, “Unveiled,” included photos that Downing took of art by African American artists. The show on the wall was of the same artists who were included in the book (the images are from the Unveiled exhibit).

It turns out ArtJaz is the book's publisher. When Downing approached the gallery about publishing the book, the gallery responded by saying how about you include the artists, because the gallery was more interested in promoting artists than promoting a book, Brown said (ah, a mission near and dear to our hearts, here at artblog). So a deal was struck and the book, which includes lots of portraits, some of them of recording-industry people, is now in print (available here) on the ArtJaz website, .


Moses by Kimmy Cantrell, ceramic and metal; Cantrell was born in Georgia and is largely self-taught. He has been making art full-time since 1994.

That's not the only new business going on at ArtJaz. Brown said the exhibit first showed in Chicago at the two-year-old Gallery Guichard. The two galleries have formed a partnership--an outgrowth of ArtJaz representing artist Andre Guichard for the past six years.

I asked how the Chicago exhibit went, and she said, "my impression of Chicago is that people are into the arts, there. People came out in December!" Even though the book wasn't yet available, she said they sold a lot of them. Brown said the gallery has some more Chicago-related exhibits on her schedule, including work by Chicago artist Joyce Owens, who was born in Philadelphia. Her white-on-black portraits on boxes look interesting and provocative. I'm looking forward to the show.


Will Downing's photo of Al Jarreau at the piano

Brown also mentioned that this was the second year that ArtJaz was invited to participate in the 10-years and still counting Black Fine Arts Show in New York, which is organized by the same people who do the Philadelphia antiques show.

permanent link   libby 1:46 PM
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Posted by libby

I admired my friend Sandy's little digitally produced portrait that he uses on some food blog. Then I noticed lots of the contributors to the blog had such portraits. How, I wondered did they do it? You guys out there are probably all so hip, you know about this, but I didn't. Here's the url and here's the new me. It only took a few minutes.

permanent link   libby 12:48 PM
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Posted by libby

I just added an email I received a couple of days ago from artist H.G. Hovgimyan to the end of an old post about the Faux Show. If you're interested in borrowed art, appropriation art and shared art, Hovgimyan's explanation of Liz Rywelski's contribution to the show might be something you want to check out.

permanent link   libby 12:41 PM
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Posted by roberta

Ray Yoshida
Originally uploaded by sokref1.


Ray Yoshida's OOFAH!, 2002, (det) collage on paper. Delights cut from the funny papers into glyph-like shapes, the big work (48" x 72") is an inscrutable message from beyond. Click to see it bigger.

Up since March, Rock Paper Scissors at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery goes down April 29 and if you're looking for the "ohmygod" show this weekend (in addition to the new ICA shows featuring Zoe Strauss and the Spector show (featuring Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Adam Wallacavage) which I predict will also fit into this exclamatory category -- run by and get an eyeful of James Castle's string-stitched abstractions, Ray Yoshida's spot-on funny and beautiful paper glyphs (see top image), Ray Johnson with a piece that prefigures Raymond Pettibon, and great work by the new kids in the stable, Anthony Campuzano, Jina Valentine, Thomas Vance, and Isaac Resnikoff.




Ray Johnson, Untitled Caveman with Daffodil, 1982. It's the drawing but also the words that are Pettibon-like.

There's amazing works in the exhibition (other notable artists are Bruce Pollock, Ruth Thorne Thomsen, Joseph Cornell, Terry Allen, Philadelphia Wireman, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Paul Laster, Marcy Hermansader, Purvis Young, Otesia Harper, Anne Ryan and Jess!). And if your idea of great collage is Hanna Hoch whose works I'd seen in the Comic Grotesque show at the Neue Museum last year -- and they were great-- paper collages on paper --this show stretches the definition of collage into the wild blue yonder.

Here you'll find sculpture that's pieced together, drawings pieced together from multiple sheets of paper, a stitched fabric collage and two puzzle pieces glued together into 3-D constructions. It's great! And it made me realize the potential that collage with 3-D options offered--call it a cousin of assemblage art but not so precious and self-conscious. These works are by turns amusing, hallucinatory, brute and just plain beautiful.




Thomas Vance's Tumble

If you loved Thomas Vance's piece at Arcadia, there are three more such works here and each one is a delight of cosmic cardboard engineering. James Castle is of course exquisitely forlorn and, here, amazingly conceptual so it would seem.


Luis Romero's Untitled

Luis Romero is a new discovery to me and his works are wild and great: They look like Aztec-runic designs made with build ups of obsessive ink patterns on layers of paper glued together to make topographical-looking channels and streams.




Anthony Campuzano's Portrait of St. Germain

Anthony Campuzano has a new word-work that's a sad tale about a man with no direction, no shadow, who appeared maybe and disappeared it seems and nobody knows if he left a trace or not. Portrait of St. Germain is weird and wonderful and filled with Campuzano's usual pitch-perfect lettering and existential questionings.




Isaac Resnikoff's The Border

Isaac Resnikoff's piece The Border is forlorn. The stitched together clothes-evoking fabrics in red white and blue are a human fence. The batting inside is peeking through here and there and and the whole made me think of clothes hanging on poles in backyards and quilts coming undone and many other sadnesses in which people are kept apart who want to be together.




Jina Valentine's Le Sange Froid

Jina Valentine's piece is a photo (I believe or maybe it's a drawing, a little hard to tell) over which is a layer of tracing paper with drawn designs and cut designs of a lacey delicacy. The piece, called "le sange froid" is veiled and mysterious.

In sum, it's another wonderful show at this gallery and a bringing together of older artists with young ones that works for all involved.

There's more pix on flickr.

permanent link   roberta 11:04 AM
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Posted by libby

Deer Head Doily by Shannon Robinson, doily and machine stitching, 2005

This year digital processes have taken over in the world of fiber and in quilts, but it almost seems irrelevant to me, except that warps and woofs talk especially loudly to the weavers and quilters and beaders who think in pixilated grids.

For the most part, the digi stuff is just a tool and a process. (Of course fiber folks are process crazy, just like print folks, and some of these artists are both.)

What's relevant are the beauty and variety, and the input into the Contemporary Art conversation.


left to right, Lisa Whitley from Linden, NJ; Barbara Askew from Detroit; Bettye Blackston from Linden; Venetta Harbin from Jersey City and Gloria Saundra Blackston (Bettye's sister-in-law) from Yeadon, PA, posing in front of their favorite quilt, Kauri 7, by Kathyanne White. All but one (I think) are quilters.

So if you've snored your way through this month's fiber shows (see previous post), it's your last chance to wake up and look around. The out-of-town fiber lovers who I met in the galleries, are beating you to it.

This year's fiber exhibits, which are at a number of venues (see previous post), confirm that the selvages have unraveled and anything goes. Okay, so it's not news, but it sure is fun to look at.


Number Five, by Pat dipaula Klein, hand-stitched cotton floss on linen, 2005


At DaVinci (I'm starting here because it's all local artists), some witty contemporary work from Shannon Robinson and Pat dipaula Klein stood out. Klein sticks close to traditional technique and materials to make imagery that suggests the fecundity of the natural world via beautiful, cartoon imagery. Robinson goes outside the box with her compressed brick of unraveled baby-blanket wool and her Deer Head Doily, embroidered with machine stitching.

I'm not sure why deer are on every young person's agenda, but they seem to have become the national symbol for nature under attack, innocence, and purity. I keep seeing deer heads--in glass, in paint, in graphite, cast in resin. It's not like this was the first generation to survive Bambi. Robinson's deer head, on a doily, strikes me as a stand-in for a teenage girl's horse as well as a wild beast in the parlor. It has a saint's halo behind, making it look a lot like a hunting trophy on a board.


Water Under the Bridge by Marie H. Elcin, embroidery on cotton, 2005

Marie H. Elcin's If Only I Could See Under the Surface, withthe word "forget" stitched into the waves, also felt contemporary in the way tight stiches create a loose network over the surface, and the way language is incorporated.


Pam RuBert's Whine and Dine at Sushi Zen

Cartoon and wit also turned up at the Philadelphia Art Alliance where the official theme was communication. Fortunately, artists will be artists and not comply. I loved witty Whine and Dine at Sushi Zen from Pam RuBert of Springfield, Mo. The stitching and material choices are meticulous and beautiful. The piece communicated just fine with its slice of contemporary life cartoon that would look swell on a New Yorker cover.


detail from Friendly Fire from Jon Eric Riis, 65 x 85 inches

And while I'm discussing what work looked utterly contemporary, I have to add to the list Jon Eric Riis and his tapestry "Friendly Fire," at Snyderman, made of metallic thread with a blood spot of red Saworvski crystals. The work cuts both ways, being a serious comment on war at the same time that it comments on fashions in politics and on the body.


A Seasonal Spectrum (top) and A Quirky Attraction by B.J. Adams, free motion machine embroidery; these get high points for their incredible technique and the texture the layers of machine stitches provide

On another note, the shows had lots of crossover artists, like B.J. Adams, local artist Nancy Herman, Patricia Malarcher at both Klein and Snyderman, and Jette Clover and Jeanne Williamson at both Klein and the Art Alliance. Adams uses meticulous drawing combined with freehand machine embroidery to create images that pop. Herman is using felt.


Super Sized by Ed Bing Lee

Ed Bing Lee was at Snyderman as well as at DaVinci. At Snyderman, the ultra-amazing macrame artist of all times offered Pop hamburger and hotdog sculptures, knotted, while at DaVinci he showed a more austere 3-D take on a mineral. Last time we looked at Lee, his hamburgers and hotdogs were Pop 2-D portraits in macrame. I'm thinking watch out, Oldenburg.


detail of Best Wishes by Amy Orr, at the Painted Bride, bleached chicken bones and beads on velvet; Orr stated that the bones series was an outgrowth of 9/11. What I like is the way the beads and bones look like constellations in the night sky.

Some of the artists in InLiquid's Exhibit 4 also showed up elsewhere--Amy Orr (Snyderman), and Jacqueline Unanue (DaVinci).

There may have been more crossovers, but those were the ones I caught.


Jeanne Williamson, Orange Construction Fence Series #28, monoprinted, hand painted, hand stamped, machine stitched

What seemed most prevalent was how fiber is being used to explore the same kinds of issues that are elsewhere in the art world. The Minimalist factory-made quality has had some influence, even in fiber, which has a reputation as the last bastion of the crafted and hand-made. There's some synergy between minimalist grids and the quilt square, which gets some witty treatment in Williamson's two meditations on orange construction fencing, at the Art Alliance and at Klein, but needle-less to say, grids were woven into every show.


Karen Perrine, Still Water

Continuing the theme of art movements migrating into fiber, we have impressionism, most spectacularly in Karen Perrine's Still Water quilt at Klein. Also Deborah Anderson's Fall Rain/Rain Fall picks up some impressionism and pushes it through some Asian, reductive seive to come up with her evocative Fall Rain/Rain Fall.


Kim Kamens, Max, thread and nails

Even traditional drawing makes it into fiber art, exemplified by Kim Kamens' Max. The nail heads rescue what would otherwise be just an exercise in technique. In the same vein were Shisuzko Kimura's airy croquis in needle and thread.


Mary Austin's Look out! crocheted and beaded, 2006

For the traditional mix of fiber and clothing, standouts were Maris Fisher Krasnegor's Leafy Jabot (felt) for its color alone and Mary Austin's fear-factor Look out! hat with eyes all around the head, both at DaVinci.


Lisa Lee Peterson's Pop Art

Narrative also was part of the mix. One that I loved was Lisa Lee Peterson's Pop Art at Snyderman, an autobiographical piece that shamelessly borrows from Pop and comics in telling its story of a father (a shameless pun on Pop) who warns his daughter against a career in art.


Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik's Roadside Shed, inspired by Japanese tin sheds and made with overdyed kimono liners

Then there are the color meditations, Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik's beautiful Roadside Shed at the Art Alliance and Jeanne Butler's White 10.92 at Klein. Take that, Robert Ryman.


detail of Bhutina Abu-Milhern's The Needle Vanquished the Sewer 3

For some Middle Eastern flavor, check out Israeli embroidery/sculpture artist Lily Poran, who is inspired by traditional tattoos and Middle Eastern stitchery techniques, and Palestinian Israeli Bhutina Abu-Milhern, whose contemporary stitched, painted and drawn-on shirt looked like a cross between a crossword puzzle and a travel sewing kit.


Mi-Kyoung Lee's untitled flowers as columns

On the sculpture front, I'd have to send you to Snyderman all the way. Mi-Kyoung Lee's large and small red stretch flowers, Piper Shepard's filligree of fabric, Lace-Like, Hisako Sekijima's plant-fiber sculptures and Lewis Knauss's grass-inspired landscape were standouts. But there was more of interest--so much more that I really didn't digest it all.


KathyAnne White's Kauri 7, influenced by tree bark in New Zealand (Art Alliance); it is also the backdrop behind the group of women at the top

It's pattern and texture that rule in the world of fiber. KathyAnne White's texture and exuberant shapes were the bar-none favorite of the troupe of women at the Art Alliance. Even when fiber goes digital, which much of it has, with digital photos applied to fabric, digital weaving and knitting, digital embroidery output, etc., pattern and texture distinguish fiber from most painting and much sculpture.

I thought I'd be able to tell you which show I loved the most if you only had time for one. Alas, this I cannot do. It depends on what you're looking for. I'd go to both quilt shows if quilting were my subject.

I'd go to Snyderman for breadth and depth as well as sculpture.

I'd go to DaVinci to see where the local scene fits (and it does) in the larger fiber picture.

Take your pick. But pick and go.

I'm in the process of putting my fiber photos up at Flickr here, but at the time of this writing, they are not yet all up, nor are they completely labeled.

permanent link   libby 6:07 PM
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Posted by libby

Shannon Robinson's Baby Blanket #1, at the show of woorks by Philadelphia-area artists at the DaVinci Art Alliance. (2005, unraveled baby blanket packed into a brick form)

If you didn't know April was Fiber Arts Month in Philadelphia, you are not alone. But this is an event with a national reputation, and fiber artists from all over the country do know it's happening. Wherever I go, I meet people who have traveled great distances to see the work.

Here's some of what's happening:

-5th International Fiber Biennial at Snyderman-Works Galleries

-Fiber Artists Philadelphia at the DaVinci Art Alliance

-Material Speaks: The New Quilt at the Esther Klein Art Gallery, an exhibit from the Art Quilt Network / New York.

-The 7th ArtQuilts at the Sedgwick this year not at the Sedgwick at all, but at the Philadelphia Art Alliance

-Inliquid.com presents Exhibition 4: Fiber Works at the Painted Bride.

In addition, the energizer bunny of local fiber artists, Kathryn Pannepacker provided the following info about some events in which she is involved:

-upcoming on Saturday, the second trolley tour this month to see and hear from Pannepacker about "Wall of Rugs: the global language of textiles", a painted mural (7ft x 500 ft long) of textiles representing 43 countries, followed by a studio visit. 9am-noon. Call (215)685-0754, for more information and to reserve your seat

-Project:Loom, an installation & community learning project of weaving and recycling with Pannepacker, at PROVENANCE/American Soil, 1610 Fairmount Avenue, Phila:

Sat.& Sun. May 6th & 7th,10-11:30p.m: pick frame/loom, bagels and coffee;12-2p.m: weaving workshop; $50.inc frame/loom & workshop. Yes, you weave and take home your frame/loom weaving!

Thursday and Fridays in April & May: 10-5p.m on-site weaving project/open studio drop-in for learners

permanent link   libby 10:43 AM
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Posted by roberta

On the art page in this week's Weekly is a piece by Lex Chalat about Lineage Gallery. Lineage is a transplant from Burlington, VT that moved to Philly soon after Jonathan Levine's Tin Man Alley decamped. (The newly dubbed Jonathan Levine Gallery is now in New York). Both galleries show similar art in the illustration/album cover genre. In fact both galleries have Mark Ryden and Jeff Soto in their stables. Chalat's is an opinion piece and while I don't agree that Lineage is the best new thing in town, nor is it the first time we've seen such art, check out the article.

And in the Editor's Choice section of the Listings, you'll find my short review of Transformer, the West Collection group exhibit at Main Line Art Center. I told you about other aspects of the show in a previous post. And see lots of pix on my flickr site.

"Transformer"

One of the most enjoyable exhibits by nonlocal artists this season is "Transformer," the traveling theme show at Main Line Art Center with art from the West Collection in Oaks, Pa. The show is postmodern to the core, with pieces both self-conscious and self-consciously concerned with the art history canon. Happily, the works rise above that with hallucinatory contemporary visions that manage to raise social issues.


Luis Gispert's Untitled cheerleader ascending riffs on religious painting.

Luis Gispert's staged photographs of what look like levitating cheerleaders replay scenes from medieval paintings of the annunciation or the resurrection. Gispert strips religion from his work and sets the young Asian and Latino squad members with their gold bracelets and sculpted nails against a seamless void of emerald green. The photos are visual seductions that completely lack spirituality. But like Rauf Mamedov's five-photo Games on Window Sills—which stages Dutch master tableaux using a cast of Down syndrome actors—Gispert's works are consumed with humanism and thoughts about the sacredness and wonder of human beings. Other works in the show—all outstanding—are by Long-Bin Chen, Sharon Core, James Hyde, Robert Lazzarini, Vik Muniz and Eve Sussman. "Transformer" will make you think. The show's both incendiary and a visual delight.

Free. Through May 3. Main Line Art Center, Old Buck Rd. and Lancaster Ave., Haverford. 610.525.0272.

permanent link   roberta 11:00 AM
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Light Bulb 10, by Amanda Means

The highlights Amanda Means' photogram images at Gallery 339 are portraits of individual light bulbs.

Their magic is partly in the structures within. They are delicate and intricate. In some cases they look like carousels or old-fashioned appliance parts, in others like little figures. And when they carry the live electrical charge, they have the magic of Mesmerism and auras.


Light Bulb 00051C, by Means

But the rest of the magic is in the lightbulb as a head, a portrait from life, the narrow neck, the bulb on top. It's all so fragile and in constant danger. This is what gives this work its life--that plus the colors in the background.

permanent link   libby 10:01 PM
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Eric Fischl
Originally uploaded by sokref1.


Eric Fischl speaking at Penn. Fischl is left and Alexi Wolfe, who introduced him and here is asking some questions, is right.

As Dan mentions in his post about Eric Fischl, two -- not just one -- big, bad-boy New York artists came to Penn last week to speak about their work. Mostly the talks by Jeff Koons (see Libby's post) and Eric Fischl were spin by mid-career artists who are now writing themselves (or attempting to) into the history books the way they want to be seen.




Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles



Based on the chronological slide show of his sculpture and recent paintings, Koons inadvertently demonstrated that the energy has gone out of his works. Early pieces were and still are interesting, edgy, funny and sociologically-reverberant. In my book, the gilded porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) is Koons at his best.

The most recent works are an embarrassment -- multi-layered and chaotic-looking paintings. The artist knew they were weak because he kept describing what was in them -- you truly couldn't make it out because of the jumble.

The most interesting thing the artist had to say was, paraphrasing, "Don't drop the ball when it's passed to you," meaning, if you want fame, fortune and glory, seize it, and don't defer or put off what may turn out to be a golden opportunity. Amen.

As for Fischl, the slides he showed were, with one exception, not his own works. Fischl was making the case for figurative art -- and for the figure in art. Why he thought he needed to do that at a time of great renewed interest in figuration became clear near the end when he put up the one slide of his own work, the Tumbling Woman statue he made commemorating the victims of 9-11. This statue, which the artist made as an elegy to the victims, appeared in a corporate lobby in New York and was quickly removed because people objected (it was too graphic, it raised too many horrible memories, it was dark and ugly and too big, etc). I think Fischl may be smarting from that rejection and his slide lecture was a way of dealing.




Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman.



The whole talk was a rumination and heartfelt at that. It was bitter and angry and poignant especially in its ending.

Here is how the artist ended. He was making a case that art used to be the mediator between the audience and what could not be seen:

Maybe art is inferior to the needs of the culture. My final point, and it's probably way too histrionic, is that removing the body from the experience means we can't empathize. Therefore we can tolerate Abu Ghraib. It's amazing when you think of art -- even modernist art -- was allied with politics (eg feminism, etc) and there wasn't so much that was big going on.

Then we get to a point when something really big happens (9-11, and Abu Ghraib -- and now we're a country that tortures people) and we're mute (i.e., art is mute).

Did I bum you guys out? Anyway, I'm going to stop there because I don't know what to do with it....

Libby and I have always known that you must write your own history. We do it all the time in our art. It was most interesting to see that we small potatoes artists are on the same page with these big bad old boys for once in our lives.

permanent link   roberta 9:11 AM
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