Photographer Matt Giel challenges the four edges of the mounted photograph, as he wonders about how to express the limitless. Giel, who was in a two-artist show at Grizzly Grizzly this year, mixes traditional forms like landscape and portrait with processes that verge on performances and products that verge on sculptures. He graduated from University [...]

The irrepressible printmaker Daniel Heyman brings extraordinary empathy to his subjects–and never seems to run out of it. His widely shown Amman Portfolio–a series of portraits of Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison survivors and their stories–was at the Baltimore Museum of Art last month. Here’s a sample from next Monday’s podcast. Download audio file (heyman.mp3) Right [...]

We went to DCCA March 24 for the 2012 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium’s Saturday panels. The topics covered building, cities, and objects, recycling, making versus appropriating — all topics that are hot in the art world these days. Sadly, we missed Marshall Brown‘s apparently memorable keynote talk Friday night. But the architect made some sparky comments [...]

This breezy, 2.50 minute-episode, the third from our first official Art Safari on March 2, takes us to the Vox building, 319 N. 11th St., where we have a chat with Jaime Alvarez at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Kate Stewart at Vox Populi.  Barnes Foundation educator John Gatti’s Art Now students were with us, and [...]

Frank Bramblett is a painter of large abstractions that spring from his love of materials and making things and his need to experiment like an alchemist. Frank is a Pew Fellow, and you can see several marvelous paintings of his in the exhibit Elemental: Nature as Language now on view at Woodmere Art Museum. Frank taught [...]

We ventured out for our first official artblog Art Safari on March 2, traveling to Crane Arts, B-Square Gallery and the Vox building. Episode 2, here , shows Bruce Hoffman and Amy Orr talking with us at the Icebox about their Fiber Philadelphia shows. Two more video episodes on their way for the other two [...]

Rachel Udell‘s  “The Shapes of My Dreams and of My Nightmares” hangs at about eye level in the middle of the Crane’s Icebox Project Space.  Part of Fiber Philadelphia‘s big juried art exhibit, the piece is a carnival of crocheted yarn, thread, heirloom clothing, fabric, felt and fiberfill.  We love its Dr. Seuss-ian ambiguity — [...]

Ever wonder just what it is that Gary Steuer is doing in City Hall? Mayor Michael Nutter appointed Steuer to a cabinet position, thereby making good on a campaign promise to restore an art czar to the city government. Steuer, who has to work with a slim budget, in hard times, has to find ways [...]

We added the video to our artblog radio interview with Annette Monnier.

Perhaps you remember the Tiki Bar at Copy Gallery. Annette Monnier, one of the group that ran Copy Gallery, calls it one of her favorite shows there–a kind of social experiment in which people expect to find a gallery with one set of rules, but instead enter a bar with a whole other set of [...]

The Inky ran Nessa Forman’s obit, and there’s a memorial service tomorrow morning (Tuesday, Sept. 13) at 10am at WHYY.

Before the Vox building became a stacked art building, it was home to Black Floor Gallery. The groundbreaking Black Floor and its successor, Copy Gallery, are both gone, but they will remain remembered as among the best collective galleries in town in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. One of the founders of both [...]

Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, has been with the Institute for ten years, and in that time she’s created many great exhibitions. Schaffner has a an easy smile, a ready laugh, and an interest in the absurd, from Dali and Dada to more contemporary artists like Richard Artschwager, for whom she worked as an archivist, pre-Philadelphia. [...]

Hey, check out our picks for the month on the our picks page.  Always available on the blog, and delivered to your email inbox if you sign up for our monthly our picks newsletter.  Also, thank you, Samantha Slade for troublishooting the broken Facebook “likes” button and fixing it.  Have fun “liking” things again.  We [...]

If hatred and fear of colors other than black and white exist in the art world, as David Batchelor persuasively argues in his book, Chromophobia, the opposite of color-hate, chromophilia, fuels Katie Murken‘s new installation opening this Friday in her DIY pop-up gallery at 319 N. 11th St. (the Vox building). We met the artist [...]

Ingrid Schaffner came to Philadelphia ten years ago as an adjunct curator at ICA.  She’s now the Senior Curator at the kunsthalle, with a passel of exhibits under he belt.  Schaffner has a an easy smile, a ready laugh, and an interest in the absurd, from Dali and Dada to more contemporary artists like Richard [...]

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The day we talked to Matt Savitsky, he was moving out of his North Philadelphia studio, in preparation for a road trip across the country with his father. Savitsky, moved to Philadelphia from what he called “the New York pressure cooker.” Here he found a whole different way of life–first isolation and unemployment, and then [...]

Whether Amber Dorko Stopper is fighting to resurrect Nam Jun Paik’s  “Video Arbor” installation, on Franklin Town Blvd., for which the software has degraded and fallen out of date, or whether she is devouring Korean horror movies and textile traditions–all of which grew out of a quest to help one of her adopted child know [...]

The best art opening party ever from our point of view was at UArts last Wednesday–a confluence of two shows, with people crossing Broad to get from one to the other. The big-ticket half of the party was at Rosenwald-Wolf for Young Country, a traveling exhibit organized by DCCA’s Maiza Hixson. It’s exuberant and national [...]