phillyarts

The Philadelphia Art Alliance

February 2^nd-April 21^st, 2012

by Isabel Oliveres

 

Fiber art is difficult to define: from cross-stitching to woven palm fronds, nearly any manually manipulated natural or synthetic material can fall under its banner, and therein lies its openness. A Sense of Place embraces the diverse potential of fiber art to examine the relationship between identity and location. Currently on display at the Philadelphia Art Alliance—and part of the FiberPhiladelphia initiative—the exhibit includes works by eight female textile artists who have created pieces directly connected to a specific locale, either in physicality or in memory.

 

Upon entering you are confronted by Pat Hickman’s Circumambulate, a symmetrical progression of “wood teeth” (pieces of preserved wood that result when a tree falls in a river) covered in hog casings. The piece occupies three walls, forcing the viewer to explore the space in order to appreciate the intricate way in which the wood teeth converge upon and explode from the center wall. Wendeanne Ke’aka Stitt’s striking collection Niho Mano is a modern interpretation of kappa cloth, a traditional Hawaiian fabric made from tree bark. She uses dyes from California to bring intense color to the bark, integrating her current location in the Bay Area with her past in Hawaii.

 

Ke-Sook Lee’s Green Hammock is particularly moving: US Army nurses’ uniforms are deconstructed and repurposed to form a hammock, from which thin, colorful threads hang to the floor. The piece evokes the care and hard work of war nurses, who help create a safe and caring haven for wounded soldiers, and it also recalls Lee’s experience of having lived through the Korean War. It presents the paradox of the compassionate female placed in a space of armed conflict—trying to provide comfort and care—and the impossibility of truly doing so while at war. Amy Orr’s approach to social commentary is dramatically different but equally engaging. In House of Cards Orr uses a myriad of credit cards, gift cards and IDs to create an intricate dollhouse, showing us how the home in the United States has been built on consumerism, and debt in particular. The exhibit also includes work by Marian Bijlanga, Marcia Docter, Barbara Lee Smith and Bhati Ziek.

 

Isa Oliveres was born and raised in Mexico City, though she currently lives in Philadelphia where she studies English and History. 

Arturo Vega Lie, Cheat, Steal El52 presents for the first time after 30 years of production, the artistic work of the artist Arturo Vega. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, from before the time of color TV, and resident of New York City since the 70’s, his work is influenced by his own life, Rock and Punk. [...]

STEVEN BARIS & KIM BECK reviewed in the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER.

• PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER   –    LINK

A lesson on WORK and TASTE by Ira Glass. Animated TEXT. Check it out.

In the subset of literature that, for no lack of you-pick-it labels, goes by “detective fiction” or “crime fiction” or “mystery novels” or a half-dozen others, one of the classic amuse-bouches is that of the locked-room story. Depending on which absolutist promontory you stand on – my foothold, quite securely, is on the peak of crime fiction / police procedural, leaning more to the American hard-boiled than the Christie drawing-room mechanical – the locked room is either the epitome of brilliant writing and detection, or a slippery trope of gimmickry and trickery. I kind of like them, the way I like any good, clever puzzle, although they are often devoid of real characters in their slavish concentration on a narrative that is less whodunit or whydunit than howdunit.

To explain: While a locked-room mystery needn’t involve a murder, it usually does, just to up the ante. The story usually goes like this: Someone is noticeably missing, or an apartment-building neighbor detects “that smell,” or a landlord can’t get into a rented room, or the door to the den in an ancestral blue-blood manse can’t be opened and the key is nowhere to be found and Lord Grosvenor hasn’t been seen since dinner, or the high-tech computerized keypad (with iris ID) can’t be activated because nobody knows the PIN number. In all these cases, the door is broken down and, alas, a body is found, slumped over a desk, or at the center of the floor, or someplace instantly discoverable. But here’s the hump: the room was locked from the inside, yet the culprit is not inside, and somehow got out – but how? There are no signs of forced entry, or exit. How does one commit a murder (and sometimes in exotic, arcane fashion) in a locked room – often trying to make it look like suicide? How’d the killer get in, then get out? And what is it about the scene – or absent from the scene – that solves the mystery? (I’ve just finished one, an early Martin Beck procedural by the excellent Scandinavian team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, titled, appropriately enough, The Locked Room, an airier-than-usual foray for the writers, more in an 87th Precinct vein, especially one of those Ed McBain corkers involving the Isola cops’ devilish Moriarty, the Deaf Man. The Beck locked-room story has a less baroque solution than most, but, as with most, is far-fetched; many are just brain-twizzlers stretched to 200 pages, and many of them cheat a little by not giving you a pertinent detail, or by basing it all on facts or motivations that are, essentially, unrealistic. Still, the Beck is the one that got me to thinking.)

What hit me this time around, in my reading, is that far beyond being just an entertainment form – a disposable diversion that we read quickly, are engaged and entertained by and then almost immediately forget  – it is clear that locked-room mysteries are, in fact, metaphors. Actually, that realization merits a “duh.” But, while some or most will see the metaphor as one of an existentialist expression of life, I see it, for the purposes of our explorations here, as a metaphor for placeness and art, and of art-making, and even of art criticism. For years now, I’ve thought of the act of creating, whether it be writing or fine arts or even performance, as a painting of oneself into a corner and then finding one’s way out (or not); it used to be that it was important to find the exit path without leaving footprints in the wet paint, but these days that is no longer a necessity: some of the best art leaves tell-tale tread marks, and gladly and purposely smooshes the perfectly coated surface, in attempts at modern or post-modern “transparency.”

But, really, isn’t being an artist a lot more like finding oneself in the placeness of a room locked from the inside, alone, committing the “crime,” keeping the culprit world outside, and, in a sense, waiting for the curious and interest-piqued “detectives” to break down the door and discover you and your work, and your stage-posed ingenuity? And doesn’t the locked-room describe the art lover, who enters that mysterious place and finds a scene that needs “solving,” that demands an understanding of not only its methods but its meaning? Is not art appreciation, on its highest level, standing in a now-unlocked room – one opened by you – and through not just looking but seeing, not just inventorying but empathizing, not just looking for the weapon but also both superficial and deep-rooted motives, finding the answer? The resonance of this placeness is both in the locking and the unlocking of a room we need to be in.

curiositycounts:

In 1962, legendary graphic designer Saul Bass illustrated his only children’s book, which spent decades as a prized out-of-print collector’s item. Half a century later, Rizzoli is reprinting Henri’s Walk to Paris.

Senior Fibers & Material Studies major Rachel Barnes will be having her B.F.A. exhibition this week. The show opens today and runs through the 25th of this month. The opening reception will be held on Friday, February 24th from 6pm-9pm. The work is on display in the atrium outside of the Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery within Tyler School of Art. Please stop by and check out the show this week, it is sure to be great. Congratulations Rachel!

fireworks bridge (detail), 2009, cast cotton pulp with pigmented linen pulp, glass beads, 30x22, out of the blue, cast crystal, casting water, pigmented cast rubber forms, textures, surfaces and materials that make my eyes want to touch...see more here.

Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company 921 Chestnut Street

1899, when buildings were buildings. Pic from the PAB.

                         Now that's a cool office building. Its so fucking tough that it has a big-ass bell tower like its a cathedral. Its like they assumed that people would instantly start worshiping the structure, so it might as well have one. This is how you design a facade, modern motherfuckers.                        It all began in June of 1888. At this point in time, Penn Mutual Life Insurance was kicking ass and taking names all over the place. They were smoking their many many competitors due to the fact that they provided equal life insurance coverage for women as men for the same price. A special committee was formed to plan a new headquarters building for the company.                        Arguments went on for months over whether the new building should be exclusively for the company or be a larger building that could rent office space to other companies. Eventually, the latter plan was chosen and Supermegitect Theophilius P. Chandler was commissioned to design it. The building they were already occupying was in a great location for the time, so instead of buying a new plot of land, they would just demolished the fuck out of their old building and started constructing the new one. They moved out of the old building on February 22, 1889 and stayed in some temporary offices at 1008 Walnut Street.                       A year and a half later, on Thanksgiving Day, 1890, the brand-new 10-story Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company building opened. It was such a kick-ass design that people barely noticed the awesome Willis G. Hale building next door. The 900 block of Chestnut became one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the whole city.                      The building was considered high tech as fuck because it had a goddamn circuit breaker. It also claimed to have more electrical wiring than any other building in the city at the time. Penn Mutual rented out the offices that faced Chestnut Street and occupied a little five-story box in the back that faced Chant Street (now Ludlow).

The interior of the first floor. This Chandler guy didn't fuck around.

                    Other architects of the period didn't think this building was all that special. They thought the cool-ass tower was too thin and tall. They thought the upper floors of the facade didn't match the lower floors. They made a point of saying that the awesome marble facade did not look as good as the old building. What a bunch of jerks. Look at that fucking building! Its a booooomb!                       Penn Mutual would only stay for 23 years until moving to a much larger building on Washington Square. From there on out, they wouldn't move again, just keep adding on to their 1913 structure until it was ultimately butt-fuglified in the 1970's. After Penn Mutual, Chandler's Kick-ass Cathedral of Roundhouse Taintpunches lived on with various tenants for another 19 years. Then, at only 42 years old, the building, along with the entire block of other kick-ass buildings, was unceremoniously demolished to make way for some nice-looking but unnecessary federal pork projects that still stand there today.

Kick-ass row of buildings, including the Penn Mutual, about to be demolished in 1932.

                   Demolishing this block was a fucking crime. Though the buildings that replaced it are neat, they pale in comparison to the shitfucktastic super-structures that once graced this stretch of Chestnut Street. We'll never get a bunch of nice buildings like these again. What a shame.

On day 2 of ANDREW JEFFREY WRIGHT FASHION WEEK store1026.com brings you the FACE WITHOUT A FACE t-shirt.

See more HERE!

Modeled by Rose. $45,000.00 an hour. Hire her!

Nick Tyrell, hurricane over the bunker wall.  Nick skates for Hard Times, they peddle some nice wares

Bud Baum, Edger on 4 feet of vert, 50 years old and still doing it!  yeah Bud you’re my hero!!!!

Cookout, b/s tailslide up the escalator.

Andy Wilcox, b/s nosegrind over the loveseat. This was crazy!

Here are some scans of the 4 pages I shot!

Juice Mag #69, with a 12-page feature on FDR! Featuring some of my photos! Click to buy!!!

New(ish) paste by Sebastian Owl at North American and Poplar streets… Love me some owly!!

Your dreams will take you places… wp.me/p1gwum-tY

— Streets Dept (@StreetsDept) February 22, 2012

Filed under: Street Art

In the name of fairness, Max Frankel wants to equalize political campaign spending. Any Philadelphian could tell him something about the unintended consequences of such a virtuous act. Max Frankel, the retired executive editor of the New York Times, is a liberal whose heart is definitely in the right place. The late E. Digby Baltzell was a famous (and mostly conservative) sociologist at Penn who tended to listen to his head rather than his heart. I assume they never met. Pity. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Frankel proposed what to him is an eminently sensible remedy for the tidal wave of campaign money that, he says, “distorts our politics, poisons our lawmaking, and inevitably widens the gulf between those who can afford to buy influence and those who can’t.” (For the full text, click here.) Frankel’s solution— the “only one attractive remedy I know of,” he tells us— is this: “Double the price of political commercials so that every candidate’s purchase of TV time automatically pays for a comparable slot awarded to an opponent. The more you spend, the more your rival benefits as well.” Frankel concludes his pitch by asking, rhetorically, “Fairness, anyone?” I think I know how Baltzell would have responded— the same way he responded to many other well-meaning proposals: “Beware the unintended consequences of virtuous acts.” Lincoln vs. Hitler The flaw in Frankel’s remedy lies in its assumption that the candidates in any given election will be more or less equal in terms of character and experience, so why not guarantee a level playing field among them? But let us imagine a hypothetical election in which, say, Abraham Lincoln is running for president against Adolf Hitler. I prefer Lincoln not only because he strikes me as Lincolnesque, but also because Hitler strikes me as a genocidal maniac. But under Frankel’s proposal, the more money I contribute to Lincoln, the more Hitler will benefit as well. Now let’s consider a real election: Philadelphia’s Democratic mayoral primary of 1999. Five candidates entered that election. Four were black males (including the eventual winner, John Street). One was a white woman. Into this mix the party’s Fumo wing, fearing it would be shut out of the city’s patronage pie, put up a fraudulent candidate named Martin Weinberg. I use the term “fraudulent” advisedly. Whatever one may have thought of the other four candidates, all of them had at least held public office, shouldered public responsibilities and taken public positions. Weinberg had spent his entire career as a behind-the-scenes adviser to real public politicians. The Inquirer’s shining moment The Fumocrats supported Weinberg (to the tune of $5.3 million) for just two reasons: First, they wagered that, as a white male, Weinberg would attract the lion’s share of voters who were uncomfortable with the notion of a black or female mayor; and second, they assumed that the media, in their obsession with “fairness,” would treat all five candidates as equally qualified for the mayor’s office. The strategy almost worked: Weinberg finished second in that primary, just five percentage points behind John Street. To the Inquirer’s eternal credit, that paper refused to swallow the Fumo camp’s narrative and persistently portrayed him as an interloper among an otherwise qualified group of candidates. That may have made the difference. To sure, Weinberg outspent his opponents in that 1999 primary. If he’d been forced to give a dollar to his opponents for every dollar he spent, as Frankel proposes, maybe he wouldn’t have finished so high. On the other hand, if the other four candidates had been forced to give Weinberg a dollar for every dollar they spent…. Do you catch my drift? Memo to Max Frankel: If you’re upset about inequality in campaign spending, wait ’til you try equality. Next question: Why do otherwise intelligent people like Max Frankel and the editors of the New York Review fall so easily for such magic potions?

Hello IKEA! Opera Carolina took the Charlotte IKEA by storm Sunday, Feb 19 as part of Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture™ program. Shoppers were surprised by five performances from La Boheme and La Traviata throughout the day – and the Charlotte Observer caught all the action. Video coming soon, in the meantime enjoy a photo slideshow here…

Why Does Knight Foundation Fund Random Acts of Culture™? Knight Foundation, like its founders Jack and Jim Knight, focuses on promoting informed and engaged communities. To that end, we strongly believe in the potential of the arts to engage residents, and bring a community together. Hearing Handel, or seeing the tango in an unexpected place provides a deeply felt reminder of how the classics can enrich our lives. As you’ll see in our videos, the performances make people smile, dance, grab their cameras – even cry with joy. For those brief moments, people going along in their everyday lives are part of a shared, communal experience that makes their community a more vibrant place to live. In these days of shrinking audiences, we also hope that these random acts will encourage people to attend traditional performances. We can’t promise it. But it’s hard to watch what unfolds during a Random Act of Culture™, and not be inspired to see and hear more.

Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio resonated at time when Europeans were obsessed with Middle East harems and slave traders. Robert Driver’s attempt to set the opera in post-World War I Turkey is only partly successful. The Abduction From the Seraglio. Opera by Mozart; Robert B. Driver directed; Corrado Rovaris, conductor. Opera Company of Philadelphia production through February 26, 2012 at Academy of Music, Broad and Locust St. (215) 732-8400 or www.operaphila.org. Abduction From the Seraglio has historical and musical significance. But does it make much impact on audiences in 2012? This production was only partially successful. While the German title, Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, is hard enough for American audiences to grasp, the English-language alternative is not much better. Rescue From a Harem would work better. Obsession with strange people from the Middle East was rife when Mozart was a young man. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were known as the Sea-Pirate States, and slave trading was at its peak. Europeans were afraid that Turks and Arabs would enslave, rape and murder Christians. In this atmosphere, audiences attended many plays and even an earlier opera by Wolfgang, Zaide. But director Robert B. Driver changed the time period from the late 1700s to 1918, and he designed the production to resemble movies from the 1920s that dramatized the closing days of World War I. During the overture and opening scene, black-and-white movie clips (including Wings and Mata Hari) gave us a good sense of time and place— in this case Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany in the war, where an American spy was captured by the Turks and an Allied flying ace came to her rescue. It’s impossible to take the plot seriously, because audiences are asked to accept the plausibility that the dictator of an evil empire would have two female captives in his harem and allow them to spurn his sexual “advances.” Come on! This production mitigated that idiocy to some extent as Driver likened the evil Selim to the relatively progressive Mustafa Ataturk, who was a Turkish military leader in the war and then helped found the modern Turkish republic. Needed: A superstar soprano Seraglio was unique in its time because Mozart turned away from the Italian language to write an opera in his native German. It also provided a musical milestone when Mozart wrote a precociously mature dramatic soprano aria for the leading lady, ”Martern aller Arten” ("Tortures of all kinds"). With this aria, Mozart shattered the conventions of his day, accompanying it with four solo woodwinds and orchestra. The heroine, Konstanze, sings how she risks everything and is even willing to die. It’s a role that requires a superstar. Curtis student Elizabeth Zharoff sang the part musically enough, but it came through as a coloratura showpiece rather than a dramatic one. In her appearance and spunky demeanor, Zharoff resembled either Mary Tyler Moore or Sutton Foster in the movie and stage versions, respectively, of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Plenty of ramps, no scenery Her love interest was a light-voiced Spanish tenor, Antonio Lozano. Elizabeth Reiter, a recent Curtis graduate, was a petite and charming soubrette called Blonde. Per Bach Nissen, a Danish bass, was excellent as Osmin, the Turkish overseer of the harem. Krystian Adam was the exuberant second tenor, while Peter Dolder was a bland Selim. Driver’s staging of the big soprano number was clever. Selim retreated into the auditorium so that Konstanze was able to face him directly while simultaneously singing to the audience. Throughout the evening, Driver made good use of ramps to provide varied entrances to the stage. Aside from the movie projections, however, the large stage often looked empty, with virtually no scenery. Corrado Rovaris led a crisp reading of the orchestral score, which incorporated some Turkish-sounding instruments.