Recession-proof Union Square is finally looking a little frayed around the edges. On this visit we saw a number of closed storefronts where there had been businesses before. We also saw scrappy young galleries closer in to the center of things, which says to me that rents are down. But the place is still glorious–and [...]

Adrienne Skye Roberts‘ reading of her family history, with visual aids, is a magical thing, occupying its own unique space between a performance and a talk. I heard her Swimming Lessons and the Red Scare at the Coral Street Arts House, with about 20 other people, a couple of whom figured in her story. You [...]

An anti-corporate guy like Albo Jeavons couldn’t possibly work with a gallery. He’s constitutionally indisposed to men and women in suits. So tomorrow night (Friday, Sept. 16th), he is mounting his own show in his own apartment. The digital prints are all based on the Sistine Chapel, with voluptuous figures of corporate godhead and equally [...]

Two days before tonight’s opening, folk artist/gay activist Ralfka Gonzalez was sitting in the middle of A Seed on Diamond slipping final touches on to a painting. He was a little apologetic of as he reinterpreted the virgin’s traditional gold fleur de lis into runic gestures. Like Ralfka, the show is exuberant. It has two [...]

Annette Monnier aces the serve in her essay on the Ryan Trecartin show at PS1 in her blog One Review A Month. She also back-hands volleys at Jackson Pollock, not to mention at Lyonel Feininger and at Cory Arcangel both at the Whitney. See who emerges t…

If this is Edmonton, I am looking for the art, and my sister-in-law Louise, a landscape artist with lots of skills, is aiding and abetting me. My brother Barry and Murray also come along. Our first stop is in a most unlikely place–the office of an optometrist named Larry Louie. There we find treasure. The [...]

Carbon 14 is back, a phoenix regularly rising from its own carbon dust. The gallery has moved to Kensington from Old City, and once again the people behind it, Katerina Lydon-Warner and Andrew Warner, are happy to think big thoughts! Their first big thought this time is their new address, at 3239 Amber St. The 45- [...]

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for quirky work outside the mainstream. So when the husband of artist Ann Irwin asked for an essay on Irwin for a book documenting his late wife’s work, I quickly said yes. A show of her work, Transmutation and Metamorphosis: The Collages of Ann Irwin,  is [...]

June Cleaver is in the kitchen when the bomb goes off; the vacant house becomes lost in time. That’s my quick take on the scenario that Chris Lawrence has built at one of the 40th Street AIR spaces (4007 Chestnut). The half-moon countertop holds a kitchen aid working a pile of irradiated cookie dough, transformed [...]

Big is what the Ice Box exhibition space requires. CONSTRUCT, CFEVA‘s show there, delivers the goods. New York artist Jennifer Williams’ installation photographs splayed on the gallery walls are spectacular. The one resting in a corner delights with the way it engages the viewer physically in its vertiginous urban spaces, delivering a sensation of instability, [...]

Blah blah blah went the promospeak from Art21. So I skipped to the videos–brief (6 mins. or so) documentary clips on artists early in their careers. First I laughed with Kalup Linzy and James Franco (yes, that James Franco) performing camp rap; then I watched a sad one of LaToya Ruby Frazier wearing out a [...]

Murray thinks about history and I think about art. I think we might have similar motives–trying to figure out the meaning of life and what is real–but just come at it in different ways. So when video artist Jennifer Levonian, a 2009 Pew Fellow in the Arts, gave a talk at the Library Company to [...]

Have you risked your life and your ankle crossing the Parkway to get from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to its annex? Do you wonder how the august institution, so slow to change, will embrace the digital era? Those issues and more were addressed in a chat at the Philadelphia Art Alliance between PMA Director [...]

Philadelphia and Cleveland have a lot in common in part because they each are eclipsed by a nearby major, international metropolitan area–New York and Chicago respectively. When our host (we were in Cleveland at the beginning of February) heard I admired Cleveland, she seemed truly thrilled. So for natives of both cities there’s a diffidence, [...]

Our series sponsor is Fleisher Art Memorial. Carl Marin’s art, which includes sculpture, installation, photography and taxidermy, will be on exhibit at FLUXspace in June. The son of a hunter and taxidermist, Marin puts animals in his work in surprising ways to explore man’s changing relationship with the natural world.  He is one of five [...]

With internationally recognized photographer Larry Fink as juror, Project Basho has once again made its annual photography show a must-see event–an event that this year brought in submissions from 600 photographers. Of the 63 photographers selected, only a couple were familiar to me, some of them from as far away as Japan, Moscow and Spain. [...]

I’ve always suspected that Superwoman was really a trannie (for sure Xena). Big shoulders. Big hair. Big powers. But she was nothing like any woman–or trannie–I ever knew. She’s Superman in a bustier–a weak copy of a guy’s dream of adventure and power. L.A. artist Mel Kadel’s exhibit Spacing Awake, a handful of illustrative drawings [...]

Nearly 100 artists contributed to Refugee Reading Room, at Space 1026 (up now through Febr 26). The exhibit, curated by Philadelphia artist Amze Emmons, includes Emmons’ cityscape installation with a makeshift newsstand and skyline–plus shelves and tables loaded with free prints and zines by the contributing artists. Not only are the prints and zines free [...]

Bohyun Yoon has been taking photographs of the people of Philadelphia . One of them turned out to be my friend Wendy, who was out in Rittenhouse Square walking her standard poodle Nelly when Bo approached. She talked, he talked, and they found out they had me in common. Wendy’s face is now one of [...]

One of the many excellent shows I saw First Friday was at Grizzly Grizzly, the little gallery that could. A surprising pairing of artists, Carrie Dickason and Mike Hein, impressed with the two artists’ engagement with materials and ideas. Dickason, MFA Cranbrook in fiber, lives in Maine, and her work evinces a love of the [...]