Opportunities
The Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is now accepting applications for its 2017–18 Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA) Project Stream grants. These are competitive grants of up to $2,500 for individual artists and organizations.
Deadline: Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Check the Cultural Alliance website for more details.
Call for Artists from the Mural Arts Program – Residencies in Photography and Sound Artists.
Mural Arts Philadelphia invites photographers and sound artists to apply for the Tacony Learning and Arts Building (LAB) 2017 Autumn Artist Residencies. Two residencies are available: one for photographers and one for sound artists. These 12-week residencies, housed in a storefront arts hub on the Torresdale Avenue Commercial Corridor in Northeast Philadelphia, are a unique opportunity to combine personal practice, community engagement, and the creation of civically-focused public art.
Deadline: Monday, July 10, 2017 at 5 pm.
Check the Mural Arts website for more information.
Events
Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture and Perry World House present (DIS)PLACED: Arts Workshop
Thursday, June 22, 3–6 pm
Free and open to the public
As part of (DIS)PLACED: Expressions of Identity in Transition, join installation artist BUTHAYNA ALI (from Damascus via skype), composer/musician KINAN ABOU-AFACH, and poet NAZEM EL SAYED for an afternoon exploring the theme of (dis)placement through art, poetry, music, and conversation! Each artist will lead a workshop inviting attendees in a creative expression and collective arts-making process.
Check Al-Bustan’s website for more information.
The Fabric Workshop and Museum Summer 2017 Public Apprentice Talks
Thursday, June 22, 6:30–7:30 pm
Free and open to the public
Please join The Fabric Workshop and Museum for an evening of presentations by the current Summer 2017 College and Post-Graduate Apprentices. This program is presented in conjunction with Surface Forms, a survey of former high school, college, graduate, and post-graduate apprentice banners depicting repeat patterns screen-printed onto fabric. Each apprentice will lead the audience through a survey of their recent work.
Click here for more information and to register.
A good read
In this week’s New Yorker, Zadie Smith writes about the paintings of British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in her show at the New Museum, Under-Song for a Cipher.
In many of Yiadom-Boakye’s interviews, she is asked about the source of her images, and she tends to answer as a novelist would, citing a potent mix of found images, memory, sheer imagination, and spontaneous painterly improvisation (most of her canvases are, famously, completed in a single day). From a novelist’s point of view, both the speed and the clarity are humbling. Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative.
Check out Smith’s beautiful essay here.
