The art activist group We Are Watching was organized by Amanda Silberling and her friends at the University of Pennsylvania, where they are undergraduates. Propelled to action by an email sent by a fraternity to incoming Penn freshmen girls to come to a party and be ready to, basically, put out, Silberling and her colleagues blanketed the campus with flyers outing the fraternity for its crass invitation, with its implied embrace of rape culture.
Read MoreSize can create competition in some shows, larger works demanding more attention than small, but these more typical relationships were somehow absent from this show. Holes were drilled into the sides of display armatures, perfectly framing a small Fishman sculpture covered in paint, encouraging the viewer to look. You did not get the sense that you were supposed to spend less time looking at the smaller things.
Read MoreIn big news today, we can all go out and VOTE and bring to an end the national nightmare of the 2016 election. I collect campaign buttons and other types of buttons. I forget where I got these two (below images) but whoever made them thank you! They messages echo my thinking right now. Vote, and let’s get started on the healing.
Read MoreBe respectful when a space has “success” in your city. Be proud of them, if that’s what they wanted. Call them out if they still use the word “alternative” to describe themselves, especially if they don’t talk about their stake in our community and society in general. Understand that “artist-run” does not mean anti-institution or DIY. We are being tricked by capitalism, which makes us believe that we are providing alternatives, that we are allies to social movements, while we are actually mirroring society’s systems of oppression. Work by yourself in your basement because, according to everybody, it is impossible to avoid capitalism. If we do participate at all, though, we need to own up to the fact that we are perpetuating deep-rooted systems.
Read MoreGary Johnson is the performance artist candidate we’ve been waiting for. Or, more specifically, he sometimes utilizes performance to communicate his ideas. Often, it is read as “class-clown” humor (which is a fair observation) but there is a part of me that respects his acknowledgment of non-traditional forms of communication. Unfortunately for Johnson, however, when you are running for president these performances are only effective when they articulate a nuanced understanding of complex issues rather than deflect or derail the conversation at hand.
Read MoreClean, neat, and unused are the words I think when I think of the new Mormon temple downtown. Pristine. It’s by the main library. I’m inside on a tour, and the walls are covered in photo-realistic, figurative depictions of piety, biblical scenes, scenes of a Sunday-school nature. It harkens back to simpler time when there was no doubt, in America at least, of who Jesus was ethnically speaking. Mormons, if nothing else, are unabashedly white, which gives me the odd feeling of relief.
Read MoreInspired by cultural icon Ulises Carrion and unwittingly ushered in by cultural icon Jeff Bezos, Ulises brings Philadelphia a much-needed art bookshop and a one-of-a-kind culture center to add to the rich mix of cultural spaces in North Philly. Welcome, Ulises.
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