Olivia Jia profiles two women who are deeply invested in local art criticism: writer Julia Clift and editor Samantha Mitchell. Both women are also artists in their own right, with serious studio practices and the multiple day jobs it takes to keep it all going. Here Jia speaks with them about the challenges associated with wearing multiple hats, and reflects on the vital service they provide to the Philadelphia arts community at large.
Read MoreThis is the third year of the New Art Writing Challenge, a community-wide festival about the importance of art writing in Philadelphia. We invite you to submit your writings to our art writing contest. Five cash prizes will be awarded this year and we will be publishing the winning articles and honorable mentions on Artblog and on other publications partnering this year with us. Roberta Fallon and Matt Kalasky co-organized the Challenge again this year. Our partners this year are these great Philadelphia online publications: Curate This, Thinking Dance, Title, and Velvet Glove. Help us shine a light on Philadelphia’s great under-sung art writing community. Participate in the Challenge!
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 MoreThis article concerns the restriction of contemporary art discourse to the specificity of Philadelphia in the city’s DIY art scene. It strikes me that the focus on the geo-political and cultural particularity of Philadelphia produces a strange contradiction in how we think about contemporary art in Philadelphia. The contradiction is between the parochial fixation of trying to speak for a Philadelphia contemporary art (distinct from a contemporary art in Philadelphia) and the global status of contemporary art. In what follows I want to develop an understanding of this contradiction by paying particular attention to some interconnected issues such as the notion of contemporaneity, globality and internationalism. I close with a couple of questions, both oriented by the attempt to inquire into the very possibility of a discourse of contemporary art within the context of an explicitly regionalist focus.
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