Catherine Rush attends the February 24th, 2018 performance of “Poor People’s TV Room” at Bryn Mawr College. Created by Bessie-award-winning writer/choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, and performed by a small inter-generational cast of black women, this multidisciplinary piece exists at the intersection of installation and dance theater. Inspired in part by Nigeria’s 1929 Women’s War, as well as the 2014 Boko Haram kidnappings of 276 schoolgirls, “Poor People’s TV Room” takes a non-narrative, full-bodied approach to articulating the interplay of trauma and resistance.
Read MoreMandy Palasik visits Spanish-born architect and industrial designer Patricia Urquiola’s first solo exhibition stateside, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through March 18th. “Patricia Urquiola: Between Craft and Industry” celebrates Urquiola’s innovative use of familiar forms and traditional techniques to activate both mind and body.
Read MoreArtists James Bouche, Jared Rush Jackson and Devin N. Morris explore individual experience through the prism of mass culture in Punctual Reality, a group show currently at High Tide gallery. Contributor Olivia Jia praises all three artists for handling the subject of identity with the subtlety it so urgently requires. Punctual Reality is on view through March 17th.
Read MoreMichael visits “How Wide is the Gulf?”, a timely group exhibition now at Gravy Studio + Gallery. Presenting a thematically-tight cluster of three artists who address North America’s migratory past and present, curator Rebekah Flake highlights the power differentials that exists between nations and the (brown) bodies that navigate them. Not to be missed, “How Wide is the Gulf?” is on view through March 13th.
Read MoreCarl(os) Roa previews the Power Street Theater Company’s production of “Las Mujeres,” a new play by Erlina Ortiz, running March 9th-17th at West Kensington Ministry. Supported by a pantheon of feminist icons from Latin American history, “Las Mujeres” adapts the unorthodox structure of Caryl Churchill’s 1982 working-woman play, “Top Girls,” to the complexities of contemporary Latinx life.
Read MoreImani Roach ponders “Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self,” an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Willis currently at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. On view through April 29th 2018, this partial retrospective shows thematic highlights from Willis’s decades-long journey documenting the richness of black aesthetic and cultural practices, and demonstrates her continuing evolution as an artist.
Read MoreSeventeen years after the feature documentary, “Rivers and Tides” debuted, Director Thomas Riedelsheimer brings back to the screen British artist, Andy Goldsworthy and his magical, shamanistic works with nature. Roberta says the new film, “Leaning into the Wind,” is a film poem, and a loving embrace of this unique artist who paints with leaves and with rain and whose humble affect masks a life of hard work, repeated failure (and triumph) collaborating with a tough and changeable Mother, Nature.
Read MoreAndrea reviews an exhibit by Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen that critiques the Stockholm Ethnography Museum and its “collecting” of non-Western, cultural artifacts and stories. Many museum goers are already aware of moral and ethical problems underlying ethnographic collections. For those not aware, this exhibit will be valuable, Andrea says.
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