Most of the works focus on the results of gentrification that continues to take place in Philadelphia, where the the displacement of people and things have transformed them all into a kind of debris. While it’s not stated overtly, the emphasis on impoverished people and forgotten neighborhoods infuses the show with political meaning. Due to its political content and focus on urban decay, debris, and poverty, you won’t find pretty views of Philadelphia.
Read MoreWe wish you peace and happiness at this time of family, friends and feasting.
Read MoreDear folks, this week we will have light postings on Artblog since we are all feeling the need to refresh and regroup and take a break with friends and family. Meanwhile, enjoy all the posts you missed, including the 12 wonderful articles by the New Art Writing Challenge finalists and prize winners. Have a restful and love-filled Thanksgiving, and we will be back to our energetic posting pace next Monday. PS If you are in the giving mood, please make a donation to Artblog, your favorite little blog for arts coverage. We can’t do this without you, and thank you for your support!
Read MoreSheherzade, the storyteller from The 1001 Nights, is a master of survival, able to keep herself and her sister alive by entertaining the king (who wants to kill them) with nightly stories that always end on a cliffhanger at the break of day. Like Sheherzade’s tales, the works by thirteen Muslim-American women in Sheherzade’s Gift are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always clever.
Read MoreEach time I visited the space to see “Shotgun Inversion,” fellow onlookers seemed more or less unaware of or unconcerned by its status as a sculptural object. People leaned up against the wall or brushed their fingers against it as they passed, chain-link fence-style. A friend and I hung our arms over the waist-high partition on one side like it was a carnival booth. One visitor wondered aloud what she’d do if she dropped her phone on the other side of the structure.
Read MoreAccording to curator Anthony Elms, Rodney McMillian: The Black Show is an exhibition about transformation. You might prefer to call it an exhibition about flux. It is about fictions, literally literary, with numerous instances of homage to Octavia Butler, and metaphorically historical, as McMillian himself expounded in a preceding interview. It is about mutable spaces, fluid identities, the distance between material and perception, the so-called experience of this ‘reality,’ and the staking out of that reality itself as a constantly undulating landscape.
Read MoreThese meetings have become the bloody battleground between a City Council that supports billboards, and a public that passionately opposes them. The Art Commission has come to bear this undue responsibility, to rule on each proposal on a case-by-case basis. While Council sees East Market Street becoming the “Times Square of Philadelphia,” the path to get there has been a drip-drip of a leaky faucet, with each new proposal drawing intense criticism. But as long the law supports it, the Commission will continue to be the stage of this fight.
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