Get your Artblog Connect! Moore College and Franklin Institute collaborate on Michelle Lopez’s ‘Pandemonium,’ Adam Crawford at Amtrak, Dindga McCannon at Whitney Museum

Artblog News

Artblog Connect is here for you

Hi, we know you’re busy. But did you see that Artblog now has a brand new gallery and event guide online at Artblog Connect? Our hope is to make this useful, user-upload art and events site your go-to place for gallery and event listings every week. Get the listings emailed to your inbox on Thursdays to prepare you for your weekend arts walkabout. Check out the site, sign up for the newsletter. Oh, and yes, please, give us feedback! We want to make this as user friendly as possible. How do you like it? What’s your feedback?

NEWS

Adam Crawford large-scale mural paintings at 30th St. Station in October

Amtrak is expanding its celebrated year-round, public art program to William H. Gray 30th Street Station with work by local visual artist, Adam Crawford, entitled Euphonic & Chromatic Drift. This large-scale vinyl mural will grace the window facades on both the East and West ends of the transportation hub.

Art at Amtrak®, the official public art program of Amtrak, presents diverse, unique and memorable art projects to enhance, invigorate and humanize the travel experience at Amtrak stations. Featuring contemporary artists through rotating exhibitions, Art at Amtrak® reflects and celebrates each region’s creative preeminence.

“Art at Amtrak has commissioned Adam Crawford to create a large-scale art installation for integration directly into the renowned architecture of Gray 30th Street Station,” said Jina Sanone, Amtrak Vice President, Northeast Corridor Service Line. “Our goal is to showcase the work of this local artist while enhancing the natural beauty of the station and improving the overall experience for our customers.”

The art installation will open in October and remain on display until winter 2024. Art at Amtrak is being implemented in addition to a large-scale restoration and renovation project also underway at Gray 30th Street Station.

Crawford’s practice is grounded in his desire to create visually engaging and stylistically unique artwork that engages a diverse audience. When developing the Art at Amtrak commission, Crawford focused on the strong lines of the existing architecture, the verticality and height of the space and the spatial symmetry of the main concourse. He also considered the relationship between motion and sound and how both are amplified in a major transit hub, ultimately impacting its overall energy.

Crawford has lived and worked in Philadelphia for 29 years. Crawford earned an AA in Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania to earn a BFA in 2002. Crawford is particularly drawn to both interior and exterior large-scale commissions and his work can be found in Philadelphia, New York City, Washington, D.C, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Nashville, Cleveland and Las Vegas.

FIBER AND PRINT: WORKSHOP WITH DINDGA MCCANNON at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Saturday, September 30, 11 am–3 pm, Floor 3, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

In this special Open Studio, visitors of all ages are invited to join Dindga McCannon to get creative in the Laurie M. Tisch Education Center. Create a fabric collage and experiment with making monoprints inspired by McCannon’s work on view in Inheritance.

Dindga McCannon is a fiber artist, quilt maker, painter, printmaker, costume designer, mother, and more. McCannon learned traditional needlework from her mother and grandmother, which she combines with other techniques like drawing, printmaking, and mixed media in her work. She is working on an ongoing series of portraits celebrating women’s lives and “herstories.”

Families with kids ages five and up are also invited to join an interactive family tour of Inheritance.
Museum admission and this program are free as part of West Side Fest.

Moore College of Art and Design collaborates with Franklin Institute showing Michelle Lopez, funded by Pew Center for Arts and Heritage grant
Moore College of Art & Design (“Moore”) announced the launch of Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium, a collaborative project with the Franklin Institute, made possible by a $360,500 grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The grant includes both project funding and an additional 20% in unrestricted, general operating support. The project will result in a two-pronged, immersive multimedia installation that will be presented concurrently at The Galleries at Moore and the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute, connecting the two institutions along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The exhibition is expected to debut in fall 2025.

“Creating opportunities to further connect Moore’s campus with the vibrant Philadelphia arts and culture community around us is an institutional priority, so we are incredibly proud to partner with the Franklin Institute to present Pandemonium,” said Cathy Young, president, Moore College of Art & Design. “Collaborations that push the boundaries of both art and technology further our mission of providing enriching cultural experiences for our students, the talented artists across the region, and our surrounding neighbors. We are so grateful to The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for their extraordinary support, which paves the way for us to reach new heights of innovation.”

Michelle Lopez has been dedicated for nearly 30 years to pushing the boundaries of sculpture as a cultural critique of collapsing the built environment through a minority-brown lens, by dismantling and re-assembling physical forms to embody violence.

Evolving from an earlier body of work (Smoke Clouds, 2014), Pandemonium investigates the concept of an explosive phenomenon of a “cloud”—whether a natural disruption from a disastrous tornado or the digital/virtual haze of our human-generated misinformation—and how both disasters leave their own kind of debris as a relic of violence. This interdisciplinary project dynamically uses space and technology to envelop the viewer in an epic form of riotous beauty by building different metaphorical cloud conflagrations to reflect on the current systemic collapse and climate crisis.

Using new methods never explored previously in her practice, Lopez will create a virtual reality sculpture that floats digitally in the Fels Planetarium’s expansive domed sky. Steps away at The Galleries at Moore, a smaller adapted version of Pandemonium will intermingle with a solo/retrospective exhibition of Lopez’ recent and rarely seen sculptural work that contextualizes Lopez’s investigations.

Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, Rochelle F. Levy Director & Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore, will steward the project. Cole Akers, Curator & Associate Director of Special Projects at The Glass House, will serve as curator for the project.