There’s politics in the hot air, which seems like it will never cease (both the hot air and the politics). Be sure to check out what’s available in both, but stay cool, no matter what. Here’s one exhibit that has a good lineup and might be worth getting out for: Truth to Power/Rock the Vote. But I recommend you keep your eyes open for political art on the street, like the Joe Boruchow piece seen below, featured prominently in West Philadelphia.
Read MoreArtblog Board member, Gilda Kramer and husband Sam Adenbaum discovered a new gallery I am excited to hear about and share with you in case you haven’t heard of it. RASCO Fine Arts shows Latino artists and is a passion project of the owner, explained Lillie Carabello, speaking on behalf of the gallery.
Read MoreCould there be a better escape vehicle than a nostalgia-infused augmented reality app populated with cuddly cute fantasy deedle-doos and whippy-wongs? Instead of going outside and actively confronting racial and economic disparities, let’s go outside and confront this Snorlax! Instead of meeting strangers and friends to reflect and discuss our experiences of race, let’s discuss these Pikachus! We are like the scared children on the airplane who refuse to focus on the harsh and seemingly terrifying realities of our situation and instead have been given an iPad by our parents. But as adults, we alone are to blame for this shameful compromise, an indulgence of distraction that immobilizes the raw introspection and societal movement that is our responsibility. All of us Pokémon Go users aren’t looking to catch them all; we are desperate looking to forget them all.
Read MoreRoberta interviews Pap Souleye Fall about his unique body suits, stitched up while he is wearing them. Pap is also a wonderful maker of sculptural installations, and he’s a dancer. Give a listen!
Read MoreJamar Nicholas wears a number of hats, as do many artists. He’s a teacher — he teaches narrative storywriting at Drexel and has taught at Moore College of Art and Design and Arcadia University; he is Fine Arts Curatorial and Administrative Assistant at Arcadia University Art Gallery, and he makes his art — drawings of narratives that become comic books about superheroes, like the Hip Hop Cop Detective Boogaloo, which ran — daily — in the Philadelphia Metro in 2015.
Read MoreThe integration of the visual and the visceral was particularly successful in “Bonzi,” whose titular character (dancer Edgar Anido) is a traveling salesman who leads a humdrum life trying to sell people things they neither want nor need. At the start of the performance, the bowler-hatted Bonzi knocks on a plain white door and sets in motion a series of surreal vignettes involving multiple doors, bowler hats, apples, and eggs–all motifs familiar from the paintings of Magritte. Dancers hiding behind movable doors on casters swirled around the stage, dazzling poor Bonzi as well as the audience. With constant costume changes and the clever use of props, the dancers playfully shift personas from alluring coquettes with quixotic tree-like headgear circling around Bonzi, to a self-contained corps of dancers that largely ignores him. By the end of the performance, Bonzi seems to enter the dancers’ madcap surreal world, leaving behind his heavy black briefcase with unrestrained glee.
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