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 [...]

Brian Spies’ installation piece “Can’t Find My Way Home,” on display through May 31 at The Hex Factory in Fishtown, is a full-throated artistic roar against the insanity of “hydro-fracking,” the groundwater-polluting, ecosystem-destroying domestic oil-drilling technology currently in use in Pennsylvania and across the country. The exhibition combines Spies’ black-and-white photography of Dimock, PA, described [...]

Martha Wilson Sourcebook; 40 years of reconsidering performance, feminism, alternative spaces, Martha Wilson, ed. (Independent Curators Inc., 2011) ISBN 978-0-916365-85-1 Martha Wilson’s sourcebook is filled primarily with the writing of others, through which Wilson traces important influences on her life and art, and documents the New York alternative art scene since the 1970s. She has [...]

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 [...]

News Through the Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP), the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage has awarded $766,325 to six local organizations, including two first-time grantees; the winners include the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, for their effort to revitalize the John Coltrane House in North Philadelphia, and the Mural Arts Program, for Structure and Surface, a community-based public art initiative about the history [...]

Spring is here! And it’s time for our April Our Picks newsletter! As you are enjoying this lovely weather, go see our top recommendations for this month’s shows and events! If you are interested in receiving our newsletter by email, please clic…

Mel Bochner; In the Tower at the National Gallery of Art  (NGA,  through April 29, 2012) includes thirty works on paper from the 1960s, most from the group known as Thesaurus portraits, and a room full of recent, large, colorful canvases for which the artist returned to the thesaurus as a starting-point.  The use of [...]

The Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn has been a haven of cheap rent for artists and newcomers to New York for at least the last five to ten years as Williamsburg increasingly became overly expensive. The venues of Bushwick are multitudinous: from music lofts, to clean galleries, to someone’s studio. A recent twist in the neighborhood’s [...]

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 [...]

NEWS Gallery classes – Beginning this spring and continuing through the summer, Nichols Berg Gallery  will host workshops in the gallery taught by Clarissa Shanahan (teaming up with Scott Nichols of Nichols Berg) on subjects including encaustics, manuscript illuminations and printmaking. And Cambridge Street Studios, a new realist atelier in Philly, is having their Grand Opening Gala this coming Saturday, [...]

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 [...]

How many ways are there to characterize photographer Emmett Gowin? He’s an empathetic chronicler of family quirks; obsessive stalker of his muse; eco-reporter; natural world archivist; latin-influenced surrealist. Each of the hats the artist wears coincides with a chronological chunk of his life’s work. And, as laid out more or less chronologically in the elegant [...]

Projected outside the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s first floor gallery, “Fly to Mars” serves as an introduction to Jennifer Steinkamp’s interest in the digital sublime. In the computer-generated animation, a tree transitions through all four seasons as its branches undulate. The movement of the branches is unnatural, spreading and recoiling in a fashion that reveals [...]

In lieu of brush strokes by the thousands, organisms by the thousands form the contours of the natural world in Mia Rosenthal’s American Landscapes, her first solo outing with Gallery Joe.  In the show, which consists primarily of reinterpreted 19th-century paintings from the Hudson River School, Rosenthal converts the pastoral landscapes into images built on [...]

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 [...]

by Maegan Arthurs I love a glimpse into a different way of life. It is the same enjoyment provided by a novel that lets you become a character alongside the rest and upon finishing, come back to reality feeling as though you have lost a dear friend but gained something invaluable.  Amina Ahmed and works [...]

In the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the albatross is an omen of both good and bad luck. Taking the seafaring bird as its title, Rebecca Saylor Sack’s latest body of work also revels in ambiguity. On view at Seraphin Gallery until March 25, the paintings in Albatross suggest creation and destruction. While these themes [...]

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 — [...]