‘What in the World?’ at the Penn Museum, Print Invitational at Little Berlin, ‘Dead Flowers’ at Vox Populi
By andrea kirsh | March 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
For the past couple decades ever more museums have invited artists into their store rooms to curate exhibitions: in an early example, the RISD Museum invited Andy Warhol; MoMA asked Chuck Close and Scott Burden; and Fred Wilson has made a career of the practice. The results have almost always been interesting. Artists, of course, [...]
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Alexander Arrechea at Crane Arts Building and Miller Lagos at Penn
By andrea kirsh | March 4, 2010 | 0 Comments
Alexander Arrechea’s installation, Orange Tree, occupied Crane Arts‘ huge Icebox as well as the Grey Box leading to it from Jan. 21-Feb. 21, 2010, and it definitely held its ground within that vast space. Arrechea’s work, combining suggestions of menace and the high-tech production values of the latest Hollywood movie, rose to the challenge of [...]
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Penn Museum takes on the Universal Subject of Sex
By andrea kirsh | | 0 Comments
Things are getting lively at the Penn Museum. I’ve just heard the museum is inviting the public (18 and older – not sure who they’re protecting – this morning’s BBC World Service carried a story about a company that’s marketing extra-small condoms for young users) to join in a discussion of what an exhibition on [...]
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College Art Association Annual Meeting in Chicago; random thoughts
By andrea kirsh | February 22, 2010 | 5 Comments
The plane to Chicago for the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Meeting left from a concourse I rarely use so I saw different art than usual as part of the airport’s Exhibition Program, which certainly provides the best distraction I’ve found at Philadelphia International Airport. Nick Kripal’s Swarm was a terra cotta landscape of an [...]
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Ida Applebroog ‘Monalisa’ at Hauser and Wirth
By andrea kirsh | February 4, 2010 | 1 Comment
For more than thirty years Ida Applebroog’s work has given us an unblinking view through the windows of America at home. Rejecting the bawdlerized domesticity of television, she has taken us behind the stage sets to reveal the disturbing unease, mis-communication, power struggles and violence of our private lives and their inevitable connections to events [...]
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Reclaiming Women’s Anatomy: The Visible Vagina at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and David Nolan Gallery
By andrea kirsh | January 31, 2010 | 5 Comments
Explicit views of women’s pudenda have never been in short supply in New York City but one found them on 42nd St. (before Disney arrived), not in established art galleries. Inspired by Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, Francis Naumann began collecting work for an exhibition and when it grew too large, enlisted David Nolan to join [...]
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Events in Philadelphia and Elsewhere
By andrea kirsh | | 0 Comments
An incomplete, biased and otherwise personal list of some of the events I hope to get to in the next two weeks:
Tuesday, Feb. 2, 6 pm YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a Seoul based web-art group, will be speaking at Temple where their work is part of Philagrafika.
126 AUDITORIUM, Temple University Architecture building, 1947 North 12th [...]
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Lynda Benglis and Philippe Parreno at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
By andrea kirsh | January 19, 2010 | 5 Comments
Lynda Benglis produced a series of work, beginning in 1968, that upset contemporary notions of what was acceptable as high art: forms that appeared soft and oozing when art was supposed to be rigid and geometric; polychrome and even fluorescent when the prevailing color was gray; sparkle-y when such effects were associated with ballroom dancing [...]
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Artists at Work: ‘Muralmorphosis’ and ‘Inside the Painter’s Studio’
By andrea kirsh | January 5, 2010 | 2 Comments
Last month I attended the first screening of Muralmorphosis, the short animated film documenting the mural project of the same name curated by Sean Stoops (and organized by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program) at 2nd and Race Streets during the 2009 Fringe Festival last September.
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Kanthas at the PMA; women’s art of Bengal
By andrea kirsh | January 3, 2010 | 2 Comments
Kanthas are delightful and appealing vernacular textiles, fashioned from of bits and pieces of worn clothing and embroidered with figurative designs by the women of Bengal (now divided between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh). Some of their charms are akin to childrens’ book illustrations, others to comic books and vernacular art of [...]
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