Jamar 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.
Read MoreThere’s politics in the air and all over the place in Philadelphia. Could be there’s something BIG coming up?
Political art #1 – Kathryn Pannepacker and Rosalind Pichardo invite you to The Memorial Saturday, July 30, noon – 5 PM, at BKG Funeral Home 1125 W. Lehigh Avenue, Philly 19133
Read MoreThis week’s Reader Advisor reflects on the state of law enforcement in our country. As I write this on Friday afternoon I am having a hard time finding any value, context, or urgency in my perspective as a white American. Instead I am going to step aside and let the links speak for themselves. To start, a poem by June Jordan via The Poetry Foundation.
Read MoreRosa Leff’s papercuts push the boundaries of the two-dimensional world. Inspired by children’s books and political cartoons, her illustrations are painstakingly crafted shape-shifters that trick the eye, at times evoking a relief print with fine line work and deep contrast. It’s upon close inspection that the separation of the cut image from it’s backing creates a landscape of shadows that makes the work reside in neither the two nor three-dimensional realm.
Read MoreThe “way markers” come, as one would expect, from Tobias’s visceral responses to his walk along the path and are designed to tickle your ears, nose, and skin, as well as your brain. You experience more than you see, depending on the weather and how open you are that day.
Read MoreOne of the most unconventional places to view art this summer is the cruiser Olympia, docked on the Delaware River. Commissioned in 1895 and now part of the Independence Seaport Museum, Olympia is the oldest steel warship still afloat in the world–and now it is playing host to sculptural installations that show up in the most unlikely spaces, from officers’ cabins to bathrooms to the galley kitchen.
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