Midweek News, PAFA leadership change, UArts bankruptcy, Philly Comics, Partners and son, Free Library, Nancy Herman Gallery, and our Fringe and Cannonballs picks of the week

PAFA news

UArts bankruptcy

Partners and Son

Nancy Herman Gallery

Chip Thomas

Fringe Events Listing

Roberta: Hi everyone, it’s Roberta.

Ryan: And this is Ryan and this is the Midweek News

Roberta: On Artblog Radio. Good morning, Ryan.

Ryan: Good morning Roberta.

Roberta: Let’s talk about the news. Alright, I have four things again this morning, I don’t know if this is good or bad. I started out with two. We have to keep it to two, and then it crept up to three and now it’s at four. So, kill me! Is it going to go higher? I hope not. Haha. I think four is a good number, so let’s keep it to four. Anyway, this morning’s news includes in the Inquirer and Billy Penn stories about PAFA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eric Pryor, who’s the director, is going to leave at the end of his contract, which is at the end of this year.

Now that’s big news. Reggie Brown was quoted in the Inquirer article. He’s a vice president of the board of trustees. And we interviewed him. We have a really nice, good interview with Reggie on Artblog. He says Pryor was brought in as a change agent, i.e., to deal with ending the MFA and the BFA programs and get that moved on, because they needed that done. And who’s taking over in when he leaves? At the end of the year, there will be an interim committee of three. Harry Philbrick, who used to be the museum director at PAFA and then went to Philadelphia Contemporary, which he founded, and then went to the Fabric Workshop after that as interim and is now going to be interim Museum director at PAFA, along with two others. Lisa Biagas, the new Chief of Operations and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon is Chief Academic Officer. So, a triumvirate is going to be handling the work at PAFA, which shows the continual churn in the institutional world of art in Philadelphia.

And so it goes. PAFA’s been churning for a couple years now. The second institutional churn I want to mention is that University of the Arts filed for bankruptcy. On Friday the 13th, they filed for bankruptcy in bankruptcy court, and they’re going to sell all their buildings. They have, I don’t know, $50 million of debt and some $90 million of buildings they are going to try to sell. Not clear whether the $90 million of buildings will actually sell for $50 million and expunge the debt. It’s very complicated. And meanwhile, they still haven’t paid the adjunct faculty members and other faculty members in the union.

Those guys are out of two months worth of pay. Now, they weren’t paid in June because the institution closed June 7th. And so they haven’t been paid for June. I would hope they’d get paid for July and now August and September. That’s inexplicable. Why they don’t have any cash reserves whatsoever to pay those people?

Ryan: Did you see the endowment. They want to spread the endowment out to other universities. So $63 million in endowments could cover some payroll.

Roberta: Yes. But I don’t know that you can use endowment for payroll. Those monies come with strings attached, and it’s all about helping the students who were displaced and now homeless from UArts. So I don’t think that money is free and clear. I’m not sure they could pay salaries. But speaking of other universities, the bankruptcy came as a result of UArts not being able to negotiate with Temple University to take over. Temple had made an offer to take over, but it was contingent upon Temple getting the endowment. Like all of it. And then the people who are the donors, the philanthropists, the Hamilton family, did not want the money to go to Temple and so they said no.

And that was the end of that for Temple University absorbing University of the Arts. So that didn’t work out, sadly. And now I think the Hamilton family — they’re responsible for half of that $63M endowment fund at UArts. –they are happy with spreading the endowment to all the institutions that took the University of the Arts students. But it won’t go to pay salaries, I don’t think, which is pretty sad.

Anyway, it continues to churn here in a not good way. I really feel for all those people who are not being paid by University of the Arts and they did all that work and they just. It’s shabby. It’s shabby treatment.

Okay, so let’s turn a little happier here now and go to comics. This is my third thing that I want to talk about. Comics in Philadelphia is such a wonderful subsection of the art sector. Many, many comics are made here by many, many artists and we love them. We just love comics so much. We’ve had comics on art blog for many, many years, so here’s to the Art Department at the Free Library which has a comics collection that is now two years old!

That’s awesome to have a comics collection. You can actually go into the library and get your hands on those books and read them. They also online resources, like this page with lots of resources for manga. Follow the Art Department’s Instagram for news about events like the Comics Club that meets monthly, and updates on their collection.

So really good news on the comics front, and as an ancillary, I want to say congratulations to Partners and Son, which is a comics store in Philadelphia on 6th Street near Bainbridge, which just turned five this year, and it seems like only yesterday that they came into Philadelphia. So, bravo to Partners and Son! They’re celebrating their birthday all month long with a series of programs and events. See the link to their website in the links list above. Partners and Son is tabling at Artblog’s Art MKT, which is very exciting. They’ll have books and prints and posters! October 4th, 5pm to 7:00 PM you can come and browse and buy.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s great.

Roberta: Yeah, I’m very excited for that. Finally, the fourth thing I want to say is, last time I believe it was, I told you about a gallery that I hadn’t heard about that was in Jenkintown and it was turning 10 years old and bravo to them. It was gallery 705.  I want to tell you today about Nancy Herman Gallery, which is two years old this year, and this is a woman-run gallery, Nancy Herman. Is an artist and gallerist and kind of polymathic artist. She makes digital arts, paintings, books. Children’s books, like a series of them. She created her own website. See the link in the links list above. She’s an illustrator. She has made textile pieces. Right not she’s felting. She is a big music lover, from the classical cannon, and she has made art digitally that responds to and encapsulates the music itself. So if you think of the swells in music for example, and there are elements in her art that kind of peak and valley so you can “see” the music.

Anyway, the gallery is a very interesting space, which she shares it with a Pilates studio. There’s Pilates tables and equipment, the big equipment, in there, which they move out of the way for openings. But it’s a space that’s shared. When I talked with her about it, she knew about Silicon Gallery, which was in Old City — no longer, sadly. Silicon was a digital printing gallery and workspace. They had the printers right out in the center of the space. It was a big open space, and on the wall were the printed works that they were showing. So here in Nancy’s gallery is another example of machinery and art in the same space. She’s an interesting person, a woman of a certain age. She’s done a lot — a degree from University of Pennsylvania, and has been making art forever and a day, since she was young. And I will be writing about this a little bit more. There’s a Q and A I did with her, so that’ll be coming up on Artblog, but I wanted to give you a little preview of that.

If you’re ever in Narberth, look for Nancy Herman Gallery. I think it’s the only real art gallery in Narberth. There are not a lot of real art galleries out here on the main line.

Anyway, Ryan. Those are my four things. So I’m ending on the upbeat. I started very heavy.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s really great. Did you see the news about the artists with the fake ads about Kamala Harris and the Eagles?

Roberta: I did. I did. The artist, Winston Tseng, has been revealed as the artist who did those, and someone put those in the bus shelters without his knowledge, he says, if that’s to be believed, I don’t know. But who are we to question? I mean, I’m just throwing it out there. But it was great to do (the prank).

Ryan: Yeah. That’s really funny. I love the ‘I don’t know how that poster ended up out of my place and in the a bus stop. I have no idea.’

Roberta: How do you even get a poster in those bus shelters? They’re glass enclosed cases. Do you pry it open and then put some putty in there and close it and assume no one will notice?

Ryan: You know, people just go about their business, they don’t notice it’s there, and it looked decent, it looked legit. It had that (advertising) style that people accept. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary and it did seem to be striking as far as image goes. So you wouldn’t really think it would be fake, not real. Might be a production of the Eagles advertising company.

Roberta: Right. it was the same color scheme. It was very good. It was very professionally done.

Ryan: Unobtrusive, not obnoxious. Just kind of fit in there. I think it was very sneaky. I don’t know if Kamala Harris has actually commented on it or if anyone’s brought it to her attention, but I think it was pretty funny. I love the guerrilla art aspect of it. I wish it was a little bit more provocative. It’s fine. I don’t think it makes any bit of difference in this city.

Roberta: Okay. The name of the artist is Winston Tseng, and he’s a street artist.

Ryan: That’s funny. I find that kind of stuff hilarious. I’d love more that kind of random stuff. I love that kind of street art. That’s my kind of thing.

Roberta: We do have street art — murals all over the place. That’s another conversation, Ryan, and we shouldn’t get into that yet.

Ryan: But I mean this one-off art I really enjoy. Because we do have all the murals and we’re kind of known for it. But I enjoy this more temporal art, like it’s just going to be here for a week at max and then it’s moving on, so,

Roberta: Right. Or it gets covered up or torn down.

Roberta: When the art collective Space 1026 started in 1998, they were known for wheat pasting images all over the city, and some of those would get covered up and some of those would stay up for a long, long time.

And then it got to be known that they were art, and that artists were putting these up and they were beautiful. Three and four colored silk screen prints that were getting wheat pasted up like real art, and people started scraping them off the surfaces and claiming them for their apartments or putting them up wherever they wanted them.

That was a phenomenon. I have a couple (I didn’t scrape them off walls). I knew some of those artists, Ben Woodward, for example, was very generous, giving away artists’ proofs of these beautiful images that he was making. He was very drawn to animals and pigeons and whatnot. And he gave me some, so I have some beautiful things, but people were pulling his work off of walls here and there because they’re great.

Ryan: Yeah, I love that. I think we maybe talked about this before, but eight years ago, when I bought that that little bus, the used airport commuter connection bus and I renovated it into a camper. Our first trip we took around the west, we had different artists tag the bus, and one of one of the artists that we picked was Dr.Chip Thomas. Who’s known as Jetsonorama (see links list at the top). And he does wheat pasting on the Indian reservation. He’s an Indian reservation doctor, if you haven’t seen his stuff, it’s really amazing. We had him put a wheat paste on on our van.

Roberta: Cool.

Ryan: That picture would be temporal.

Roberta: You should put that in the post – a picture.

Ryan: Yeah. I’ll have to find that. His work is really amazing. A lot of climate justice, reservation justice images. If you like wheat pasting, his work is fantastic. And climate based environmental action. I love that kind of stuff. I would hang that in my wall. I would take that off of someone else’s building and put it in my own office. I would.

Roberta: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. No, it’s art. Yeah. Street art, yes. You put it outside, makes it street art.

Ryan: In Philly, if you leave it outside for five minutes, it’s someone else’s property. It’s other rules in this city.

All right. I’ll get to my things and I’m just going to pick my three, and then I’ll go from there. Philly Fringe is happening. So I wanted to pick a couple things in Cannonball. It’s all about the performance art that’s happening around the city. I do find it a little bit confusing because there’s not like a full calendar that I found that dials it in for me very clearly. But if you click on each event, you’ll see the dates that are happening. Some of the calendar events have been canceled, which is kind of unfortunate. because then it makes you think that it’s all canceled.

Some of it’s that individual shows have been canceled versus the entirety of the show. So make sure that you do double check whether the entire show has been canceled, or just the individual show. There’s been some great shows happening.

One show that I want to shout out — and I hate to say judge a book by its cover — but this is such a great name.

“Dixie Cup Seance.” I love that name. So I thought, boy, this is going to be a great show. That show is running 17th to the 20th. So there are going to be a few shows available even after you hear this podcast. That’s at the Ukrainian League of Philadelphia at 800 North 23rd Street, which I don’t think I’ve actually been to.

So that could be an interesting venue. “Dixie Cups Seance.” Another one that looked hilarious. So one thing that I’m known for is tall socks. I saw this ad that said “Night of a Thousand Knocks,” and I thought it said “socks.” I’m like, ‘Oh, this is for me.’ So “Night of a Thousand Knocks.”  Then, Jeff and Buttons have a new show and it looks hilarious. The art on the poster is hilarious. This show is coming up Wednesday the 18th of September and Thursday the 19th, 20 North American St.. That’s Christchurch Neighborhood House, which is hosting quite a few different events. This looks like a great show. I thought it looked hilarious.

Roberta: I have two questions.

Ryan: Yeah.

Roberta: What exactly of “Dixie Cup Seance” caught your eye? Was it the Dixie Cup or was it the Seance?

Ryan: I think it’s the word mashup of the two together, because I can envision it. It’s like when you get two words in a sentence and you know them on their own, what they individually mean and represent, but you put them together, you’re like, ‘I have no idea what we’re talking about.’

Roberta: Yes.

Ryan: So that was exactly what I thought. What the heck?

Ryan: Yeah. I’ll read you the quick title. It says, ‘Daddy Issues, scams, and a piled Up Medium who hates talking to the dead? “Dixie Cup Seance” is the story of a grieving daughter and her one chance to speak with her dead father, but she only gets three questions. What will she ask? and why? And who uses Dixie cups to contact the dead? And at the end, those three questions, each one gets a new question mark. I thought that was hilarious. From a grammatical standpoint.

Roberta: Okay. Second question. “The Night of a Thousand Knocks” is it K-N-O-C-K-S?

Ryan: Yes. Like knock on the door, knock knock jokes.

Roberta: Oh, No! Haha. Not knock knock jokes.

Ryan: No. It could be you know, Shakespeare invented those or borrowed that from someone else.

Roberta: Really! I didn’t know that.

Ryan: Also roses are red, violets are blue, that sort of idea.

Roberta: Well, he was a poet.

Ryan: Speaking of Shakespeare, next Thursday the Henrietta Project is doing “Antony and Cleopatra,” which is my third shout out. And they started on the 1st of September. So this has been an interesting spread through the Cannonball time. They have shows like one every week till the end of September. So there’s a couple more shows coming up the 22nd and the 29th of September. It’s called “Antony and Cleopatra, A Shakespears Jawn.” So it’s very Philly apparently? And I’m not quite sure what that’s going to mean, but it could be really interesting.

Henrietta Project is a Black, female-led Shakespeare troupe. That space is here in Philly. Could be very interesting. Mix it up, smash it all together, shake it around, and then pour it out on stage and see what happens. I think that’s what it’s going to be. And it could be very interesting. That’s at 1608 Ridge Avenue.

Those are my three big picks of the week.

Roberta: I love that there’s a Black female Shakespeare company in Philly. That is outstanding.

Ryan: Yeah. Me too. I want to read more about that. There’s plenty of great Black female theater  performers in this town.

So, we have a troop, we do the Fringe, we’ll do Shakespeare. Expect a different take on it. Get a different vibe of what Shakespeare was. I think you get a different perspective, especially when you take the men out of it. Shakespeare has a very different tone. And, and quite honestly, I think there’s a lot there to be explored.

And yeah, there’s still a lot happening until the end of the month. We’ll talk about more next week as well, since we’ll still have an additional week left in the month to talk about Fringe and Cannonball events that are happening.

If you see something that you particularly liked and there’s a couple events that I’m not covering, send me a note. I got a couple notes about different things people saw that they enjoyed, which is why I tried to get to the Pig Iron show, but that didn’t happen. Thanks for sending me notes. Keep them coming.

Roberta: Definitely. Yes. We need more email. Kidding!! but Wow. I want to say, let’s just recap what we did last weekend, shall we? Friday, Ryan and I, and Libby went out to Media, PA. You remember Ryan’s story from Media, PA from the previous podcast? …with the loss of his wallet and the recovery of his wallet. So we all are bonding with Media these days. Yeah. One of our board members. Gabrielle Lavin and her husband have started a new coffee shop, I guess we would call it, in Media on Providence Road, and it’s called “Yo! Coffee.” And it’s in an old Swiss Farms drive thru, and if you knew Delco Swiss Farms, (they were only in Delco) Apparently there were several drive-thru dairy stores. So you could drive in. There was big silo out in front to signal that you were at a farm, which you weren’t. But anyway, it gave you the ambiance of farm-ness. And you would go to the window, you would order your quart of milk and your butter and your eggs and all that stuff, and then you would swing around and exit.

And so there are legacy Swiss Farms places all over Delco. That’s an exaggeration. There may be three of them. I don’t know. But anyway, Gabrielle and her husband started “Yo! Coffee” in an old Swiss Farms place. They’re repurposing it in a kind of tiki, straw hat way. Floral wallpaper inside and it’s now got a sit down patio outside (and a bathroom with a very large moon light in it).

It is so wonderful as a reuse of an old building that who knew what was going to happen to it. And you can drive through and get your coffee and they have a full service coffee service and. Some sweets and some crazy kind of candy that they bought from a local candy maker, freeze dried m and ms, freeze dried candy, corn, you know, freeze dried everything.

Anyway, we went out, we found it, and we had coffee and talked with Gabrielle and she is wildly excited about what they’re doing; and they’re doing community events in the neighborhood out there. The very next day, she was taking their little orange Japanese van to Rose Tree Park, I think it was, where there was a 5K race and a whole bunch of vendors and they were going to have their coffee kiosk there.

That was really a nice field trip. I’m glad we did it. It was happy.

Ryan: Yeah. I thought it was a lot of fun.

Roberta: Then, I had the Bala Avenue of the Arts Art Walk on Sunday, a very beautiful day, very hot and sunny. There were more than 30 vendors that were there, including a person from Morocco in a hijab who was doing henna designs on hands. She had just heard of the Art Walk and drove over and she asked, “Can I do this? I have my stuff. Can I get a table?” And of course we had set this up months before, but we found room for her. We found a table for her. We found a tent for her and she set up and she was doing a big business! People love to have their hand covered with these exquisite designs, the henna designs.

So that was, that was sort of the high point of the Art Walk for me. There were about 2,000 people that showed up, which was amazing. There was a Mr. Softie truck. I was so parched by the time lunch rolled around that all I wanted was Mr. Softie. So, yeah, that happened.

Also, there was a vendor selling corn on the cob, which I thought was amazing, out of a truck. Cooked of course. And some West African spicy food. So it was really a thing. And we’re going to do it again next year, so I’ll let you know when applications are open to vend. And eternal thanks to Megan and Erin of Art Star, who organized the vendors!

Ryan: That sounds great.

Roberta: Yeah, it was great. Anyway, Ryan, we should probably talk about Artblog’s Art MKT! We’re ramping up for that, everybody. We are so excited. We’re going to have so much art, it’s going to be fabulous. And we’re hoping you show up on Friday, October 4th, 5pm to 7:00 pm for the opening at Moore College of Art and Design, an accessible building on the Parkway. We’d love to see you. So come on out for that. There’ll be beverages and there’ll be snacks and it’ll be really nice and art. Lots and lots of art. Affordable, so you can buy.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah, we’re really looking forward to that. And it’s going to be happening all through October and November and into December. Yep. So lots of time, but do come out for the opening, see what’s available and what’s going on. And there’s a lot of programming happening that we’ll keep you up to date on as well. Yeah, so look for that opening coming up in just a few weeks. We’re excited about it.

Roberta: We are very excited. Bye now. Signing off. It’s Roberta. Thank you for listening.

Ryan: And this is Ryan, and this has been the Midweek News on Artblog Radio.

Ryan: Bye-Bye everyone.