Category Archives: NJ

Food

Leave a reply

How Food Moves: Edible LogisticsImage: Amber Art and Design, Corner Store Project

How Food Moves: Edible Logistics

Amber Art & Design / Ryan Griffis & Sarah Ross
Brian Holmes / Otabenga Jones & Associates / Cynthia Main
Claire Pentecost / Philly Stake / Stephanie Rothenberg
Candice Smith with Freedom Arts / Kristen Neville Taylor

Daniel Tucker, Guest Curator, Graduate Program Director in Social and Studio Practices at Moore College of Art and Design
March 27 – May 27, 2017
Public Program and Reception: Thursday, March 30, 2017, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Our public program begins at 6:00 pm followed by the reception
Rowan University Art Gallery, 301 High Street West, First Floor, Glassboro, NJ 08028
Admission to the gallery and reception is free and open to the public.
The public program begins at 6:00 pm, led by guest curator Daniel Tucker in dialogue on art, geography, and agricultural planning with Professor Megan Bucknum Ferrigno from Rowan University’s School of Geography and Environment, and with exhibiting artists.

Artists explore the US food supply chain and its complex patterns of distribution in between the point of origin (the farm) and its point of consumption (the plate). The exhibition aims to highlight the work of contemporary artists grappling with the complexity of this movement through multi-media, research-based, and participatory practices that focus a lens on the social and industrial impacts of migrant workers, food justice movements, immigration, multiculturalism, and economic disparities. This project builds upon Tucker’s event series, Moving Units: Where Food & Economy Converge. A companion booklet, produced by Rowan University Art Gallery, serves to provide a general overview of US food supply chains. It includes descriptions of the artist contributions to the exhibition that relate to each step on the chain. Throughout this booklet you read about an approach to geographic education that values connecting with the world outside the classroom. The booklet was researched and written by Megan Bucknum Ferrigno, part-time faculty member of Rowan University’s Department of Geography, Planning and Sustainability. Additional contributions made by Dr. Chuck McGlynn, Dr. Jennifer Kitson and Makenzie Franco.

About the Artists and Projects

With Corner Store, Amber Art & Design – a team of Philadelphia-based artists that work on public art within marginalized communities that have little or no access to art – explores the contemporary sociological and psychological intersection between pan-ethnic Black and Asian communities in Philadelphia and how relationships are shaped based on which side of the counter we stand. (image top)

Illinois-based artists Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross are represented by Between the Bottomlands and the World, a video (combining photographs, narrative writing, and moving images) exploring the rural Midwestern town of Beardstown, IL, a place of global exchange and international mobility, inscribed by post-NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) realities.

Brian Holmes, an art and cultural critic with a Ph.D. in Romance Languages has a long-standing interest in neoliberal globalization and a taste for on-the-ground intervention. His online atlas, Living Rivers, is devoted to the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds and shows these fluid ecosystems as they are inhabited by a multitude of creatures and radically altered by human enterprise.

Otabenga Jones & Associates, a Houston-based educational art organization, documents a collaborative art project and public health program addressing the ongoing crisis of obesity and its related risks with “The People’s Plate.” Inspired by the Black Panther Free Breakfast for School Children Program, this art project includes a public mural in Houston and programs to kick off a year-long commitment to health education.

Cynthia Main, a multidisciplinary artist from Missouri focuses on relating to the land as part of an integral view of a more sustainable society. She shares her hand-made buckets and barrels created using traditional techniques to readdress storage as one of the current dilemmas of localizing production.

Chicago’s Claire Pentecost uses photography to show how industrial agriculture is only partly about supplying food and how it is structured to meet the problem of expense and excess capital accumulation when considering the cost of complex machinery, brand name chemical herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and patented seeds.

How Food Moves: Edible Logistics

Philly Stake is a locally-sourced, recurring dinner that raises funds for creative and relevant community engaged projects that contributes to the well-being of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods through community arts, urban agriculture, social services, and activist work.

Stephanie Rothenberg’s Reversal of Fortune: The Garden of Virtual Kinship is a garden in the form of a global map that explores the question of what it means to be charitable through the click of a button and examines the cultural phenomena of online crowd-funded charity and how the flow of money impacts the project, positively and negatively.

How Food Moves: Edible LogisticsStephanie Rothenberg

Candice Smith runs Freedom Arts, an after school collaborative art program at Camden’s Freedom Prep Middle School, which is creating an installation responding to the idea that Camden is a “food desert” and examining the movement of food at their school and in their community.

Philadelphia-based Kristen Neville Taylor’s installation – a globe depicting routes of oranges and actual oranges outfitted with a QR code that links to music, articles, folk tales, and art – was inspired by a lyric from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” (“and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China”) which she associated with the market place and the movement of food but also romance and exotic foreign cultures.

Admission to the gallery and reception is free and open to the public. 
Free parking is now available in the parking garage on Mick Drive directly across from the gallery. For visitor information go to our website: www.rowan.edu/artgallery.

Thank you to Mary Salvante, Rowan University Art Gallery for the content of this post.

Like Rowan University Art Gallery on facebook

SEO and Photoshop by DoN.

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Ourself

Leave a reply

Ourself: Roosevelt Plaza Park, Camden   Ourself : An Interactive Public Art Piece

Roosevelt Plaza Park, Camden NJ – 2016

Ourself is a site-specifific, responsive artwork that shares the positive inner voices of Camden. By entering the work the public activates audio clips of personal interviews with local residents from all walks of life, around the theme of motivation and ambition.

The infinite mirrored space symbolizes the many voices of the community that define our story and ourselves. Ourself is produced by New American Public Art in collaboration with Cooper’s Ferry Partnership, the City of Camden, Connect the Lots, Get Healthy Camden and NextFab.

ourself2

The work is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, and the Campbell Soup Foundation. The Connect the Lots initiative is a community-driven initiative to activate Camden, New Jersey’s vacant and underutilized spaces through the identification and implementation of artistic, cultural, and recreational projects and activities in these spaces to create safe and vibrant gathering places for the residents of the City of Camden.

ourself3

For more information visit newamericanpublicart.com/ourself

Contact: New American Public Art info@newamericanpublicart.com 10 Tyler Street, Somerville,, MA 02143

Meishka L. Mitchell, AICP, PP meishka@coopersferry.com 2 Riverside Dr # 501, Camden, NJ 08103

ourself4New American Public Art is a multi-disciplinary studio for conceptualizing, designing, fabricating, and installing interactive projects.

SEO and Photoshop by DoN.

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoNArTNeWs on Tumblr

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Ourself from New American Public Art on Vimeo.

In/Dwelling

Leave a reply

In/Dwelling: Meditations on Built Environments as Cultural Narrative

The Galleries at Rowan presents

In/Dwelling: Meditations on Built Environments as Cultural Narrative
February 22 – April 14, 2016

Introducing our new location 301 High Street, Glassboro New Jersey

Artist’s talk and reception Thursday, February 25, 5 – 8 pm

Rowan University Art Gallery at High Street explores built environments, both external and internal, as emblems of a cultural past, present, and future with In/Dwelling: Meditations on Built Environments as Cultural Narrative. The exhibition is on display from February 22 to April 14, with an artist’s lecture and reception onFebruary 25 from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

We are compelled to imagine a time when architectural spaces and objects were new representations of manufacturing, design, and aesthetic tastes and trends. The urban / suburban motifs have time and again provided artists with the perfect vehicle in which to explore universal topics such as: the complexity of infrastructure, commerce, demographics, and identity as inspiration to create new work. In this exhibition the participating artists imbue architectural structures and domestic objects with interpretations of historical experiences, social customs, and emotional memories as a cultural narrative. Artists include Philadelphia based artists: Lewis Colburn, Ben Grasso, Kay Healy, Erin Murray, and Miriam Singer. Chicago based artist Ann Toebbe, and New York based artist Brian Tolle. A work by Louise Bourgeois is included courtesy of the gallery permanent collection.

The catalyst behind the framing of this exhibition concept was the print Femme Maison, 1984, by Louise Bourgeois from the gallery collection. Femme Maison, which means both “woman-house” and “house-wife,” is one of Louise Bourgeois’s most famous motifs. For the artist, who was raised in France, the home was closely connected to female identity. By combining residential architecture and the curvaceous female body, Bourgeois portrays a woman who is obscured and entrapped by the domestic realm that she simultaneously supports.

The selected artists for this exhibition approach domesticity, architecture, and everyday objects from singular and accumulative perspectives. Brian Tolle creates a cross-wiring of reality and fiction in his sculptures and installations and blurs the border between the contemporary and historical with recurring themes of architecture, site, and technology. Lewis Colburn, of Philadelphia, sees objects as unreliable tour guides. He investigates ways in which we re-interpret and re-tell the past through the filter of our current experience. Ben Grasso, of Brooklyn, NY, presents a re-imagining of what actually exists and recasts these things in new terms creating a re-alignment of logic that makes plastic the anxiety underlying objects in the world through his painting. Miriam Singer, looks perceptually at multiple locations in Philadelphia and expresses the fragmentation of a fictional city as a collage of noise, pattern, and density.

By recounting memories of unique, collective, or habitual memories these artists investigate identity and history through interior and exterior experiences. Kay Healy, a Philadelphia based artist, creates large-scale screen printed and stuffed fabric furniture based on other people’s descriptions of their childhood homes and investigates how we relate to objects and cope with the fact that there is no way to truly return home. Ann Toebbe, a Chicago based artist, creates meticulous paintings using reconstructed memory and multiple perspectives to depict domestic and architectural spaces in cut-out paper doll fashion. Erin Murray, of Philadelphia, relates to buildings and built forms as being understood to represent our physical body, our cultural history, our economic reality, and our long-formed habits.

Brian Tolle, from New York, offers a lecture on February 25. He has completed several public art installations in New York, including the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York City. He has exhibited around the world and his work is included in numerous museum collections. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from SUNY at Albany; a B.F.A. from Parsons the New School for Design, NY; and an M.F.A. from Yale University in New Haven, CT.

The lecture will be presented at Westby Hall Room 111 beginning at 5:00 p.m. A reception follows at 301 High Street in Glassboro at 6:00 p.m.

Shuttle vans will be provided for guests traveling from Westby Hall to High Street. Return service will not be provided, but High Street is only a 15-minute walk away. Free public parking is available on High Street and neighboring streets. Municipal parking areas are available off Lake Street (behind Little Beefs Deli) and near the Barnes and Noble shopping complex between New Street and Rowan Blvd.

In/Dwelling: Meditations on Built Environments as Cultural NarrativeImages: top, Brian Tolle, Outgrown, platinum silicon rubber, toys. Courtesy the artist and CRG gallery. Bottom: Ann Toebbe, Jim’s Apartment, paper, gouache and pencil on panel.

Thank you to Rowan University Art Gallery for the content of this post.

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoNArTNeWs on Tumblr

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Donate via safe and secure PayPal in the sidebar.

Five

Leave a reply

The Philly Five

The Philly Five

Susan Barnes, Tony Cirineo, Patrick Monaghan, Doris Peltzman, and Reta Sweeney at Medford Memorial Community Center, 21 South Main Street, Medford, NJ, 08055, 609-654-2598. Hours by appointment.

“The Philly Five, a group of artists that met over 15 years ago while attending Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, are exhibiting a diverse selection of oil paintings and other works…Each has a distinctive style and their own preferred subject matter, although they all paint a variety of subjects. – The Medford Sun

The Philly Five, April 10th through May 31st, 2015.

Artist Reception Sunday, April 12, 3:00 – 5:00pm

“Fleisher Art Memorial is a source of inspiration, creativity and community. Every year, more than 17,000 people experience the transformative power of art by participating in our studio classes, exhibitions, and community-based programming. Founded in 1898, we are a nonprofit organization committed to advancing the vision of our founder, Samuel S. Fleisher, who believed that art is one of society’s greatest assets and equalizers, and from the doorway of his Graphic Sketch Club, “invited the world to come and learn art.” – Fleisher Art Memorial

“Susan Barnes, a native of New Jersey, has been painting in oils actively since the mid 1990’s and is the recipient of numerous awards. Seeking her own educational path at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia and by attending various workshops, she has learned from a generation of painters that studied under the tutelage of Arthur DeCosta at PAFA.” – Susan Barnes

“Patrick Monaghan began his art education at Fleisher Art Memorial School in Philadelphia, PA in 1994.  He received instruction in painting the figure and portraiture from such notable artists as Stanley Bielen, Paul Dusold and Carolyn Pyfrom.  Also, he was instructed in still life painting and continued his education in this genre with Lousie Clement-Hoff, Nathan Rutkowski and Christine La Fuente.” – Patrick Monaghan

“I am a direct painter, painting from life to capture the moment.  The excitement of the moment and the immediacy are what drive me. It is that total impression that creates the completed painting. I focus on color, harmony, light, mood, texture, composition and the calligraphy of my brush strokes. I love to experiment with a variety of palettes and surfaces.” – Doris Peltzman

Fleisher Art Memorial creates an environment where over time artists become dear friends, companions, confidantes, supporters and collaborators. I know almost all of the Philly Five from taking painting classes in the early 21st Century. Before they put the elevator in at Fleisher and you had to carry your gear up the stairs and grab a spot with the best views. The instructors or monitors are some of Philadelphia’s most accomplished artists and educators and the classes would fill up fast. The vibe in the classes was as intense as going to PAFA or UArts, critiques can be so painful to watch but so personal to experience.

I distinctly recall seeing Doris Peltzman the first time at Fleisher Art Memorial. She came into the studio wearing a tweed jacket and skirt, a very elegant silhouette, and she proceeded to get oil paint on it. It’s funny but she was so happy to get paint on her clothes. Doris Peltzman‘s been painting with oils ever since, studying with the best, participating in the competitive art scene, exhibiting across the region, and is considered one of Philadelphia’s finest painters.

The Philly Five: Susan Barnes, Tony Cirineo, Patrick Monaghan, Doris Peltzman, and Reta Sweeney at Medford Memorial Community Center, 21 South Main Street, Medford, NJ, 08055. April 10th through May 31st, 2015. Artist Reception Sunday, April 12, 3:00 – 5:00

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoNArTNeWs on Tumblr

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

@donniebeat on Ello

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Donate via safe and secure PayPal in the sidebar.

Chromography

Leave a reply

Chromography, Rowan University Art Gallery CHROMOGRAPHY: WRITING IN COLOR

Translating communication symbols & systems into color, sound and objects Glassboro, NJ – Rowan University Art Gallery presents Chromography: Writing in Color, a two-person exhibition examining concepts of translation and symbol-based communication, from March 23 – May 9. A reception on Thursday, April 9 from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. features an artist’s talk beginning at 6:00 p.m. to include a performance of excerpts from musical translations represented in the exhibit.

Artists Melinda Steffy and Gerard Brown explore concepts of translation and symbol-based communication in their work. Starting with different sets of symbols—Steffy with music and Brown with writing—both artists have developed systems for translating distinct methods of communication into visual artworks. Written texts, then, rely on color and pattern to be understood. Music, usually experienced as linear and time-based, can be seen all at once, in immediate spatial configurations. Gerard Brown explores the intersection of seeing and reading, often by employing codes that do not—at first glance—resemble writing. Brown employs a script of nautical signal flags arranged according to traditional “tumbling block” pattern similar to quilting patterns. The tumbling block pattern is a powerful optical illusion that creates the feeling of three-dimensional space on a flat plane. This illusion offers an analog to the ways writing can be confused with speech. Unlike most other forms of writing, signal flags rely on color to communicate their message and are easily confused with one another if color is absent. Converting the common alphabet into a patterned array of color reveals idiosyncratic instances in language, as letterforms repeat and combine into new shapes and arrangements.

Melinda Steffy explores congruent patterns by translating compositions by J.S. Bach and Béla Bartók into watercolor paintings on paper. In her translations, each of the notes of the chromatic scale corresponds with a hue on the color wheel; as the music progresses through the key signatures, the paintings’ color schemes shift. Notes and rhythms are plotted on a grid to show intrinsic tonal and rhythmic structures. The subtle irregularity of the hand-painted squares and watercolor pigments captures a sense of tone variation similar to a live performance.

A central element of this exhibition is “The Hours,” an elaborate experiment in translation that moves messages from writing to music to image. Working with “Solresol,” a language invented by composer and violinist François Sudre (1787 – 1862), the seven notes of the musical scale: DO RE ME FA SO LA TI are used to translate texts. Each word in Solresol uses one to four syllables (or notes), resulting in a lexicon of about 3,000 terms. Sudre constructed dictionaries to translate French, English, and other European tongues into his new language, and created systems of notation – including one that assigns colors to notes – by which it could be written. In this manner, colored flags or lights could transit messages. Brown translated short literary descriptions of times of day into the Solresol language and then into brief melodies that chime at the hours they describe. For example, a passage about the end of the day from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” becomes a lonely, meandering melody for brass ensemble. Each tune was then re-scored by Steffy, using the system she invented that translates musical notes into color. Several of these visualizations are installed on the gallery windows as decals, and each of them sounds at its designated time in the public space outside the gallery. In the gallery, “The Hours” are presented in the books where the passages originated.

Gerard Brown, a writer and painter, is an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. His work explores how the mind moves from seeing to reading by concealing writing in patterns and color. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited at the Woodmere Art Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia Sculpture Gym, and the Icebox (all in Philadelphia), as well as Finlandia University Art Gallery (Michigan) and 5.4.7 Art Center (Kansas). He has also organized exhibits for the Center for Art in Wood (Philadelphia) and Hicks Art Center at Bucks County Community College.

Melinda Steffy, a visual artist and classically-trained musician from Philadelphia, has had artwork displayed across the Northeast and beyond, including the Icebox, the Hall at the Crane Arts Building, and Sam Quinn Gallery (Philadelphia); Delaware Center for Contemporary Art and Fringe Wilmington (Delaware); Lancaster Museum of Art and Villanova University (Pennsylvania); Finlandia University (Michigan); Micro Museum (New York); and Stamford Art Association (Connecticut). She is an artist member of InLiquid and a LEADERSHIP Philadelphia fellow. An accomplished musician, Steffy currently serves as general manager for the innovative music nonprofit LiveConnections and sings with the Chestnut Street Singers.

Admission to the gallery, talk and reception is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 10 am to 5 pm (with extended hours on Wednesdays to 7 pm); and Saturday, 12 to 5

Rowan University Art Gallery is located on the lower level of Westby Hall on the university campus, Route 322 in Glassboro, NJ. Directions can be found on the gallery or university websites. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.

This program is made possible in part with funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Rowan University Art Gallery

Mary Salvante, Gallery & Exhibitions Program Director

CONTACT: Dennis Dougherty (856) 256-4537

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoNArTNeWs on Tumblr

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

@donniebeat on Ello

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Donate via safe and secure PayPal in the sidebar.