Diane Burko uses art to examine monumental geological phenomena
GLASSBORO, NJ – Exploring the confluence of arts, science, and activism Rowan University Art Gallery showcases the work of environmental artist Diane Burko in Vast and Vanishing. On display from March 8 – April 21.
Diane Burko’s artistic practice is at the intersection of art, science, and activism focused on climate change. For over a decade, she has been documenting glacial recession in large-scale paintings and photographs developed in collaboration with scientists, studying their research, and utilizing their data. She is especially committed to understanding and incorporating climate science and sees this intersection as crucial to her artistic development. Her activism led her to make research expeditions to the ice fields of Antarctica, Greenland, Patagonia, and Svalbard where she documented and collected data for her work.
By employing many of the methods used by climate scientists such as recession lines, satellite imaging, and repeat photography, Burko’s research, coupled with her experiences, are translated into monumental paintings and photographs. The results are emotionally expansive works that function as a visual record of glacial recession, a call to action, and metaphor for the socio-political discourse on climate change. Curated by Mary Salvante, Vast and Vanishingcomprises works that capture the inexhaustible dichotomies and the inescapable tension that Diane witnessed in these extreme frozen environments.
Ortophoto Kongsfjorden 1869 _1990 (after NPI)
Brooklyn-born. Philadelphia-based Burko focuses her work on monumental geological phenomenon. Since 2006 her practice has been at the intersection of art and science, devoted to the urgent issues of climate change. Her current work reflects expeditions to the three largest ice fields in the world. She has sailed around Svalbard with artists and also spent four days in Ny-Alesund with scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute. She has visited Greenland’s Ilulissat and Eqi Sermia glaciers and first traveled to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2013, returning in January 2015, and explored the Patagonian ice field of Argentina. Burko’s expeditions can be followed at www.dianeburko.com/polarinvestigations.
Aside from showing her art, Burko has gained attention from the scientific community, often speaking on how the arts can communicate science. She is an affiliate of INSTAAR, and has participated in numerous conferences such as those hosted by the Geological Society of America and American Geophysical Union. She is committed to public engagement, using both facts and images to make the invisible visual and visceral.
Petermann Calving
Rowan University Art Gallery is located at 301 High Street West. Free 2-hour public parking is available in the Mick Drive Parking Garage across the street from the gallery. Eynon Ballroom is located in Chamberlain Student Center on the university campus. Admission to the gallery, discussion, and receptions is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Wednesday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday – Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Directions can be found on the gallery website. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.
Support for programming at Rowan University Art Galleries is made possible by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Thank you to Mary Salvante for the content of this post.
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EXPLORE MELANCHOLIA AT HAVERFORD’S CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY
HAVERFORD, Pa.- What if we saw sadness not as a giving up or giving in, but a getting out? What if, instead of being seen as a passive pain, feeling deep sorrow was understood to be an act of resistance? What if, given the current political and cultural moment in which so many feel ignored, maligned, or repudiated by the systems and people in power, mourning was not just an understandable reception, but a useful action against those systems? A new exhibit in Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, opening March 23, showcases the work of five artists from across different media to grapple with such questions of power, agency, and melancholy.
Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy, curated by Vanessa Kwan and Kimberly Phillips, proposes a re-consideration of melancholia as defined through our contemporary condition. Resisting its historical definition as an affliction that creates disorder or inactivity, this exhibition reimagines passive sadness as a powerful refusal, a conscious (or unconscious) “standing aside,” a willful production of generative failures and resistant potencies. Each of the five contributing artists begins with the idea that outside the boundaries of “contentment” resides a potent flourishing. Unwilling is a resistance and a proposition: it responds to the profound cultural reckoning we are witnessing in this moment in time, as the boundaries and exclusions of state-defined citizenship become increasingly fraught.
The exhibition crosses disciplinary boundaries. Dance artist Justine A. Chambers explores choreographies of resistance, growing out of a studious and embodied interpretation of all the minor gestures on the way to hands raised in surrender. Sculpture- and performance-based artist Mike Bourscheid mines absurdities in relation to our cultural preoccupations with masculinist productivity, while social practice artist Ginger Brooks Takahashi works to create new networks of value in the production of food, drink, and community. (Her piece in the exhibit is a collaboratively created-and consumed-beer.) The “weeping” willow is at the center of media artist Noa Giniger‘s multi-faceted take on reversals of sadness and the refusal to succeed, and poet and critic Billy-Ray Belcourt positions mourning as a defining aspect of an active and resistant subject and proposes that the future must address this subject head on.
Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy will be on view March 23 through April 27 at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. To celebrate the exhibit’s opening, there will be several events during its first week. On March 22, ahead of the official opening, a roundtable with four of the featured artists and the two curators will be held from 4:30 to -6:30 p.m. in the College’s new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) building, room 201. On March 23, Justine A. Chambers will perform an all-day, campus-wide, site-specific commission, ten thousand times and one hundred more. And later that day, at 4:30 p.m., there will be a talk with the curators followed by a reception at 5:30 p.m., featuring Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s Wyrt Blod Gruyt, a custom-made beer commissioned specifically for the exhibit and brewed in collaboration with Meredith Rebar Williams and Home Brewed Events. For further event details: exhibits.haverford.edu/unwilling.
Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy is made possible with support from the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities. The exhibition is organized in conjunction with the Hurford Center’s 2017-18 faculty seminar “The Arts of Melancholy,” which is led by John B. Whitehead Professor of Humanities and Professor of Music Richard Freedman.
Overseen by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, associate director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and campus exhibitions, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu, or visit the exhibitions program website: www.haverford.edu/exhibits.
Haverford College is located at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, Pa., 19041
Thank you to Rebecca Raber for the content of this post.
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This winter, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Keith Smith at Home, the first major monographic presentation of the artist’s work in five decades. Spanning his entire career, the exhibition brings together over 60 exceptional and varied examples of his handmade artist’s books and experimental photographs, prints, collages, and fabric pieces made over the last half century. The exhibition places special emphasis on his artist’s books, the work for which he is best known. Many of these works are from the artist’s collection and have not been exhibited publicly before.
Smith is an especially private person, and one whose life at home has been the inspiration for much of his art. Central to the installation is Book Number 82, Keith Smith at Home (1982), showing a sequence of views of his residence in Rochester, New York, where he has lived since 1975. Page by page, it conveys the passage of time: views of the same room shift, household objects trade places, and friends appear and reappear in framed artwork on the house’s walls. Visitors will be able to page through this book digitally on an iPad in the gallery.
The exhibition highlights books that challenge perceptions of what a book can be. Book Number 11, Up (1969) explores the interplay of images by alternating film-positive transparencies with opaque pages. As the film-positive page is turned, it creates the appearance of an image moving from one side of the page to the next. Book Number 91: a string book (1982) consists of cord, punched holes, and blank pages. Strings are extended across each page and spread in different patterns, sometimes taut and other times slack, creating an abstract and rhythmic narrative. Smith considers his string book to be photographic, as it deals with light, shadow, focus, motif, and sequence.
Smith has referred to his work as an open diary. Self-representation is a key motif, whether appearing lighthearted or uneasy. Some self-portraits reflect the struggles and joys the artist has experienced in coming out as a gay man, as in Untitled, from Roadside Attractions (1979), a multilayered photograph in which two silhouetted male figures caress each other’s shoulders.
Smith has said, “Social intimidation is not as odious as repression that is self-inflicted. When I permitted my work to speak openly, I gained my freedom and my self-respect.”
Also on view is a selection of handmade postcards, a format that Smith has experimented with since the 1960s. He made these cards with particular recipients in mind, but, feeling unable to part with them, has kept them. In addition, the exhibition features fabric pieces from the 1960s and 1970s. Among these is Margaret Gave me a Rainbow 2:30pm 21, November 1971, a collage of a photograph of an ear, curtain tassels, and an impression of the artist’s profile made on a color photocopier affixed to an army-issue bedsheet. Smith made Eye Quilt (1965), a full-size quilt screenprinted with a dense pattern of eyes, while a student at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Keith Smith: Word Play is a related installation on view in the Museum’s Library. This intimate display highlights the ways in which Smith uses word play, poetry, typography, and sequencing to create surprising relationships between images and text in his books.
Exhibition organizer Amanda N. Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs, said: “While Smith may seem shy personally, his art is candid, intimate, delightfully irreverent, and transgressive. To share a large body of his work with the public is an exciting and rare opportunity, and it underscores our commitment to showing provocative work by living artists.”
Smith’s reluctance to categorize his work established him as a rogue member of both the photography and printmaking departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated in 1967. His works are often radical departures from conventional books, and may unfold, light up, hang on the wall or in a corner, or be constructed of pencils or the shirt off the artist’s own back. Certain themes-friendship, love, desire, intimacy, and domesticity- recur. He has made over 300 artist’s books and over half a dozen seminal instructional manuals on bookbinding.
Smith’s work is represented in leading public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Nelson-Atkins Museum; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships (1972 and 1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978), and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester.
Book Number 91, a string book, 1982, by Keith Smith, American, b. 1938. Artist’s book with cut outs, punched holes, and string. Courtesy of Keith Smith and Philip Zimmermann.
Public Programs
Representing Queerness
Sunday, March 4 | 2:30 p.m. | Perelman Building
Community Conversations open discussions about socially relevant topics.
Included in Pay What You Wish admission.
Bookmaking Workshops
Saturdays, March 17, April 21, and May 5 | 1:30-4:30 p.m. | Perelman Building
Each session includes a tour of Keith Smith at Home with the exhibition curator.
Each workshop: $20 ($16 members); includes Perelman Building admission
Curator
Amanda N. Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs
Exhibition Location
Julian Levy Gallery, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building
Installation Location, Library, Second Floor, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building
Support
Support for this exhibition was provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Social Media
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Tumblr/YouTube: @philamuseum
We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A landmark building. A world-renowned collection. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors-through scholarly study and creative play-to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world-and themselves-anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.
The Moody Jones Gallery in Glenside, PA is delighted to announce their upcoming photography exhibit featuring the work of David Swift and John A. Benigno.
John A. Benigno. Moth Orchid II
There will be an opening receptions on Friday, March 2nd from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., and on Saturday, March 3rd from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Both are free and open to the public. The show runs through April 5th. For more information, please call the gallery (215-582-4496).
David Swift
David Swift
David Swift is a photographer, actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. His visual aesthetic, honed by more than 40 years’ experience working in theater and motion pictures, has greatly influenced his still photography. He is a member of the Philadelphia Photo League and the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited in many art galleries throughout the region David shoots mainly with 35 and 120mm film.
“I attempt to shoot photographs that have meaning and subtext.To touch the viewer on an emotional level.When I succeed, the camera becomes an extension of my heart” – David Swift
John A. Benigno, San Francisco de Asis, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico
John A. Benigno, Moose Hall, Downington, PA
Among other venues, John A. Benigno‘s work has been collected by the Lancaster, Noyes, Berman and Woodmere Museums, the Harry Ransom Center, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania; and published in “Camera Arts” and “Antietam Review”. He was recently awarded the Luminous Landscape Grant for his Adobe Church Project from the Luminous Endowment for Photographers.
The Gallery
The Moody Jones Gallery is a boutique art gallery. We have a rich collection of paintings and sculpture work. We are proudly located in Glenside, Pennsylvania and are excited to show the space and our appreciation for fine works of art to the community. Our mission is to introduce you to new, mid-level and well established artists working in different mediums. Our goal is to display and sell original works of art which will both leave the customer satisfied and secondly be a perfect addition to the home, work place or wherever the art is to be displayed.
The Private Collection
Adrian J. Moody and his wife Robyn Jones have spent years building a large collection of paintings and sculptures. The collection, mostly made up of African-American, Latin-American, and Mexican art features works by Andrew Turner, Easton Davy, Ted Ellis, R. L. Washington, Gina Echeverry, Jonas Allen, Andre Guichard, Leroy Edney and a wide variety of other artist. The collection features a rich mixture of abstract, representative and portraits. As a collective, they display their experienced taste and expertise on the aesthetic and subjects that encapsulate African-American, Latin-American and Mexican art. The pieces themselves speak largely on race, gender, sexuality, and family, while others cater to different conceptual ideas.
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March 1st through April 1st, 2018, Muse Gallery, 52 North Second Street, Old City, Philadelphia, 19106, 215. 627. 5310
First Friday: March 2nd, 2018 from 5:00 – 8:00pm
Artist’s reception: Sunday, March 11, 2018 from 2-5 pm
Artist Statement:
“When starting a painting, I try to be crazy and paint with whatever feels good at the moment: old acrylic test paint, rollers, squeegees, stir sticks, wire mesh, oil sticks, and lots of smearing and dripping. It is pure madness and lots of fun. After a time, the painting has to calm down, be edited, have a composition and hopefully a dominant color. My paintings are all about the tension between madness and calm, my striving to keep the energy, chaos and color while imposing an order and coherence.”
Mission: Established late in 1977, the Muse Gallery is an artists’ cooperative dedicated to encourage and promote its members’ artistic expression through abstract, conceptual and representational forms. Reflecting an aesthetic that awakens awareness, the Muse Gallery affirms the shared experience of art between the artist and the community. Please see the membership page to view a detailed history of Muse.
Columbia Glacier Lines of Recession 1980-2005
Ortophoto Kongsfjorden 1869 _1990 (after NPI)
Petermann Calving
