Roberta: Hi everyone, it’s Roberta.

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

Roberta: on Artblog Radio.

I missed an opening. I wanted to go to the Keen Collection opening at the McGuire Art Museum last Thursday, but because it was already snowing. I did not do that.

Ryan: The weather can put a damper on what you want to get done, and what you want to see.

Roberta: Well, if, if you are worried about slipping and falling on ice and snow, then yes, and I’m, I’m a walker, so I would’ve walked over to St. Joe’s. I don’t live all that far from them, but I didn’t trust that the sidewalks would be walkable.

Ryan: Yeah. It’s been rather treacherous. Well, I made it to the icas opening on Friday.

Roberta: Oh good. We just got a pitch to cover that show. Oh, nice. The Charles Chang, is it? Yeah. Lane Spiedel wants to write about it, so that’ll be great. What did you think?

Ryan: The opening was good. There was a lot of people there. It was a cold day. It was nice to see it packed. Really interesting work. I’m not sure at some point there the work was a little bit more interactive previously or not, but ICA was very much hands-off, which was interesting because some of the displays have activating buttons and actually interactive features, but they were not allowing, the patrons to give them a flip and a switch and a push. Oh. So it was interesting. It was a bit of a tease. I’m sorry.

Roberta: Is that a thing? It was meant to seem as if it was interactive, but it was not. And so that was part of the piece. You know, stay away, don’t touch the buttons kind of thing.

Ryan: I didn’t touch anything, but the people in front of me touched things. I might say, changes to the art, were affected by the buttons. They were pressing the button. It seems to me that they were, they were active buttons. They were actually doing something. They were making a change, or there’s a few buttons that were inactive, but there’s other things that were made. A change made a difference. So I don’t know if the intention was to touch them at a previous exhibit or at the initial exhibit, but these pieces are now, some of these pieces are from the seventies, some are from the eighties. Maybe they’re hoping to make them last a little bit longer, so a little more hands-off.

Roberta: I’m confused. Yeah. There was a signage that said, do not touch.

Ryan: Nope. Just the security personnel that said do not touch. The guard came over and told people not to touch things.

Roberta:  Linda, our favorite security guard. The tall woman?

Ryan: Nope.

Roberta: A black woman?

Ryan: No. But it was an interesting show. There was a diversity of work.

Roberta: Technology? It sounds like it was technology. If there were buttons to push that did things.

Ryan: It felt a little bit more like an 80’s arcade. Buttons to press rather than modern, interactive of any kind. There’s a lot of temporality context, in the work of the show. Things along those lines.

Roberta: Well, it was made in the seventies and the eighties. That already is a, you know, let’s talk about the time that was made in.

Ryan: It definitely felt of a time,

Roberta: and that’s just right. So it’ll be up for like three months or something.

Ryan: So I’ll be curious to see what Lane thinks of it as well. Get their perspective.  Lots going on politically, lots going, on the TikTok decisions, to the inauguration on MLK day.

Roberta: Yeah, weird aligning of the stars, I guess you might say. Yeah, that MLK day and the inauguration of the fascist president happened on the same day. I don’t know. Yes, I deported a lot of people on the day, day of service. I got all kinds of insurrectionists out of jail. 1500 Insurrectionists are now free and loose on the streets, or will be soon.

Ryan: And I assume you saw the Elon Musk, Holly Hitler salute the Nazi.

Roberta: I read a bit. I don’t look at that stuff.

It just turns my stomach, so I can’t look. But I did read that it happened. Yes. There’s nothing unexpected about this. I mean, he’s an oligarch. These are oligarchs, they’re together. It’s Russia, you know, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. It’s the same as Putin and his oligarchs. And so we just need to resist and stick together and make sure each other are safe.

Ryan: Yeah, so there’s a lot of interesting things that are coming up in along those lines. I saw that there’s, I don’t know if I’m going to count as one of my three, but there is a show coming up at the National Liberty Museum. It’s an interesting talk coming up on the 23rd. I. That, that looks kind of interesting.

It’s, it’s talking about free speech and threats, but it’s, it’s interesting media personalities. So I’ll make that at one of my three plus on my events list for this week.

Roberta: Yeah, I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole too deeply. People will make art. It’s a good thing to make art. We never want to suppress that impulse in anybody.

Children make art people. Make art. It’s a good thing to do. And share it with others. So that’s the bottom line. If you’re going to make art that states a position of some sort of political, you know, thoughts, that’s go ahead and do it, but just make arts, make arts, art is not going to save us. But it is a form of communication.

We need more communication now rather than less. So it’s, we should have more arts rather than less art. That’s my opinion. All right. So I have a couple things to talk about and I’ll just rattle through my list and I’m sorry if it’s too much. First off, there’s an opportunity for high school students from Creative Philadelphia.

I found this on Instagram and we’ll put the link to it. It’s a talent search contest and it’s called. I am PHL 2025. There’s a thousand-dollar prize to win if you want to go for that and put in the link. There’s all kinds of information about where to submit and how to submit and whatnot, but it’s high school only.

And the deadline, they didn’t put a deadline in here

Ryan: April 15th.

Roberta: Oh, not so soon. Okay. Lot of time then. Shout out to Sarah Caer, who just started the at feed feature on Artblog. It’s an aggregator or whatever you want to call it. That is using chat, GPT and Mid Journey to come up with a sort of spoof of how the media are mistreating the climate story.

And this was. Picked up by Peter Crimmins at WHYY, and he wrote a very lovely article about it. Bravo Sarah Kaser, and this week we’ll get episode number three of the at feed. So stay tuned for that. Sarah is an artist and a graphic designer. She has several books to her credit that she’s illustrated and worked with an author on and has shown her work at Mitchner Art Museum among other places, many other places.

And she works for Kieran Timberlake, which is a very eco-sensitive architecture firm, well known. They just architected up the US Embassy in London, which is an outstanding kind of new shape for a building. Congratulations, Sarah. More congratulations for the Leeway Transformation Award winners.

There were 18 of them and one of them is Lane Timothy Spiel. Who is one of our writers and is going to cover the ICA show for us. So congratulations to Lane. We’ll put in the names of all the people and a link to where you can hear more information about this award. This is award is $15,000. They had a huge increase in applicants this year.

The award supports artists working at the intersection of art and social change for five years or more. So congratulations to everybody who had that. Who won that award? It’s a wonderful award. The Mitchner Art Museum has a show called the Legacy of Bucks County Art Collector and curator Louis Tanner Moore, who died in 2024.

He was an African American and a descendant of Henry Oua Tanner, the famous. African American painter. He was a collector in his own right. He and his wife. The show has 35 artists in it who shaped the Delaware Valley’s creative community. It says. So that would be, if you want to take a trip up to Mitchner, it’s well worth it to go see this show.

That opens. Goodness. I didn’t even put down When it opens, I think it opens soon and probably runs for a couple of months, but we’ll put those dates in too. Oh, the Cal or Gardens are opening. We’ve been longing for this ever since we saw the photos back in whenever it was announced with the hanging gardens and the sunken.

A place to walk and see the gardens hanging above you, along with the mobiles dangling in the wind going to be a beautiful place. So it’s opening in September. They appointed Juana Barrio as the Marsha Perlman Senior Director of Programs. The Calder Gardens are going to be administered by the Barnes Foundation, which is going to be across the street.

It’s across the street from the Barnes is where this. New gardens will be, so they’re going to be doing a lot of crisscrossing the parkway, I hope they watch very carefully the racetrack. If you’re trying to cross that, that is a very big thing and it really cements or puts a capstone, I guess, on calling the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a museum mile or whatever it is.

It’s God’s the barns it has. Calder Gardens, it has the Rodan Museum and the PMA and very close nearby is PAFA. So it’s really, it’s the museum district, I guess you would say. That’s the extent of my coverage of the news.

Ryan: That’s great. I also saw that Philly Rail Park got a little bit more money. I was working to get some more funding through that. I think that looked really great. Park extension the Schull River Trail got a little bit more money to do some more expansion. So yeah, some more green re happening. The city

Roberta: where, where is all this money coming from? Was this one funder who gave. To all these various places or various funders,

Ryan: looks like piecemeal.

Pulling together what you can, where you can, but several million dollars into each different extending greenway, extending paths and parkways and I think it looks really good. So the Vine Street Expressway coverage continues to make it more green and the

Roberta: stitch, the Chinatown stitch they call it. I love that.

Ryan: Yeah. So hopefully that all continues to grow. because sometimes it, like maybe last year it felt a bit stagnant. Hopefully, I think they’ve got, we’ll probably start seeing some work. 25 done on the rail park, so that’s exciting. I’d love to see that. It feels like it kind of hit a pause there for a couple years.

Love to see it going again. Yeah, so there are a lot of events happening right now. There’s a lot of really interesting shows. One show that popped up that I was really curious about is this dance performance piece that’s, that’s happening and it’s like a, I’m not quite sure even. What it’s going to be.

It’s at Pen live arts. It is called Agora de La Dance Kros VR experience. So it’s dance with VR headsets. Can’t quite imagine what that’s going to be. So it’s supposed to be in a more an immersive experience. To the performance,

Roberta: you mean the audience wears the VR or the dancers are wearing the vr?

Ryan: I’m not quite sure.

The video trailer shows three dancers performing. On stage, but I, I’m assuming I, I’m not quite sure, but it’s, but the, the gist says, imagine yourself in the middle of the stage completely immersed within the performance. The answer’s moving all around you, which makes me think I. You have the headset?

Roberta: Well,

Ryan: an audience

Roberta: of how many people, how many headsets do they have?

Wow.

Ryan: I know. So I’m curious. Anyway, tickets are available now. The shows are January 24th, so Friday, January 24th. There are three shows and shows run through Sunday. So it’s just this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 24th, 25th, 26th, and there are many shows per day. It looks to be interesting, but I’m not quite sure what it is.

If you do go, let me know what, what it looks like. It’s a Philadelphia premier show from a, a Montreal company. I, I’m super curious what that would be like, but it looks like a, a lot of fun trying something different. I love when people are trying new things, seeing how it works out and, but it’s a traveling show, so it must be on some level, successful and people are into it.

We have the lunar New Year’s parade coming up. Philly Suns do quite a few different events. They have their Lunar New Year, midnight parade on the 28th in Chinatown. That’s going to be at 10th and spring at 10:00 PM So I don’t know what the temperature’s going to be like then, but it’s going to be chilly. So bundle up cozy.

But there are other indoor shows coming up on the 1st of February. They’ll, they have a whole full day of performances on the 1st of February. Then they will have another parade on the second. In Chinatown, and then a few more indoor events as well. The last one will be the 17th of February, so quite a few shows for them if you miss the outdoor ones, but it does look like a lot of fun.

Roberta: Can I ask a question?

Ryan: Sure.

Roberta: Who are the Philly Suns? SUNS?

Ryan: The performance company that brings out the dragons and performs in the city. It’s the, they do the fireworks along with their performance, so they, they have a parade route that they follow. It’s a lot of fun if you haven’t seen it, but it’s the standard company that runs the dance performance for new, for the lunar New Years.

Roberta: Got it. I, and that was my second question. Do they bring out the dragons?

Ryan: It’s a lot of fun. It does get a little bit loud, so if you do have people who are sensitive to, to that, so be heads up about that. It can be a bit startling, especially if you’re, if you’re outdoors, it can be a lot of building.

Echo can get even loud outside. Keep that in mind. Then my theater pick for the week is fall away into. Corridors of Rememory. It’s, this is a world premiere by Ariel Julia Brown at Fringe Arts. This show is running now January 22nd, and we’ll run through February 1st at Fringe Arts. It, it is looks to be an interesting multimedia play that’s written by Ariel Julia Brown, and directed by Naya Benjamin.

And if you need something weird, my son is kind of into Discworld, and things of that nature. But there’s an opening reception called Fantasy Spell the Art of Enchantment at Moore College. All to do with like fantasy maps and weaponry and fantasy walk you wanted me to mention as well, that sounds interesting to you as well.

Roberta: It’s an exhibition, right?

Ryan: It should be ongoing, but the opening is Friday, January 24th if you’re interested in that. That’s at Moore College. So there’s could be paintings and drawings, maps. Weaponry, I think so those are my three plus three or whatever, whatever I hit this week. It’s hard to keep it to three when there’s a lot of things happening and there’s, there’s a lot of other things that are happening in the city and things that are ongoing as well.

Roberta: Definitely. Thanks for listening everyone. This is Roberta. Talk to you next time.

Ryan: And this is Ryan and this has been Artblog’s, midweek news. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye bye.