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.
Read MoreEd 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe 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.”
Read MoreKip’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.
Read MoreSome of the most compelling sequences in Wright’s documentary consist of the artist’s reflections on perception, perspective, and space. After a painful breakup with his longtime partner, Peter Schlesinger, Hockney made a series of etchings based on Wallace Steven’s poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” which was in turn based on Pablo Picasso’s famous 1903-04 Blue-period painting, “The Old Guitarist.” Hockney was drawn to the poet’s insistence on “things exactly as they are,” using his etchings to play with realistic and illusionistic depictions of space, all within the emotional frame of the artist’s life and relationships with others.
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