Perhaps you remember the Tiki Bar at Copy Gallery. Annette Monnier, one of the group that ran Copy Gallery, calls it one of her favorite shows there–a kind of social experiment in which people expect to find a gallery with one set of rules, but instead enter a bar with a whole other set of values. She talks about her confused relationship to the American Flag and about how guilty she feels in spending time making art when there are so many problems in the world. Her antidote to that guilt is her job running the ClayMobile program. She talks about the need for community and about her experiences working with Black Floor and Copy, two collective galleries, now both gone, that made their mark on the Philadelphia scene in a short period of time. Monnier, who writes the highly regarded One Review a Month blog, is eloquent about how important it is to remember and to record the best shows in Philadelphia. We kept the air conditioner on as we talked about these hot issues on one of the summer’s scorchiest of scorchers. You can hear the faint hum in the background.
This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support. You can listen to Artblog Radio on Apple and Spotify.