Category Archives: Art Spaces Philadelphia

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Diversity

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Edwina Brennan, 3rd Street GalleryEdwina Brennan: Contemporary Gestures

From February 28th through April 1, 3rd Street Gallery presents two solo exhibitions in the main gallery:

Edwina Brennan: Contemporary Gestures, and Jean Plough: Sketches in Paint and an exhibition in the Annex gallery, Demetra Tassiou: Diversity.

Highlights

Exhibition Dates: February 28 – April 1

First Friday: Friday, March 2, 5 – 9 PM

Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2- 5 PM

Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 12-5PM

Edwina Brennan: Contemporary Gestures

Edwina Brennan starts with a mark – simple and straightforward. But then there is another and another, a splotch of color and some scraping. Although the artwork is relatively large in scale, some of the drawings are quite subtle and minimal, while others are bold and expansive. The artwork unfolds, inviting the viewer to share in the conversation, looking at and responding to marks and layer as they move over the surface.

Edwina Brennan‘s abstract paintings and drawings are known throughout the Philadelphia area for their evocative color, strong and subtle markings, and emotional power. Highly energetic, she has been strongly influenced by Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell. Brennan studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and progressed from landscape painting to her abstract style. Her work is in many collections including Bryn Mawr College and the Berman Museum.

Jean Plough: Sketches in Paint

Jean Plough: Sketches in PaintFlatland, Jean Plough, 2018

Jean Plough Sketches in Paint represents a journey from traditional non-realistic landscapes to bolder unconfined statements, scattered with words etched in crayon. Paintings vary from strictly geometric impressions to more spontaneous renditions. At one end of the spectrum are simple atmospheric color-fields, and on the other, freer expressions that include text. A scrubby, sketch-like quality of similar color brushstrokes is applied in layers to create perspective. The exhibition cannot be pigeonholed into one style; instead it employs several, although the transition is evident from one piece to the next. Inspired by a sense of place, as well as being open to the subconscious, Sketches in Paint presents a wide range of offerings.

Born in Queens New York, Jean studied painting at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She also spent time at the Corcoran Gallery summer program in Washington, DC, and took part in a show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts called, “Insomnia, Landscapes of the Night”. Jean’s piece, “Hurricane/Gulf,” is in the Annapolis Volvo Collection in Annapolis, Maryland, and her work received the Award of Excellence at the University of Delaware Biennial. She earned Best Abstract at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, and honorable mention in Scenes of Schuylkill for “Market Street Bridge”.  Jean paints because it allows communication with others, as well as creating a new perspective, a sense of space and the unexpected. Artist website:  https://www.jeanplough.com

Demetra Tassiou: Diversity

Demetra Tassiou will be showing a selection of her abstract mixed media work around the theme of Diversity in the Annex gallery. Demetra holds an MFA in printmaking from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Athens in Greece, where she majored in Painting and minored in Art Education and Ceramic. She has exhibited extensively in the Philadelphia area and surroundings as well as New York City, Greece, and Italy.

About 3rd Street Gallery: The Gallery has been in existence since 1978, opening in its first space on the corner of 3rd and Bainbridge in South Philadelphia. As one of the oldest artist-run, fine art galleries in the City it has been home to thousands of Philadelphia artists. The members are a diverse group of artists of all ages and backgrounds. They are multigenerational, have advanced degrees in the arts as well as the sciences, work in diverse media from the traditional to the digital, range from the classically trained to the self-taught and include arts educators, award-winners, and artists whose work is collected by museums as well as by corporate and private collectors.

Thank you to Pia De Girolamo for the content of this post.

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Far

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Far From The Tree, Katherine Fraser, Paradign Gallery + StudioThe War of Independence, oil on canvas, 54″ x 60″

Paradigm Gallery + Studio is pleased to present
Far from the Tree

A solo exhibition of new oil paintings by artist Katherine Fraser on view February 23 – April 21, 2018.

In her third solo exhibition with the gallery, Katherine Fraser draws inspiration for Far from the Tree from fables and explores what it means to have control over our own destinies. Universally-known stories and endings are suddenly given the ability to change. The artist’s most cohesive series to date, each character is presented with the agency to alter their own outcomes.

In the work, The War of Independence, the natural beauty of the Acadian National Park
acts as the backdrop. Having grown up in rural Maine, the landscape is a reference to
the artist’s childhood – a symbol of a time when Fraser felt her most strong and
independent.

Fraser says, “When I use the rural landscape in my paintings it symbolizes
the homeland; I use it to create a feeling of peace and protection. I mostly paint solitary
figures, and being alone in nature is the best kind of alone. In nature I feel most myself,
vibrant, and at one with the world.”

Fraser’s figurative compositions ‘depict moments of quiet reflection and insight, of wonder, vulnerability, yearning, determination, humility, strength, and growth’. She cites realist painters Edward Hopper and Bo Bartlett as influences, but also sees parallels between her work and photographers like: Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Sally Mann. All of these artists act as storytellers, capturing individuals in moments and settings with a great deal of intimacy.

Far From The Tree, Katherine Fraser

By Example, oil on canvas, 56″ x 74″

Classically trained, Fraser exclusively works with oil paint for its flexibility and luminosity, striving to make her paintings beautiful, but also to emotionally engage with the viewer. Fraser likes to draw attention to dynamic and conflicting emotions within individual characters. In her overall practice she seeks to portray ‘our continual need to reckon expectations with truth, and the struggles we endure to feel satisfaction with our choices’.

In Far from the Tree, Fraser asks the viewers, “how much power do we really have to
change the narratives of our own lives”?

ABOUT PARADIGM GALLERY + STUDIO

Established February 2010, Paradigm Gallery + Studio started as a project between co-
founders and curators, Jason Chen and Sara McCorriston, to create a space to make artwork, exhibit the work of their peers, and invite the members of the local community to make their own artwork in a welcoming gallery setting. Over the years, Paradigm Gallery + Studio has become a gallery of diverse contemporary artwork from around the world, while maintaining a focus on Philadelphia artists.

ABOUT KATHERINE FRASER

Katherine Fraser has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United
States. She is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and of the University of Pennsylvania. As a student she received the Thomas Eakins Painting prize, the Cecelia Beaux Portrait prize, and the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Award, among others. Since graduating in 2002, she has received awards including the Lucy Glick Award and the Victor Klein Family Award. Her work has been published in Studio Visit Magazine, Philadelphia Weekly, Die Blumen die Frauen, The Fertile Source, New American Paintings, The Southern Review, the Best of American Oil Painting, and more. Her work may be found in many permanent and private collectionsmnationally and abroad.

Paradigm Gallery + Studio 746 S. 4th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 10147

Thank you to Madison Fishman for the content of this post.

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Two

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Two, 3rd St Gallery, Pia De GirolamoGreen River Blue Mountain, Pia De Girolamo

Pia De Girolamo: Mountain Series and Carol Wisker: Accumulators.

Two Curated Exhibitions at 3rd Street Gallery

November 1-26, 2017

The 3rd Street Gallery, Philadelphia, PA presents solo exhibitions by Pia De Girolamo and Carol Wisker, November 1-26. For Mountain Series, curator Christine Stoughton, Instructor of Aesthetics at the Barnes Foundation has selected a group of abstract landscape paintings for De Girolamo’s 3rd Street Gallery debut solo exhibition. Acting as a pictorial element across the series, the mountain is also a potent symbol of challenge, risk and refuge.

Long time 3SG member, Carol Wisker presents Accumulators, an exhibition of sculptural assemblages, selected by curator Barbara Bassett, the Constance Williams Curator of Education for School and Teacher Programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Wisker’s recent exhibition Left Behind, the Accumulators brought together textiles and findings from a variety of cultures left behind due to migration. In this new exhibition Wisker extends her definition of the Accumulators to also include aggregations of “created natural growth” in her fiber, wood and textile sculptures.

Highlights:

Artist Reception and Talks: Saturday November 11, 5:00 – 8:00pm.

Artist Talk by Pia De Girolamo: A Wild Peace: Art, Nature and Wellbeing. Saturday November 11, 6:00pm

Artist Talk by Carol Wisker: Accumulator…I Am! Saturday, November 11, 6:30pm.

First Friday: November 3, 5:00 – 9:00pm

Pia De Girolamo: Mountain Series

Curator Christine Stoughton says of De Girolamo’s landscape series: “She strips away the details to capture the vibration of colors, the geometric structure of the forms and the ambient space. While the viewer recognizes these abstracted works as a landscape we are given the opportunity to see this environment in a whole new way, which is what art is all about”.

Pia enjoys being out in nature, especially in the mountains. She finds that the key word in that sentence is “being”.

She states, “All the senses are engaged as I pocket smooth stones, sketch, smell the thyme and clover, taste the tartness of wild plants and listen to the sounds of nature as well as its silence. Then back in the studio, I explore what makes these landscapes beautiful and mysterious to me, letting the natural forms, the surrounding emptiness, and the sense of gravity influence how I use color and shape. As I work, the paintings evolve, and while some of them refer to real places, others spring from composite memories of shapes or vistas. All are a record of what is for me of the essence in these landscapes, whether they are in Iceland, Hawaii, the Canadian Rockies, or the American Southwest”.

In her artist talk, A Wild Peace: Nature, Art and Well-being De Girolamo will talk about her work and also link it to recently elucidated scientific thinking affirming the importance of exposure to nature and art to maintaining the individual’s physical and psychological health.

Pia De Girolamo grew up in New York City and lives in the Philadelphia area. She has had sequential careers, first as an Infectious Diseases physician and since 2003, as a visual artist. Recent exhibitions include the Professional Artist Members Exhibition at Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA and a solo show curated by Inliquid at the Courtyard Mariott at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 2017. Her work is in corporate and individual collections including those of PNC Bank Headquarters in Pittsburgh and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. A full member of 3rd Street Gallery, she is also a member of the Cerulean Gallery Collective, Main Line Art Center, Inliquid.com. Her website is

www.piadegirolamo.com

Curator Christine Stoughton is an art educator, sculptor, printmaker and formerly a practicing psychologist. She is an Instructor in Art Aesthetics at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA and at West Chester University, West Chester, PA. She is also a printmaking instructor at Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA. She has exhibited her work, including public art installations, in Philadelphia and the surrounding region, in New York City, Toronto and in Washington, DC.

Two, 3rd St Gallery, Carol WiskerCumulus, Carol Wisker

Carol Wisker: Accumulators

Curator Barbara Bassett says of Wisker’s installation: “Carol’s work takes what the world leaves behind: hinges, gears, fabric and fibers, furniture and antiques, bones and cocoons… and imbues them with new stories and purpose. In each, we find the familiar transformed, compelling us to look deep within ourselves.”

The works in the abstract Accumulator series are fashioned using the domestic art techniques of crochet, wrapping and braiding to form surface textures on a variety of shapes and forms that will be ceiling, floor and wall-hung. In this exhibition Wisker also presents painting like fiber works created through her hand and finger manipulation of painted wool roving in its basic combed state, depicting multi-colored flora, hills and valleys on round and square fields of dense off-white cotton.

Carol Wisker is a sculptor, painter and installation artist, born in Brooklyn, NY and who now resides in the Philadelphia area. Carol studied textile arts and received a BA in psychology at Mansfield University and her Masters of Education from University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her artistic practice included a fifteen-year tenure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Division of Education and she also instructed art history and studio art in maximum-security men’s Correctional Facilities for twenty years. Wisker’s work is in corporate collections and has been shown in museum exhibitions, most recently at the Delaware Art Museum. She is a member of Philadelphia Sculptors, Assemblage Artists Collective and the da Vinci Art Alliance, and has also participated in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2016 and 2017. She is a member of Inliquid.com and her website is www.carolwisker.com Curator Barbara Bassett is The Constance Williams Curator of Education or School and Teacher Programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has spent over 30 years leading programs and developing resources that encourage children and adults to have rich personal experiences with art.

Two, 3rd St Gallery, Agathe Bouton

Showing in the 3rd Street Annex Gallery: Agathe Bouton: Reflections and Light, a series of monotypes.

3rd Street Gallery, 45 N 2nd Street Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.3rdstreetgallery.com

215- 625-0993

Thank you to Pia De Girolama for the content of this post.

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Digging

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As By Digging

As By Digging, Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse

InLiquid @ The Painted Bride

As By Digging features three artists—Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse—working in distinct media, whose works suggest an archaeological position to their subjects. Materials are used to draw out contradictions in our relationships to things and spaces with unclear origins: Photographs pronounce their subject with a different accent; paintings reflect on tangible objects without pointing us in the direction of where exactly we are; cardboard is put together to seem like lumbering parts reclaimed from a shipwreck. Split personalities can be sensed in the work, and each of the artists use their medium to collapse the distance between what we expect something to be and our fantasies of how it actually performs. The Indiana Jones franchise is a useful comparison in popular culture, in which the medium of film is a bridge between an intellectual’s quiet scholarly pursuit and their alter ego’s perilous adventure.

In contrast to an action movie, the excavations here unfold more quietly and without black and white good and bad guys. Jaime Alvarez’s photographs of small, synthetic figurines appear giant and alive; Michelle Marcuse’s bits of cardboard and glue take on machinic obscurity; Olivia Jia manipulates paint illusionistically in an idiosyncratic approach to cataloging personal documents and art history fragments. Amidst these approaches, we become conscious of our connection to a vast lineage of human remains, and the strange moment when our distance to these emergent totems is both closed and accentuated.

Jaime Alvarez’s work introduces us to some of the fundamental poles of the photographic medium. His large prints of uniformly painted figurines, trinkets, and other left-behinds, in either jet black or white, offer a sumptuous version of familiar things while they remain at the distance imposed by their singularity and iconized stature. Amidst these delectable yet cold memento mori, there appear straightly documented rooms of an empty, crumbling home. In their quiet, irreversible decay, we find we can pay attention.

Olivia Jia calls on the sleight of hand in painting to place us into an object’s space. Curious specificity meets ambivalent setting. Busts of classical, familiar statues are captured in a moment of focus, and provide little context for their inner fracturing. Fragments of personal ephemera, art historical reproductions, and more abstracted yet referential piles of historic matter are similarly reverent yet concise in what they appear to describe.

In the cardboard and glue sculptures of Michelle Marcuse, we encounter flexible understandings of reverence and delicateness. That which is flimsy is not necessarily weak; lightness in weight is not bound to a lightness in being. Her objects, while small in stature, imply something grand, aged and important, and indeed heavy. Each one is a space that is found out, by a process of physical conflicts and resolutions with the material. We come to detect them, not by a definitive allegation from their author about their personalities, but by the clear relationship between the object and the hands constructing it.

The Painted Bride Cafe Gallery, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6:00pm

As By Digging: November 1, 2017 – December 16, 2017

Reception Dates: Friday, December 1, 2017 · 5:00 pm–7:00 pm

Thank you to Michelle Marcuse for the content of this post.

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Cuban Relief

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RASCO Art Galler, Cuban ReliefCuban Sunset Over Havana, Sandy Stiolzman

CUBAN RELIEF FUNDRAISER | Conversation with the Artist Sandy Stolzman

Thursday, September 28 | RACSO ART GALLERY

WHAT: Hurricane Irma left Cuba devastated and in need of our help. Philadelphia’s leading Latin American art gallery, RACSO Art Gallery, and artist Sandy Stolzman are hoping to make a difference by donating all proceeds from the current exhibition “CUBA: Beauty and Sadness” to Friends of Caritas Cubana’s dedicated “Hurricane Irma Special Appeal”. Money raised will go directly to the immediate and basic needs of water, food and shelter for Cubans. Friends of Caritas Cubana’s services are available to anyone in need, regardless of religion, political beliefs or sexual orientation. Friends of Caritas Cubana donations go directly to Caritas in Cuba in accordance and compliance with current and anticipated US Treasury Regulations.

Any amount small or large makes a difference.

To thank you for your donation, you will receive from RACSO Art Gallery:

  • $25 Set of notecards with images from the CUBA exhibit
  • $100 (1) Signed print on paper, 8”x12” of Sunset Over Havana
  • $375 (1) Signed print on metal, 16”x24”, of any image from the CUBA exhibit

WHO: Available for interviews and photographs

  • Sandy Stolzman, Guest Artist
  • Oscar Villamil, Owner, RACSO Art Gallery

WHEN: Thursday, September 28, 6:00 – 8:00 Refreshments & Fundraising, 6:30 Gallery Talk by Sandy Stolzman

WHERE: RACSO Art Gallery, 1935 East Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19148

“CUBA: Beauty and Sadness” Exhibition now through October 8, 2017

RASCO Art Galler, Cuban Relief

Monday & Tuesday by appointment 215.735.3515 | Wednesday through Saturday 4:00-9:00PM | Sunday 2:00-6:00PM

ABOUT RACSO ART GALLERY | www.racsocontempoarts.com

INSTAGRAM: @racsocontempoarts

FACEBOOK: @RacsoGallery

RACSO Art Gallery exclusively represents Latin American artists. Dealing in emerging local and international contemporary Latin American art as well as the ‘Modern Masters’ of Latin American art including Botero and Villegas. Located at the gateway to East Passyunk Avenue in the heart of South Philadelphia, collectors can experience a range of works including paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photography. RACSO Art Gallery celebrates the beauty of the Latin American art spirit with rotating exhibitions throughout the year.

Thank you to Tara Theune Davis, taratheunedavis@gmail.com, for the content of this post.

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