I was stunned this morning to see that Ed Sozanski went out on a limb and reported about Jane Irish’s invitational anti-war art exhibit, Operation Rapid American Withdrawal (Operation RAW), which includes 87 other artists as well as Irish. There are a lot of big Philadelphia names in this show, but still, the whole project, which is quite ambitious, is also not your standard fare (image, a collage of two of Irish’s 38 images of Vietnam and of small American towns visited during a 100-mile anti-Vietnam War protest march that took place 35 years ago, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War).
Sozanski gave it the kind of space he and the paper reserve only for major museum exhibits, safe big-name-artist gallery shows, and snoring boring shows of safe work at the Michener. This show, on the other hand, is at the Ice Box, a fairly new, out-on-the-edge space organized by a bunch of artists. So far as I know, no show there has ever gotten a review from him before.
Maybe I’m naive to consider this a breakthrough, but being a cockeyed optimist, I of course do.
Here’s a link to the article. It only works if you sign up–no fee–and it only works for a couple of weeks. (We used to put up our blog id so you didn’t have to sign in, but we got reports that it didn’t work, so no more.)irish, jane
