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Saturday, August 07, 2004

Context is everything

 

The continuing saga of financial and organizational peril at the African American Museum in Philadelphia makes me want to point out to art lovers that this has been a special place where you can see high quality African-American art that's serious and thoughtful.

And we're not talking just one painting or three paintings, in typical white-institution tokenism, but ambitious shows, and shows that compare more than one African-American artist. As Roberta pointed out when I raised the subject yesterday, the museum's offerings with their contextual seriousness make this institution important. (Here's a link to a 5/18/03 post about a couple of shows I reviewed there).

Apparently, the museum lacks adequate support from local donors private and corporate, everyone waiting for the African-American community to step up to the plate, no doubt. But the support needs to be community-wide, because the service at least in the field of art, has fulfilled needs of the community at large.

So, all of you who support the big museum up on the hill, why don't you consider directing some money toward this little museum too? It's a rare place that offers African-American art in a meaningful context.

permanent link  libby 2:23 PM
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Home school with Andrea Fraser

 
If you were wondering what Andrea Fraser, whose performance piece at the PMA I told you about here, is doing now, I just stumbled into some information about her. She's participating in what sounds like a great show in New York, "Home" at American Fine Arts, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-727-7366 (apparently no website).

The writeup in artnet, and the photo there show the exhibit looking like a high school classroom (green boards and student desks).

What's more fun is that the show's organizer, LA photographer Patterson Beckwith, organized an entire curriculum of "home schooling" events in the gallery, where students can attend sessions taught by specialists in topics like Samba or Salsa dancing -- that's Fraser's gig -- or, my favorite "brainstorming for beginners." Here's the webpage listing all the home school choices.

Beckwith is a collaborationist, apparently with a nice sense of humor.
permanent link  roberta 10:36 AM
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Grotesques of First Friday August

 
NYT critic Michael Kimmelman's been to Santa Fe to test the Robert Storr-curated Site Santa Fe exhibit. He declares it ok in his Friday report on the show. (to read, sign in as username: lrrfartblog, password: artblog)

Check out the Site Santa Fe website, too. Click on Biennial 2004 and you get a nice grotesque Flash graphic that reminded me somehow of the cob webs in Miss Havisham's dining room.

Apparently Storr is interested in the grotesque as something kind of American and kind of "now." We've been talking about the grotesque for a while here on artblog (Dario Robleto, the Project Room show Scarab, the recent Mutter Museum Big Nothing show). I think the "movement," if such it can be called, is due to millenial naval gazing. We'd rather linger over our hangnails than move forward. Who can blame us? The world's a mess at the moment and where are the big thinkers and bold leaders? It's too scary out there, so we'll make some demon images and titter. Boo. I'm not knocking it, just find it unsurprising.

Anyway, snapping back to attention, according to Kimmelman, Storr says the grotesque is imbued with both ecstasy and morbidity and points to Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe as American literary examples of artists who dipped into the exclamatory or the deathly dark. (top image is Tom Friedman's "Untitled" a pastel drawing from 1995 that's in Site Santa Fe)

New Mexico's pretty far away and while we'd all love to go, Philadelphia's got plenty of grotesquerie in town right now. Last night I ran into some at Rosenfeld Gallery in the form of Carrie Ann Beade's oil on copper paintings.

The parodies of stock imagery from old master paintings and books are small, well painted -- and if not surprising then striking. (image left is "Jabberwocky," oil on copper)



Mexican day of the dead imagery is of course also grotesque. And while it's not American, it's Chicano which is Mexican-American, and right now there's skulls and devils galore up in Taller Puertorriqueno's "Visiones from Postmodern Aztlan." My favorite is Alex Rubio's "El Diablito," 1998, a screenprint from Coronado Studios. (shown right) For more see my post below and Libby's post.

And for more devil action, don't miss "Scarab," folks. It's still up at Project Room and they're having a Friday the 13th closing event with the panel discussion from hell.

More on the show in my post and Minna Dubin's post.


permanent link  roberta 8:20 AM
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Friday, August 06, 2004

Visiones from postmodern Aztlan, the panel discussion

 
Libby told you about the show in her post below, so I'll tell you about the two-hour panel discussion Stella and I attended July 31 in Taller Puertorriqueno's gallery, a wonderful group grope about Chicano culture and identity that had a lot in common with Puerto Rican artists soul-searching for same. (I'm thinking of Adal Maldonado's great recent exhibit at Taller and Roxana Perez-Mendez's also recent video installation at Temple Gallery in "Mixmaster Universe." See my posts on Maldonado and Perez-Mendez for more. (top image is the panel)

I'm going to run a few images here that have a common thread -- they depict fighters -- boxers, wrestlers, superheroes -- imagined or real, all are symbols of embattlement, which is perhaps how Chicano and Latino artists feel about themselves and their communities vis a vis the USA.


Around a dozen people attended the discussion. That's a good turnout on what was a sunny Saturday afternoon in late July. (right is Xavier Garza's "El Mil Mascaras")

The four panel members, from left to right above included

--moderator Joseph Gonzalez, a Taller Board member and Temple University grad student working on a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology (focussing on Chicano history);
--Sam Coronado, founder of Coronado Studios, Austin, TX;
--Marta Sanchez, San Antonio-born Philadelphia Chicano artist and activist (founder of the local children's charity event "Cascarones por la Vida");
--Gustavo Leclerc, artistic director, Self-Help Graphics (SHG), Los Angeles.

Moderator Gonzalez started things off by pointing out the nice three-way dialog in the gallery -- between Southwest, West Coast and East Coast art and artists. Gonzalez said he was interested in this work as a kind of reference for the next generation of Chicano artists. I thought that was an interesting point-- children born today may have a different connection to the source material than what today's artists have. (left below is Teddy Sandoval's "Angel Baby")



Sanchez spoke about her childhood and about an aunt giving her her first piece of art , a "shopping cart" religious icon that she charished. "It wasn't just the symbol of Christ, it was the paint ...and that someone bought it for me," she said. Sanchez later carried the idea about the purchase of real art forward saying that printmaking is a great way to put art in people's hands -- it's affordable, beautiful, and valuable. Sanchez said she would encourage corporations to buy Chicano art as a way of supporting the artists. About the making of art, Sanchez said "We need it [art] to keep the culture going." (right below is Alfredo de Batuc's "Emiliano con Zuecos")



Leclerc of SHG, born in Mexico but living in the U.S. since the 1980s became SHG's artistic director two months ago when the 30-year old print studio reached out to him in its quest to renew itself and move to another level. He spoke about art as a way of telling the story of Chicanos in America, a story left largely untold by the American media and Hollywood. "Hollywood is good at denying [we're here]," he said. "We are kind of like ghosts." (left below is Alma Lopez's "Our Lady of Controversy")



Leclerc explained that his organization is artist-run and that they have a large membership, some 900 artists. When they have a meeting, 50 artists show up and it lasts four hours! "It's very organic, everyone can go there," he said about the community organization that also has a gallery space. New issues for SHG are how to keep up the quality of the work and respond to the needs of a broader group. Money and physical space are also issues. (right below is Laura Molina's "The Jaguar")



Coronado talked about his beginnings as an artist after serving in the Vietnam war. He said he had no direction for his art until he started seeing Chicano art, like the works of Carmen Lomaz Garza. "That was very inspirational. I found a direction," he said. In the 1980s, Coronado went to SHG to make a print and afterwards decided to create his own print studio. (left below is Fidencio Duran's "High Heel Shoes" which reminds me of Carmen Lopez Garza's work)



Asked what he felt his role was vis a vis artists, Coronado said it was basically to help get the story out there about Chicano artists.

"Without Taller, SHG and my little studio in Texas, Latino artists...have a hard time exhibiting and letting mainstream America know we're around. In my region we're considered folk artists, we're not considered mainstream artists. Now with the studios, I've seen a difference."

Sanchez agreed.

"Works on paper are more accessible and can reach more people. An artist can donate a work on paper to libraries. A painting is a little more problematic."

(right is detail from Sanchez's shrine to Chicano author Gloria Anzaldu)

Everyone agreed that the challenge to continuing into the future is money. And with grant money dwindling (both studios are non-profits), Coronado indicated "We won't be able to do away with grants but we're trying to do more with sales."

I'll comb my notes for more but I wanted to get this up quickly. It was a great discussion and it's a fabulous show.
permanent link  roberta 7:30 AM
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Thursday, August 05, 2004

Father, son and--holy cow!

 


I was rambling toward the Art Museum today, admiring the sculptures all along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway when I passed Alexander Calder's "Ordinary" (top).

The shock of the differences between Alexander Milne Calder's "Swann Fountain" (below) and son "Sandy's" mobile hit me anew. These two pieces can hardly both be called the same type of artwork--sculpture.

The switch from the serious, solid-looking modeled figures which catch light and cast shadows to the virtually 2-D flat plates--witty little drips of colored ink punctuating the air--hanging off linear bars that move is nothing less than drastic.

Calder the younger has taken a medium known for weightiness, a medium that doesn't depend on illusion, a wysiwyg sort of medium, and made it more like a lighter-than-air drawing in space. He has opened it up to multiple interpretations and added a dollop or two or 10 of wit and playfulness and gave it a push so it moved.

It's so different in method and intent that comparison seems rather beside the point. But my walk up the Parkway was all the richer for having a chance to observe the radical shift in just a few moments.


permanent link  libby 8:42 PM
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Wednesday, August 04, 2004

North-of-the-border art

 

"Visiones from Postmodern Aztlan" at Taller Puertorriqueno is an exhibit chock-a-block with prints made in a print studio in Texas and a print studio in Los Angeles, both of which specialize in Chicano art. It also features some pieces from four local artists with Mexican backgrounds.

Now I didn't realize that Chicano, by definition, meant political, as in Mexican self-definition and protest north of the border. But I was lucky and bumped into Anabelle Rodriguez, the show's curator, while I was at Taller looking, and she explained.

For the most part this is not the kind of political art that descends into didactic modes, telling you what to think. It's art about identity and culture and mythologies and the border where cultures meet. So the imagery is a rich mix of Mexican, and American--especially pop culture--and traditional painterly and print-making modes of expression.

And it's about yearning for Aztlan, which Rodriguez said was a kind of mythical land, and in the case of Mexicans who came north, a place that they created in their minds and yearned for.

There's much to love and much to delve into in this show.

I suppose the easiest way to start is via the studios. The Texas work is more painterly, more art-traditional, which is not to say it's dull. It's just different from the L.A. work which is more pop-influenced graphical.

The two images above are from L.A., with Alma Lopez's "La Llorona Desperately Seeking Coyolxauhqui" (top) using the Mexican taste for decoration that makes me think of the Los Angeles house of a Mexican friend of mine, a tiny space lovingly filled with crochet work, flowers and lace. The image is mixed with tears, yearning for a mental space that mixes the myths of the distant past and the more recent Mexican Catholicism, stirring it up with a thoroughly modern, pop, pink young woman. Favianna Rodriguez's "Margarita," (above, right) sporting a white-face mask, is teeming with pop cartoon imagery that includes Mexican gods from the past and images of a sick person getting cured straight from Mexican art and shaman traditions.

The Texas prints come from Coronado Studio in Austin, Texas. Studio founder Sam Coronado was inspired by the work of the Los Angeles print studio Self-Help Graphics & Art, which has been specializing in and encouraging Chicano voices through art for 30 years, and which is the source for the other suite of prints in the show (left, Celina Hinojosa's "Andaba Perdida" from Coronado shows a tough babe with body like a landscape in a claustrophobic space).


Using the most popular technique for political posters--the silkscreen print--both groups of artists have created varied imagery with varied affect, but what was chosen largely expresses that yearning for Aztlan and expresses the confusion, anger, and difficulty of mixing the Mexican with the American .

The images show the range of emotions from dark, like like Vincent Valdez's "No. 10 - Collector's Item" (right, above) or his "Suspect: Dark Clothes, Dark Hair, Dark Eyes, Dark Skin," images of outsiders making their way in a strange land. One of my favorites was Cruz Ortiz's "Darling," (left), which captures the stripy-ness of a bad computer print-out, the tender note as ragged as the scenery and the print quality, and the helmeted lover so serious, forlorn and so ordinary and down-at-the-heels looking. It's not clear if the darling is his wife (he's got a wedding ring on) or Mexico.

One of the surprises about this show was the large number of women showing. Shizu Saldamando's "Snapshot" (right) is a portrait of assimilation, showing herself (she's the one on the left) with two buddies, the middle one wearing a Morrissey t-shirt (as opposed to a Los Lobos t-shirt or some such). [Correction 8/7/04: I just got a note from Shizu saying the gal on the left is not a self-portrait. Silly me and silly Anabelle. We thought it was because she was wearing a necklace that said Shizu. You'll have to put the rest together for yourself.]

There were many more prints worth the trip north of the Market Street border to Taller.

And speaking of borders, local artist Marta Sanchez included an altar in tribute to Gloria Anzaldu, who wrote the much acclaimed "Borderlands/La Frontera" and was a lesbian and Mexican activist. She died several weeks ago. Sanchez, who organizes the annual Cascarones fundraiser for children with AIDS, is also a printmaker, and the altar includes lots of little linoleum block prints. It's also a reminder of how Mexican culture persists even in Philadelphia.

Cesar Viveros, a Philadelphia muralist who works on his own and with Meg Saligman, showed some enormous paintings that reimagined Mexican mythic symbols for a modern world, including a painting of a Mexican-influenced pieta mixed up with broken idols (right, "Quetzcoatl," the god whose myth was twisted by Montezuma, who came to believe Cortez and Christianity were Quetzcoatl's heir). These powerful grisaille paintings restore a heroic stature to the old stories and myths.

Also from the local scene were Brujo de la Mancha's bold acrylics and a mixed-media painting( right, "Diagnastico" ). This work reflects traditional Mexican paintings and tableaux calling for a miracle cure. But in this case, the cure must be worse than the illness, the poor sick fellow attached to various real-world computer chips and electronica. I loved the ceremonial arrangement of the so-called doctors standing over the supine body. I also loved the equation of technology to milagros.

Also shown were some small pieces of traditional Mexican subjects like this still life of chiles (left) from Rocio Levito, who returned to Mexico several weeks ago to attend art school.

permanent link  libby 2:00 PM
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What you see and what you get

 
I want to encourage a trip to the cool and refreshing Philadelphia Museum of Art. Not only is the Glorious Harvest photography show glorious (see my post and Libby's post and my PW review) but the Video Gallery has a 30 minute presentation by performance artist Andrea Fraser that's a stitch.

"Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk" was filmed in the PMA in 1989 and the museum just bought the newly remastered work. The piece, based on Fraser's five, live gallery tours conducted in February, 1989, is the artist's often serious and sometimes loopy tour by a fictional character, Jane Castleton, who's

--part Main Line Molly (prissy do-gooder with all the facts and figures at her fingertips)
--part political rally agitator haranging the audience with words about poverty and homelessness
--part satirist who -- without winking -- tells you about the naming rights to various PMA galleries (like the Berman Galleries where Glorious Harvest sits) and continues that "for $750,000 you could name the Museum Shop."

The talk is very well scripted from books, pamphlets and pr material. You can almost hear the quotation marks when the artist slips from one source to another. At one point she waxes press release eloquent about Philadelphia -- including its "restaurant rennaissance that the whole world's talking about."



There's a welcome bench in the Video Gallery and every time I've been there folks feel free to pull up the floor and view from there as well. It's a good thing because the piece is worth seeing in its entirety.

The piece's first ten minutes are a set up and a little slow, but the fun begins after that with Fraser waxing histrionic about poverty; and mis-referencing many artworks (she points to a guard's stool and calls it a piece of "abundance and grace;" she points to an open doorway and exit sign between galleries and says "this picture is a brilliant example of a brilliant school." And on it goes.

Fraser's critique of the business of museums is as fresh today as it was in 1989. Without downplaying society's love and awe of the big repository for taste the piece raises questions about whose taste is being saved here and what that means in the long run for a world of many classes and many tastes.
permanent link  roberta 9:01 AM
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Through the car window

 
Several years ago I took a ride with Ben Woodward and a friend of his, Dasar, to view some of the better grafitti art around town. I wrote it up in a story for PW but sorry to say the PW archives don't go back that far. The wheatpaster (Woodward) and the tagger (Dasar), both Space 1026 ers introduced me to Philadelphia's premier corner for high end grafitti art in Philadelphia, 5th and Cecil B. Moore.

5th St. is a northbound road and the intersection is on the way to Taller Puertorriqueno (5th and Lehigh) and I recommend a drive-by on your way up there. (both images are taken from my car)



I don't have much to say about the grafitti except that the quality of the craftsmanship is astonishing.

Mostly, I love the fact of the outdoor art exhibit which represents -- if I understand it -- not gang designations and territory but spray paint art by those whose need to make art is on the wild and illegal side of things. (The fence surrounds a junkyard, by the way, and I believe the guys told me the owner sanctioned the art, so in fact that makes it legal.)

Fact is, this two-block long grafitti art show is more interesting than some of what shows up in galleries here and in New York. And every couple months, just like in the galleries, the show changes as new pieces go up over older ones. I'd kind of like to know how those decisions get made. Anybody know?
permanent link  roberta 9:59 AM
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The Strike zone

 
Stella and I ran into basekamp and Taller Puertorriqueno last Saturday.
We also saw some nice grafitti art at 5th and Cecil B. Moore while driving up to Taller.

Here's a brief look at Strike at basekamp. More about the others to follow.

The exhibit, a new version of a 2002 show at Wolverhampton Gallery in England curated by Gavin Wade and others, consists of slide projections of mostly text-based works onto four specially made walls. (top image is one projection on one wall).

The black flag in the right foreground near the door is a piece also. I'm sorry I don't have the artist's name. (I'll get it)

The curatorial thrust of Strike was to ask artists two hypothetical questions:

1. what would a world without art be like; and
2. how art could strike a blow to the world's structures.

There were approximately 100 answers from artists around the world including Markus Vater, Pae White, Paul Noble, Sal Randolph.



In basekamp's installation, a laptop computer sitting on a work station made of grey and red milk crates near the front windows invites viewers to register their thoughts on the questions by drawing or writing their own answers. (image is Stella at computer)

While I took notes and photos and admired once again the lovely big space that is basekamp, Stella drew a picture which she said was what art would be like if there were no art (it was a vapid, kindergarten-esque picture of a smiling sun and a bunch of "v"s for seagulls.)

Overall, the image projections were hard to see during the middle of a sunny day with bright light streaming in the big windows. But since they seemed to be images of dense pages of text I'm not sure what you're supposed to "see" anyway.

Jennifer Goettner, the basekamper minding the gallery, indicated viewing was better at night and that they were open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights from 6 p.m.-10 p.m. and were getting some night-time traffic, especially on Fridays.

Because the projections repeat what's in the show's catalog (available at the computer station -- in fact the catalog was the mousepad!) I browsed the show via the book -- a good strategy, actually. Whether intended or not, the show itself appeared to take a position and answer its questions.



Words will take the place of art. And words -- and maybe cartoons -- or maybe computer communications -- will be what strikes a blow -- not art.

That said, two entries that struck a blow for the importance of visual art were Markus Vater's cartoon of two round-faced children above a caption that asks -- hypothetically -- who would you sacrifice first, a doctor or an artist? (right, image from catalog)



I also liked Paul Noble's "Why work," a chunky word piece made from letters evoking building blocks. (left, image from catalog)

It spoke of labor and labor's dignity and of creation as a kind of bedrock on which to build.

By the way, this show is part of the Big Nothing roundup.
permanent link  roberta 8:36 AM
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Sunday, August 01, 2004

The woods, the weeds, the village

 
Local filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" opened this weekend. It's a story about an isolated village surrounded by a spooky woods.

So I thought I'd talk about some woods surrounded by a village -- the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, 500 acres of forest and field encircled by Philadelphia's Roxborough section. Roxborough's not spooky but I sure did feel its presence when walking through the woods.

The weeds
Just for starters and a little off subject if not off the trail, look how glorious the weeds look. (top image) You'd pull the suckers right out of your own yard, but here, left to their own devices weeds are lush ground cover -- and much better than grass.

The village

When I took my walk last Saturday to see Extinct/Extant, 7 new outdoor installations along the Grey Fox trail, I kept listening for birds. I heard a few but what I heard alll along the trail without really wanting to was the sound of cheering moms and dads at little league games in the neighboring baseball field across Hagy's Mill Rd.

I can't say the noise spoiled the experience but it separated me from nature and reinforced the idea of the woods beseiged by the village. (that's Brian Tolle's "Nature is a Personality," a quote from H.D.Thoreau running on the ground along side the trail.)

The art

Mostly you don't need art when you're in the woods -- the place is chock full of material to direct your thoughts. But the Schuylkill Center uses art as a kind of ecology teaching tool -- like a little time out along the trail to think somebody else's directed thought.

"Extinct/Extant," organized in conjunction with Philadelphia Sculptors and part of the Big Nothing festival, is a somber exhibit, as dictated by its subject matter -- life and death, the extant and extinct of the show's title.

Tolle's "Nature" and "Soiled" by Jackie Brookner, Liat Margolis and Alex Robinson, (image above) draw your eyes and your thoughts down to the earth, dirt, soil that is the beginning of and final resting place for life. Brookner and company's piece, a plastic shed buried in the ground with the dirt mound beside it, was downright funereal. I can't say I thought about ecology when I encountered it. But I thought about funerals and people I miss.

Darla Jackson's "Shadows of the past," (not shown)a sculptural installation that was like a 3-D line drawing of a pack of running wolves, was a good piece but was almost invisible, which was the point, of course, about wolves which no longer roam these parts.

Sylvia Benitez's "Wrap Song," (also not shown) was perhaps the most lyrical and life-imbued of the lot. Benitez attached what looked like wagon wheel halves onto the trunks of trees.



She called the half-wheels tree harps and while I never would have gotten that reading without her artist's statement, I thought the piece evoked something of our pioneer past and the thought that forests carry the memories of bygone eras. I love that thought.

Knox Cummin's "Galactic Nest" (image above) made a dark resting point on the trail, as did Jan Tomilson Master's "6 Hold (for Penn)." (image below)

Both works used sticks scavenged from the site to create small shelters that, once inside, either blocked out the woods (Master's piece) or turned your thoughts to darker matter (Cummin).



In the Center's main building, are the artists proposals for their works are displayed in the lobby. I happen to love sculptors' drawings and Cummin's drawings (image below) were lovely schematics.

(Master and Edward Dormer also had some nice working drawings on view).



Dormer, whose piece, "Landing: East West Cycle" has a kind of Christo the gardner aesthetic, wrapped the ground around several trees in a grove that's overrun with invasive Japanese stilt grass. (image right)

It might have been a little too much gardner and not enough Christo but Dormer's other work on the trail, "Cut Here," is a complete honey.



Libby wrote about "Cut Here" in her post and I'll just say here that I liked the work very much and thought its simple idea and simple execution combined for perhaps the most eco-evocative piece in the woods. (image)

By the way, local filmmaker Peter Rose shot film of Dormer's "Cut Here." (image below, sorry you have to squint to see the pink bands around the tree trunks)

Rose told me he included Dormer's piece as a three-minute segment in a larger work he made, "Flat Rock," which includes ten short observations about landscape.



Rose produced the work with high definition equipment for the HD satellite channel "Voom." I'm working on more information on where and when to see Rose's video, which sounds nifty.

Meanwhile, check the Weekly (PW) next week for more thoughts.
permanent link  roberta 3:34 PM
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The groups of summer #3

 

The work at Fleisher/Ollman, which is up through August, is a mix of outsider and insider, young and old, and it's hard to say where the twain don't meet, because meet they do in lots of places.

For insider and outsider, I've got TC Campuzano who borrows outsider words stacked and compressed into a crazyquilt pattern, revealing a slice of subculture. My favorites were "Brix Smith Reveals All" and "California." In Blix, a '60s hippie tells some tale of partying that evokes that era, the words in a figure-ground struggle with yellow horizontals serving as places to rest the eye. In Cali, laid-back beach bums issue vacuous statements about how they spend their free time. The words are scrawled in the strata of a stack of colors that evoke beach and sky (top, "Important Communication," the tale of a believer's encounter with an alien and what the alien had to say).

For the mix of young and old, I've got Ray Yoshida on my mind, his imagery cut out of old comics and arranged to float in a rather haphazard grid on a plain white ground. Yoshida is no spring chicken, an emeritus faculty member from the Art Institute of Chicago, yet his work looks like it came from one of the young pop and skate-culture artists who worship old comic genres. My favorite piece was called "mmmm ..." and it was the hair-dos adrift from everything but random bits of architecture or curtain selected from behind.

Other show highlights included a Don Colley tile. Colley's work was one of the high points in the "Say Something: The Art of Politics" show at the Painted Bride (see post) last November.

Primitive work of note included self-taught Jon Serl's "Capturing the School Mascot" (left), an energetic oil on canvas that has a crayon-y look that creates an epic scene, and Chuck Connely's "Cathedral #16," a dazzling color-and-pattern depiction of a church.

Oh, and I don't want to leave out Bruce Pollock, whose career of seeking satori on canvas is still going strong. Of the oils, "Reds" enhanced the coliding spheres of the Pollock cosmos with colliding reds, and intense but beautifully composed piece that orbited from space to atomic structures and back again. The circles in his drawing "Net 1" looked like airy ringlets of hair that ultimately tangle toward a dense focal point where nature and space collide (right, "Net 1," ink and graphite on paper).


Others in the show include Bill Traylor, SL Jones, Howard Finster, William Edmondson, Davis Brown, William Pym, David Smith, Sean Cavana and Edgar Tolson.

The biggest anomoly in the show was a collection of prison mug shots from the Fulton County Prison Farm in Georgia, c. 1940-1960. I guess I don't think this is art, but it's an artifact and somewhat interesting for the array of humanity and how people face down the culture of the prison system. I also like the hints of fashion from a time past.

permanent link  libby 12:17 PM
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Whoa, Nelly

 
I was in the midst of a big post about the wonders of nature -- and the art, of course -- at the Scuylkill Valley Environmental Center when the skies opened in Philadelphia and nature poured into my basement, maybe 100 gallons of it. I'll be back after I've bailed out. Until then, remember that nothing as beautiful as nature is not also terrifying and strong.
permanent link  roberta 8:55 AM
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