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Saturday, March 06, 2004

Quick time out for Whitney

 

Leave it to the new York Times to be ahead of the curve. Here's Holland Cotter's preview of the upcoming (as in opening Thursday) Whitney Biennial, including a slide show of eight featured artists...and Roberta Smith's piece on sound art and how much of the audible bubbly will be served up at the Biennial.

Aleksandra Mir, featured at ICA with her Ramp project "Naming Tokyo," a map of Tokyo with the street names changed, is in the Biennial. Her ICA map with the little flags sticking out left me cold but I cottened up to this image, "First Woman on the Moon," a project Mir created on a Dutch beach with the help of some earth-moving equipment. I don't know if it's earth art or moon art but the Robert Smithson-meets-the-sand-castle-builders affect amuses.
permanent link  libby and roberta 9:51 PM
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First Saturday Old City art tours

 
Pretend you're a tourist visiting Philadelphia and join the "First Saturday" tours of Old City galleries. Old City Arts is running the series of tours, with programs that include demonstrations and artists talks. Today is the second tour and sounds fun for kids, with hands on mask decoration and puppet making.

The one scheduled for April, which is not yet on the web site, is adult-oriented, with artists talks and printmaking demonstrations at Artists House, a gallerist talk at Pentimenti, and artists talks at Union 237.

For info and registration, call Bobbie Ann Tilkens at Wexler Gallery, 215-923-7030.
permanent link  libby 11:26 AM
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Friday, March 05, 2004

Great expectations

 

So we're making a list of what we plan to deliver up over the weekend for First Friday. In no particular order, here are our soon-to-be blog posts. By the way, we noticed that poets have been inspirations here in a number of venues. So here are pics of Rainer Maria Rilke (right) and Wallace Stevens (left below) just fyi:
1. Vox Populi has sculpture by Clint Takeda, video installation by Matt Suib and works on paper and on the wall by Katie Abercrombie
2. The FAB has installation by Ernesto Neto, international panty-hose art star, speaking at 6 pm tonight.
3. Locks Gallery has Jennifer Bartlett's sea-inspired paintings from the deep past (1980s) and brand new photos by Eileen Neff

4. Digi-photo round-up of works at Muse, Highwire, Locks, Nexus and Vox
5. Pentimenti in its new location (145 N. 2nd St.), paintings by Sara Eichner and sculpture by Nancy Blum
6. Musings from the alternative art scene at 222 Gallery and Space 1026...that would be Brooklyn artist Rich Jacobs at 222 and three San Francisco travellers who make work about Rainer Maria Rilke!!!!! at 1026. (say what?)
7. Rosenfeld has Susan Pasquarelli has gouache and watercolor paintings
8. then we will rest

Note: We understand we just violated several rules of design as we frequently do by posting the poets staring right into the same spot in outer space. Somehow we thought this was appropriate. There.
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:41 AM
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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Thanks for the memories

 


Frank Bramblett's post (see the previous post) brought to mind a show that's just a memory now but has stayed in my memory and was about memory.

Dean Dass's show, "Mnemosyne" (that's the goddess of memory in Green mythology), that closed last week at Schmidt/Dean, offered both practiced art (I'm referring to Bramblett's terms) and concept, although the concept was a little abstruse as it related to the art, and the art was as juicy and sensory as an eyeball and fingertip could yearn for.

Dass's three large tomes (not shown), all named "Mnemosyne," were beautifully tactile and included transcriptions of the unfinished poem "Mnemosyne" by 19th century German Romantic poet Holderlin. The typywritten poem seemed to me to interfere with Dass's final product, even though the words had inspired the tomes. I'd rather have lost the memory of the starting point, but I haven't forgotten the beauty that I saw.

The computer-generated images and the painted images based on a squence of snapshots of a burning building disintegrate and gel into focus, each image offering a different take on a memory receding and returning.

While I liked it all, the tricks of memory seemed like conceptual baggage, overwhelming and obscuring the visual impulses.

But I'm in love with the concept because the world of memory; and false memory; and what happens to the facts, the images, the history, and the people we used to know as time passes are a result of our invention, and thus a little bit false. As we comb through the artifacts of history and reinvent our stories, we end up with a new truth when we've done it right.

I think these are the places that Anastasi, Malen and Dass are playing with and mulling over, and I find them interesting. I don't know if it's great art, but I know I want to spend time with the work and my memories of the work.
permanent link  libby 5:45 PM
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Conceptual death of art

 
Post by Frank Bramblett


I have nothing against concepts or theory, and even have been guilty of doing conceptual art.  [I] believe that theory is critical to art, but believe that artists’ dependence on theory is terminal to art (shown, Lawrence Weiner's "More or Less...Give or Take...).

Many philosophers find that their "work" is theory and in theory … there is no practice. Many theorists see and sometimes envy the artist as the true theory practitioner. Over many decades the gap between the two has slowly eroded as artists’ work became closer and closer to theory (shown, Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even," in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
The problem is that theory today leads the artist to such an extent that the "work" dies. 

…Much art today is illustration of theory, concept, idea.  Part of the problem is with the "word." Thoughts are concepts; words describe thoughts. Art is made to defend the words; art is then conceptual, or at least all that can be spoken about art is conceptual.  The burden of the word becomes the limitation of what a work might become and the "artist" is mute. To execute a concept is … the death of the art (shown, John Baldessari's Read, Write, Think, Dream).

Stand in front of the Third of May [by Goya] and you stand in the place of Maximillian--you understand the story, but you experience the inexplicable.  I think that. I … believe that the theory, the concept, the idea is a result of a recognition of an understanding that is reached by the practice of work.  This understanding cannot be explained.

I am a long time fan of R. Hughes (see previous post) and his simplistic way of describing complex relations of multiple contexts.  Since a visit to the Prado a few years ago, I am a lover of Goya.  I too look forward to his talk.

About the Malen event (see yesterday's post): Sorry, but I had a different experience that had nothing to do with the "conceptual art" conversation.  For me it was all downhill from the introduction announcing that she was obsessed. Obsessives deny as an alcoholic denies. 

I was at the back near the door, and recognized most of the laughter as coming from the mid to front.  For those at the back, we could not see the slides.  I became amused at the head in front bobbing back and forth in futile efforts to make the connection between the images and the words.  Was this a strategy?  Soon I began to fight laughter, not at what was being said or seen, but in Malen's delivery and what I saw ahead (shown, one of Malen's slides).

My efforts to contain my laughter escalated as the efforts to slowly exit the squeaky door.  Was her intention to create in me a condition of sympathy or futility?  Was this not a presentation, but a study? 

I was saved by the case studies at the end that, I agree, were of some amusement.

--Philadelphia painter Frank Bramblett won a 2000 Pew Fellowship in the Arts
permanent link  libby 4:54 PM
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Heaven Hell Goya Hughes and Hockney

 

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes comes to town April 7 to talk about his new book on Goya, something I'm excited about (both the book and the talk). The talk is part of the University of Pennsylvania/Locks Foundation Distinguished Artist Lecture Series. (ticket required -- see information below) Read an excerpt from Hughes's "Goya" here.

For a little warm up, I suggest a great article by Jonathan James in this morning's Guardian.

James interviewed painter David Hockney and the article is much ado about painting versus photography. (Hockney, of course, has used both in his art.) And what has that got to do with Goya and Hughes you ask? Hockney refers to Goya's "Third of May" (top image) and says that painting can give you hell but photography can't.

Jones opines that Hockney is a painter of heaven, which I found amusing. (Hockney heaven left)

My favorite Hockney quote is about images and social control. I think he's got it right:

"All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses" - as Hockney has argued in his book Secret Knowledge - "and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly.

"Social control today is in the media - and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses."

Get free tickets to Hughes's talk by calling the Annenberg box office. 215-898-3900. The talk will be held at Penn's Irvine Auditorium, 34th and Spruce, 6:00 p.m, April 7.
permanent link  roberta 8:36 AM
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Search for the cure; search for understanding

 


Roberta and I both stopped at Slought Foundation Saturday, at separate times on different missions (see Roberta's previous post). I was more focused on the work of Lenore Malen in the vault, and Roberta was more focused on Anastasi.

When we got together Monday to paint, I dismissed the Anastasi and she dismissed the Malen. She, on the other hand, defended Anastasi, and I defended Malen.

After reading Roberta's post, which I found quite interesting--more interesting than I found Anastasi's rather arcane show--I concluded for not the first time in my life that when you listen to an artist and his obsessions, even the most difficult work starts to make sense to you and seem worthwhile.

Now I have to say, right here, that Malen is a friend with whom I fell out of touch more than 20 years ago, so I do bring my delight in seeing her and what she's up to to my argument.

When I stopped by Slought in the afternoon, there was Malen, alone in the front of the gallery, setting up for the evening performance, and surprise, surprise, she looked exactly the same. Even more to my surprise, she said I looked exactly the same. (Sometimes, old friends can't recognize me, so I've gotten used to the concept that I look quite different.)


Leaving her to her work, I headed to the installation, a bunch of photos, a video and some artifacts--or were they "artifacts" (see image above left, its source labeled by Malen as A key to physic, and the occult sciences, by Ebenezer Sibly; London, 1795. Courtesy Bakken Library)?--telling the story of "The New Society for Universal Harmony," a parodic version of a utopian society called La societe de l'harmonie universelle established in Paris in 1783 by followers of Franz Anton Mesmer (the mesmerism guy).

Malen's photos of people and the place they went for a cure of whatever ails them showed a parody of a rustic spa, sort of chataqua meets mental hospital by the hot springs.

(I suppose it was the back-to-nature, Victorian quality that made Roberta pop up with a comparison to the affect of Justine Kurland's back-to-nature commune shots (her "Wood Song" shown here, left), and up to a point I suppose that argument could be made. But Kurland seems to have an intent other than parody.

Slightly bizarre, slightly Victorian in affect and texture, Malen's photos portrayed, in deadpan tone, earnest-looking people willing to believe anything and try anything in their search for a cure of whatever. A slide-show video of their faces and their overlapping stories was as poignant as it was silly. The artifacts, in library-like vitrines, were a mix of fact and fiction, including text and images about the original society.

And the evening performance was Malen as Society archivist, in white lab coat with the Society emblem embroidered on the pocket, reporting her findings about the past society and the activities of the new one (the crowd favorite appeared to be the urban men "tied" to trees in the middle of a field, trying to reconnect to nature's magnetic field, shown right).

The accompanying slide show also included a tour of the New Society grounds, as in Here's a cottage, here's a bedroom, here's an assembly room.


To me the highlight was the Freud-inspired case histories, with loopy sexual elements and odd obsessions.

Now this was a Saturday night at 6 p.m. out in West Philadelphia, a time that never would have drawn me in if Malen weren't my friend. But Slought was jammed. More than 80 people showed up. And they laughed pretty hard at the performance.


My personal interest, however, was less in the parody (which also includes a web-community parody), and more in what I saw as the dark side of the work--a serious anger with the human condition. Those society members as Malen photographed them looked so vulnerable in their ridiculousness, their desperate willingness to do foolish, useless things like dress in hospital gowns and white caps and socks while immersing themselves in a chilly natural pool. This is a parody of the failure of belief.

I suppose the parody was aimed at crystals and fringe medicine, but to me it read like a serious attack on the failure of conventional medicine and psychiatry (after all, why do people turn to crystals and the fringe?) The weird practices of the Harmonites seemed no less dehumanizing than a day of tests and manhandling in the hospital.

I think Malen's work talked to Anastasi's, with its academicism, its archiving and its references to past systems of thought.

Here, I thought, was a society that practiced, unwittingly, pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions.


Some people I was with at Malen's performance seemed discouraged by the conceptual approach of both her and Anastasi's work. But like I said, listen hard enough to artists and their obsessions and you'll find a way in to their most difficult work and come away having had an experience that was worth your while.

I ended up later that evening having several conversations with people who seemed unhappy with conceptual art as a whole. I "get" that unhappiness with conceptualism's lack of sensory juice, but there's satisfaction in the pleasures of thinking.

addendum: I got to wondering about how Malen and Slought found eachother; the answer, said Slought's Aaron Levy, was Steve Clay at Granary Books, Inc., who approached Slought about co-publishing Malen's book, "The New Society for Universal Harmony." The book includes Malen's original fiction plus essays from Nancy Princenthal, Irving Sandler, Pepe Karmel, et al.

A symposium on Mesmer and his beliefs is scheduled at Slought for April 3, 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.



permanent link  libby 1:25 PM
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Pata-cake

 

I stopped in at Slought Foundation Saturday to look at Philadelphia-born, New York conceptual artist William Anastasi’s show “me altar’s egoes” before I went to hear him speak at Rosenbach Museum and Library later that afternoon. (The event was a public conversation between the artist and Slought's Jean Michel Rabate.)

Anastasi’s show is made up of some 2,000 sheets of sequentially numbered paper -- color copies of the originals which the artist doesn't show -- each in a plastic sleeve, all hung on the walls. The installation consumes every available inch of gallery space outside the two vault spaces. (images above and below are details)

On the sheets of loose leaf are the artist’s handwritten notes, his painstaking research, into the the influence of French theatre-of-the-absurd playwright Alfred Jarry on James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp. There's also much notetaking on the interplay between Joyce and Duchamp.

Anastasi’s obsessive cross-referencing of texts and journals has the feel of an pre-typewriter era Ph.D thesis. Unless you're his advisor, you don’t want to read it -- just absorb the poundage.

Lest you think this is tomfoolery, let me tell you that Anastasi, the influential conceptual artist and friend of John Cage, presented his thesis to a gathering of Joyce scholars at the Sorbonne...and that it was mostly well-received.

Anastasi’s thesis has two arguments -- that Joyce admired Jarry (1873-1907) and refers to the father of Pataphysics all over the place in his texts; and that Duchamp -- who never admitted to it publicly -- was also a Jarry man. Neither Joyce nor Duchamp came right out and admitted the Jarry connection. (image below is portrait of Jarry)
[for more on Duchamp, check out this comprehensive, interactive site]

The artist thinks Joyce is to literature what Duchamp is to art. Both are revolutionaries.

As I found out at Rosenbach, repository of James Joyce's hand-written manuscript of "Ulysses," Anastasi, 71, is a natural raconteur, full of energy and charm. By turns serious and self-deprecating, the artist was a name dropper; he was funny; he was frank; he made the conceptual underpinnings of his work clear. And he made you interested in it. The fifty folks who packed the Rosenbach on a sunny Spring-like afternoon sat for two full hours to hear his stories. (photo of the artist below)

By the way, I learned from artnet that Anastasi's 1968 camouflage installation is featured currently in New York at White Box Annex.

Here are a few of my notes from the rambling discussion. (My note-taking accounts for some Dada-esque leaps from subject to subject, sorry.)

William Anastasi: I always thought there was a Joyce and Duchamp connection. Joyce exploded literature and Duchamp exploded art. And the Duchamp-Jarry connection looks obvious. They both use sexuality via machines. Jarry talks about man as a machine who can make love forever. He has a female robot. He talks about a machine/bride...

Jean Michel Rabate: Jarry is mostly known for the Ubu plays. He had a big influence on French culture. He invented pataphysics...the science of imaginary solutions.

WA: [about Joyce and Duchamp] Joyce after Ulysses published little things and spent all his time thinking. It’s like Duchamp playing chess....and they both made disappointing works at the end. (photo of Joyce)

[Ed. note: previously, this post included a parenthetical after the disappointing works comment listing Finnegan's Wake and Etant Donee as the presumed disappointments. Anastasi wrote me to say he never said that Finnegan's Wake and Etant Donee were disappointing works. My mistake.

Quoting from Anastasi's email:

I have never said or thought anything like this (that Finnegan's Wake or Etant Donne are disappointing works) -- quite the opposite. Finnegans Wake is a unique masterpiece and I have regarded it so for a half century plus. Etant Donnes is likewise unique. (Also) 'coprophiliac' is the correct spelling for your "cacafiliast."]


WA: All three thought accident was divinity. They thought beauty was everywhere. “I stumble on a stone and it’s exactly what I need.”

I only met Duchamp once but I became very close to Teeny.

Jarry said “Death is for the common man” Duchamp said his epitaph should be “Death always comes to the other guy.”

Joyce used literary ready mades. He copied from the TLS, sometimes randomly....he’d excuse himself at a party and go to the bathroom and leave the door open and copy conversations. People got wise and got mad at him. You wonder why the dialog in Joyce is so loopy?

[Somebody said] “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” (image above is Duchamp readymade)

Here’s a tip for any poets in the audience. If you go on a subway and copy dialog from one ear and then from the other, that’s great poetry.

There's not one page in Finnegan's Wake that doesn't have erotica or scatological material. Duchamp said the erotic is the only thing that interests me.

Aaron Levy: In our brochure essay, Jean Michel and I called you a demented archivist. We didn't know if you would like that.

WA: Thank you. That’s almost as good as coprophiliac (someone obsessed with feces -- a term applied to Jarry and Joyce).

AL: Why is that a compliment?

WA All I have is my aesthetic prejudice of the moment. My aesthetic prejudice moves, maybe because I’m a runner. I’ve run every day for the last 36 years. I’ve never met anyone who could say that. I’ve never drunk coffee. Never. I’ve never met anyone else who could say that.

There’s a distance between me and the multitude.

“Taste is habit.” These three words are enormously important for life and art.

There are thousands of things out there that are better than mom’s lasagna. We are very provincial.

When I started this project I had nothing to lose. At the Sorbonne I was attacked by one man but I won him over. Also, I got caught up in it. For me it was relaxation...like chess for Duchamp. It’s a fascinating world I’d never come across.

[about Cindy Sherman’s photographs of herself dressed up] I wonder if Cindy Sherman will be a footnote to Rrose Selavy [Duchamp’s alter ego--image above] or if Rrose Selavy will be the footnote for Cindy Sherman. (image below)

Duchamp said the title is the most important part of the piece.

What Jarry, Joyce and Duchamp have in common? Their total indifference to the audience.

By the way, I’ve been poor and rich and poor and rich. I’m serious.

One time I went to a bookstore and asked how many copies of Finnegan’s Wake they had. Thirteen. I said they’re sold. I brought them home and said this thing is a work of art. I’ve been reading Finnegan’s Wake every day since I was 19. Like I draw every day. When I have insomnia I can draw but I can’t read except Finnegan’s Wake, out loud. Try it when you have insomnia.

JMR: What you do is art and scholarship

WA I have my suspicions and that’s what it boils down to....Jarry equates all art with masterbation. He predicts that even after the end of the world there will be a machine making art, our need to make it is so great.

Tom Chimes: [sitting in front row, the Philadelphia artist known for his dreamy portraits of Jarry and others--see image above] What was your hypothetical audience?

WA: I didn’t have one. Myself. I didn’t see this as my work. It was my hobby. That’s why I was good at it....

[about why Duchamp never stated his admiration for Jarry] Picasso openly embraced Jarry... Also, like Joyce said, we always keep the dearest person to ourselves.
permanent link  roberta 1:42 PM
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Number crunching

 

Steve and I saw Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War last Saturday. We went with our friends Pam and Laurent, and while our collective first response to the long face-off with the 85-year old Robert McNamara was negative (the movie was long; the interview questions weren't as tough as we would have liked), I now -- hindsight is all -- believe the movie to be great.

What I really didn't like was Robert McNamara.

Morris's moviemaking is a seemingly deadpan approach. Turn on the camera and let McNamara talk. You never see Morris. And when you hear him ask McNamara questions, the director's voice seems to shout his questions as if from across a great divide. The almost clinical objectivity allows McNamara his dignity.

But, because of the harrowing visual sequences of war intercut behind the words of the aging bean counter (he was the head of Ford Motor Company before becoming Secretary of Defense under Kennedy) you begin to understand the disconnect between McNamara's bottom line war-making and its results.

You have an automatic sympathy with an old man who tears up repeatedly as he tells his stories. But the unapologetic explanations for war-making were not sympathetic. Here is a guy who still doesn't get it.

Morris's visual montages occasionally rise to the level of metaphoric genius. One image alone stands out, capturing McNamara's disembodied, bottom-line reasoning about war as well as the filmmaker's questioning of that reasoning. As the Defense Secretary talks about the bombing of Japan, his words get caught up with the numbers and it's clear there's an abstraction in his mind between those numbers and what takes place in the real world.

Behind these words, Morris shows a sequence of bombs dropping from a plane and suddenly the bombs change into a bunch of numbers falling. You and I know they're not numbers but it's not clear whether McNamara understands this or cares. For this sequence alone, the movie is a must see. But for anyone interested in our current foggy situation (and the parallels are chilling) I recommend this stiff cup of coffee. And for a great, behind the scenes interview, see Greg Allen's chatty piece on his blog.
permanent link  roberta 8:59 AM
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Monday, March 01, 2004

The body and the blood

 

Puerto Rican artist Victor Vazquez's new photographs and video at Seraphin Gallery express relationships about body, land and spirit in ways both foreign and familiar.

In multi-panel works, the artist photographs common materials -- a chair, an egg, a metal bucket, some dirt -- and creates a world of beautiful disorientation.


"Chair and Book," for example, is work of sumptuous textures and inviting richness. Yet the sequence of photographs of a large book, a wooden chair and an egg are a puzzle. (first two images, from "Chair and Book" sequence)

The book is covered with snowy white powder -- I thought it was flour but the artist said baby powder. The chair and floor are covered with a rich brown dirt; there's a mud-caked hand holding an egg that has a drawing of a mummy-like figure on it. Everything, from the brown and white colors and the open book and the chair, made me thing of kitchen and baking (I must have been hungry). But the clearer reference was to learning, anthropology and ritual. All I really know is it's loveliness is not lyrical, although there is poetry in it.

There's a kind of haiku-like spareness to the work and an almost mathmatics-like precision, yet I am not sure what a and b add up to. But their gorgeousness and their iconic nature make you accept them as objects.


"Bucket Man" (left and below) is a sequence showing a mud-covered model with his head in a bucket or standing to face the viewer. Either way, the set-up is evocative. This is no Muybridge sequence. Motion is not the point, although it is suggested.

The point seems to be, again, ritual and performance. The figure bent over the bucket is all acute angles and suggests a kind of animal quality -- chicken, even. As for the standing model, he looks like a kind of acolyte or perhaps a holy fool.


"Blood with Candle" (below) reminded me of Gerhard Richter's photographic paintings of tall tapers burning. But Vazquez's candle is sandwiched between two images of a blood-spattered wall. The chicken blood, the candle, the hand holding it are all startlingly beautiful, which jars your thoughts as you imagine how the blood got on the wall.


As you walk back and forth studying all these images, metaphors for learning, stability, humanity seem to be suggested. But the iconic works are complete unto themselves, and they really don't need the viewer to complete them.


Vazquez, is an artist fueled by his study of comparative religions. He has spent time in both Japan and India.

Previous photographs focussed more directly on the Caribbean practice known as Santaria. Here, the work suggests it (blood, dirt, mud) but the artist seems to be pushing elsewhere, into the interplay between east-west cultures. And it -- almost -- suggests a kind of harmonious coexistence.

This is most clear in his untitled three-channel video piece, (below) which juxtaposes a city ritual and a country ritual. Here, on old fashioned, blue-tinted monitors you see a close up shot of a man's feet walking towards you. First, the feet are in fashionable shoes walking on a city street; then the scene shifts and the feet -- bare -- tread a stretch of rocky and occasionally muddy land, perhaps a road. It's not clear.



The contrast between the bare feet squishing and sinking in mud and the wingtip-encased feet pounding the pavement suggests not a clash of cultures but a kind of oneness in difference.

Bottom line, these works tringulate like haikus, all sideways glances and inference.



More to the point, they seem a part of a kind of pre-verbal or anti-verbal world. Their power lies knotted up in ur-threads of thought that best be left tangled.

I always want to untangle things. But I find that Vazquez's works are so firmly rooted and so beautiful and odd, that I'm happy to meet them on their turf, tangles and all. (bottom image is from series "Man Walking")

Also showing at Seraphin, Leon Golub's large paintings and drawings. More on those another day.
permanent link  roberta 4:59 PM
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Sunday, February 29, 2004

Into the nabes

 


A good-hearted show at City Hall (a part of the Art in City Hall program) sings the well-deserved praises of neighborhood art centers, keeping art education alive for adults as well as children.

Programs from five neighborhood art centers were featured, each one with its own mission and clientele. More than 60 citizens--a mix of teachers and students--have work on display in those dreary cases. I always regard it as a miracle when any work shines in there. But some of it does, indeed (shown right, work by Coalition Ingenu's Robert Bullock).

As little group shows within the larger show, the work from Coalition Ingenu and Allens Lane stood out (shown left, work by Ingenu's John Author Goffigan).

Coalition Ingenu works with adults who live in mental health centers, homeless shelters and rehabilitation programs (shown below right, work by Ingenue's Vanice Clay); Allens Lane Art Center's Vision Thru Art Program works with people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired.

The other three neighborhood art centers showing off their programs are Center in the Park, which works with an aging population; the University City Arts League, with a general, diverse, population. The West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance's artist residency program offers workshops throughout its inner-city West Philadelphia community.

Coalition Ingenu offers some punchy, outsider stuff, including the piece at the top from David Kime (made from melted crayons and yarn!) and each of the other images shown above.

The Allens Lane show includes some clay face jugs from William Talero (shown left) and a wooden face totem from Ronald Bryant (shown below).



Other noteworthy pieces were by Donald Laura, Kathy Faul and Eve Lipman (Lipman's piece below left).



I was not always clear who's who in terms of faculty versus students, but both of these programs--Allens Lane and Coalition Ingenu--seemed to show uniformly good work from all who contributed.



The Center in the Park display included this funky decorated telephone by Dorothy Payne, who also showed a number of other colorful pieces.



Artist Bernie Hayward, also from Center in the Park, contributed this swell lithograph with its WPA-Depression Era feel (shown left).







The diverse Arts League display included this beautifully decorated sekere by Sara Buget Fabunmi, as well as crochet work, ceramics, paintings, collages and photos showing off the wide variety of classes offered there, including a variety of performing arts.



And artist Isaac Mayfield's "Endangered Species" (shown) and carved walking stick stood out in the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance work.

"Artists from Community Art Centers" is one of those democratic shows where not all the work stood out on its own merits, but the variety and volume added up to a city-wide expression of joy in art-making. The Art in City Hall program has shown the works of more than 800 professional artists since it set up shop in 1984, according to coordinator Tu Huynh.
permanent link  libby 12:15 PM
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