News
Pentimenti’s latest, most exciting project is The ARTacama Project, billed as “A Critical Partnership between Science, Technology, Education & the Fine Arts.” Held on Thursday, May 14 from 6-8 PM at Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, ARTacama is a partnership between the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), led by a team including Prof. Mark Devlin and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow Benjamin Schmitt, (University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy), artist and professor Jackie Tileston, (PennDesign Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania), and Christine Pfister, Director, (Pentimenti Gallery). Some background: since its creation in early 2012, The ARTacama Project has sought to bring art and science together, and especially to promote public awareness of experimental cosmology and the visual arts. Located at over 17,000 feet in elevation on Cerro Toco, an extinct stratovolcano situated near the village of San Pedro de Atacama, in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, ACT is dedicated to studying the earliest light in the universe, called the Cosmic Microwave Background. One of Jackie Tileston’s paintings, naturally, is a perfect vehicle for their mission. Deployed to cover the surface of ACTPol, a new, high-sensitivity camera for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), her painting Radical Measure (Not Entirely Random) is an oil and mixed media painting on linen that evokes otherworldly explorations. There’s a panel discussion and tour, a welcome address by Benjamin Leavenworth, Honorary Consul of Chile in Philadelphia, and a tour of the Penn Experimental Cosmology High Bay Facility (David Rittenhouse Laboratory at 209 South 33rd Street). RSVP by Monday, May 11, 2015 at mail@pentimenti.com
Philadelphia poet and friend of Artblog, Tom Devaney, has a new book out, with an accompanying launch May 13! Runaway Goat Cart, published by Hanging Loose Press, is featured alongside the work of Brooklyn-based Joanna Fuhrman; Devaney and Fuhrman are then doing an East Coast book tour in May and June.
Opportunities
via Andrea Kirsh – The International Association of Art Critics is seeking applications from potential new members and is encouraging younger art writers to apply. Criteria for membership are based on board review of submissions published in recognized print or online art magazines or journals, art critiques in daily newspapers or periodicals, reports or commentaries about contemporary art for radio or television, and published writing on contemporary art in books and museum catalogues.
75º West/75º Oeste has issued a Call for Artists for their exciting Philly-Medellín Project. With a deadline of Thursday, May 28, 2015, please send your email submissions and questions to seventyfivedegreeswest@gmail.com. A collaborative exchange between Philadelphia and Medellín, Colombia, 75º West/75º Oeste invites Philadelphia-based artists of all disciplines (visual, performing, literary) to submit up to 10 images that represent their creative work, along with short statements about what they value in their lives and in their city. All work submitted is accepted into the project, and all submissions are then part of the ongoing process of 75º West/75º Oeste. Each submission is professionally printed multiple times, in miniature, and exported to Medellín, Colombia in June. Once in Medellín, each fully-credited image is packaged into a small ziplock baggie (why ziplock baggies?), accompanied by its artist’s name and statement. The baggies are then distributed and displayed throughout the city in several ways – given to members of the public to either keep or pass on, left in public spaces for people to encounter (for example, on a park bench or pinned to a tree), and exhibited in a gallery setting at the contemporary art center Casa Tres Patios. Work may also be shown as part of community workshops at Museo Casa de la Memoria and Casa NN. Work will be credited at all times. As a partnering artist on the project, your name and a hyperlink to your website appear on the 75º West/75º Oeste website. In a parallel process, art from Medellín is simultaneously exported to Philadelphia, with Philly-based artists invited to help package, distribute, and display the images as part of the U.S. Social Forum and as a way to raise awareness about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In order to submit, send images in .JPG format, 300 ppi resolution, sized at 1200 pixels on the longest side. Please name the images in the following format: lastname_firstname_number. You may submit up to 10 images, and multiple submissions are encouraged; no watermarked images images, please. In your submission email, please submit the following two phrases with the blanks filled in:
In my life, I value ___________________.
I value ___________________ Philadelphia.
You may respond to each prompy up to 10 times; your responses to the “fill-in-the-blank” are included in the project and attributed to you. For full information on submissions, please visit the 75º West/75º Oeste site.
Artist News
Matthew Cox is in the process of a new body of work for 2015, which includes Kepler 22b: Estimated Organisms, Fragmented Hosts, shown above.
Assembly, a co-authored social practice conference held by Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA faculty, students, alumni, and partners, features presenters including Alec Soth and Zoe Strauss, among many other Magnum photographers. The program runs from May 27–31, 2015.
Rebecca Gilbert has plans in motion for a much-anticipated new project, Treasure Searching in the Land of Enchantment. This summer, she’ll be traveling to the mountains of northern New Mexico, as part of a grant awarded by The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA), and a residency awarded by OCHO Artist Residency and Gallery, Questa, New Mexico. Expect exhibition news!
