June 7, 2016 by Roberta

Center for Creative Works, Allens Lane benefits, Sarah McEneaney in Portland, OR, Blackstar Film Fest and Wall Writers movies at International House, Crane Arts Archive Space closes Philly space+opens elsewhere, Plus Brown Bag it with ICA and Opportunities

Allen’s Lane Art Center’s Second Annual “Night of the Arts” This Saturday, 6PM – Immerse yourself in this vibrant community art center in Mt. Airy – and spend time with their gallery exhibition by photographer Harvey Finkle, whose socially-activist works Artblog has long admired.

June 6, 2016 by Michael Lieberman

Sonia Sanchez BaddDDD – A Documentary

In addition to documenting the course of Sanchez’s personal life, her literary life, and her life as an educator–beginning in Alabama, with stops along the way in New York, Amherst, and San Francisco, and ending in Philadelphia–the documentary surveys the route of her five decades of activism, touching upon her involvement in CORE, The Children of Malcolm, the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, the Black Studies Movement, the Black Panthers, and The Nation of Islam. Above all, the film portrays a powerful, principled woman on a mission, speaking out against and standing up to injustice wherever she encounters it–whether in the curricula of respected educational institutions or in the misogyny of Eldrich Cleaver–demanding and reclaiming self-respect for herself and for her community, and urging her sisters and brothers to do the same.

June 3, 2016 by Tina Plokarz

Sensing the Past at the Library Company of Philadelphia

In the end, the exhibition Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind offers more than a glimpse into the history of the blind from the depths of today’s archives. In contrast to persistent misconceptions about blindness–as if Pieter Bruegel’s sinister and mocking “The Blind Leading the Blind” (1568) still shapes our thinking today–Teresa Jaynes shifts our biased perception from a predominantly visual culture into a synesthetic experience. Speaking through the language of the fingers, she creates a tangible world that addresses issues of humanity and society that are anything but marginal. Liberate your vision and explore the nature of perception through the senses of touch, sound, and scent.

June 2, 2016 by Roberta

Talking with Ed Bronstein, architect, artist and art community organizer!

Ed Bronstein’s brushy, expressionistic paintings capture scenes — au plein air — that include buildings, parks, dogs (lots of dogs), trucks (lots of trucks) people and more. Ed was instrumental in founding Art in the Open, and if you visited that festival recently you may have seen him out there with his paints and easel chronicling the beauty that inspires him.

May 31, 2016 by Roberta

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez movie tonight at AAMP, Latino Film Festival June 10-12, First Friday Art Safari, T+M Studios ends gallery run, Asian Arts FF on Pearl St., Jennifer Zarro+Art Dive to CR Ettinger Studio, Gina DeCagna+Symbiosis Mag, Moe Brooker in NY, Suzanne Horvitz+Robert Roesch at Legends+China, Plus Opportunities

In movie news — TONIGHT – Film screening of the biopic, “BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez” at the AAMP as the finale to the Art Sanctuary’s Celebration of Black Arts. Philadelphia Poet Laureate emeritus Sanchez will attend for a Q+A with filmmaker Barbara Attie after the screening.

May 29, 2016 by Michael Lieberman

The Woodmere Art Museum – Past, Present, and Future

I came away from our meeting April 6 with the impression that Valerio is a thoughtful and imaginative person who is dedicated to engaging the community in the arts. He seems willing to take risks. He has an eye for the overlooked, for the unexpected, and he is committed to promoting local artists who are working outside of the mainstream. When so much of the art world is focused upon celebrities and established artists, and has become international, it is not a small blessing that the Woodmere is focused upon telling the story of the art and artists of Philadelphia.

May 27, 2016 by Roberta

What is an Art Bastard?

The film, about a talented, articulate and ambitious artist, raises an important question. Why is an artist overlooked? A movie can’t answer definitively, but in 84 fast-paced and colorful minutes Art Bastard delivers a hint of why a rebellious yet loveable personality and his rollicking, politically-charged and mostly humorous paintings are under the New York art world radar. In the words of the movie’s smartest commentator, the oracular Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, “It’s about chance and geography.”

May 26, 2016 by Christa DiMarco

Between Built Environment and Lived Experience – The Edifice at Snyderman-Works Gallery

Kip’s and Fischer’s respective works underscore a sense discomfort in the act of looking or a reliance on subjective frameworks in the process of recollection. I find their work particularly relevant as they address the relationship between routine and confusion, and between observation and obscured memory, within the context of architecture. From their structures, I gather that to think about edifice is not to reflect on deliberate forms of shelter and safety, but, more so, to consider how the built environment metaphorically serves as a foundation for the lived experience.