From our family to yours, Happy Holidays, Everyone!!! We are taking some time to spend with our families but will return with renewed vigor to present the 2016 Liberta awards next week, our signature round up of the weirdness and wonders of the year.
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Read MoreThese two proposals show two radically different strategies to artistically approach the Ben Franklin Parkway. For Richard Serra, it’s the global reputation of the artist that makes his work a natural fit for this global stage. For the Holocaust Memorial, a park designed pluralistically, it’s the magnitude of the event it commemorates that elevates this design for this stage. And both proposals are now on track to land on the Parkway in the next year.
Read MoreSherman Fleming is a performance artist, who began performing in the 1970s after being introduced to “Happenings.” In graduate school he created a character, “RODFORCE,” that he performed as. He tells A.M. Weaver about the difficulty of finding performance role models since there were few black male performers. His art is public, and about issues of race and masculinity and is intentionally provocative.
Read MoreThe art produced in Philadelphia is not, for some miraculous reason, outside of the problem of the unresolved status of contemporary art. It is, rather, like art produced in so many other places, subject to the larger social-historical problem of art’s function. To begin to reimagine platforms of reception, I believe that constant reflection of the unresolved problem of the social function of contemporary art needs to be made.
Read MoreWhy don’t we know about Paula Modersohn-Becker? The book reveals she showed her work but a few times while she was alive, she died young at age 31, and the modernist style and nudes, made in the last year of her life, 1906, were a shock when discovered. No one quite knew what to make of her work. “Greatness” an early critic said; in the same decade of 1910s another said “odd.” This book is the first in English to give a definitive account of her life, exhibition and critical history, and art historical assessment.
Read MoreSylvie Franquet’s reMembering is nothing less than a treatise on how art history has plundered the female form and women’s idle hands. Franquet’s intimate, reconfigured tapestries now on view at London’s October Gallery recall my own mother’s needlepoints of tulips and roses, little girls and blue skies–laborious forays into home decoration. Well made, but uninteresting–a condescending opinion of mine, I admit, that haunts me today. Indeed, I once asked my mother to produce a pair of text works; she acquiesced, but grudgingly, complaining, “I don’t like your conceptual works! How about a nice flower!”
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