Category Archives: Public Art

Art events, installations and creations by Philadelphia area artists in public spaces

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011 – DoNArTNeWs @ Philadelphia Museum of Art

20th Street Art Scene – studio christensen, Prelude Gallery and Beauty Shop Cafe

Matthew Ostroff @ studio christensen

Matthew Ostroff is like a graffiti artist using wheat paste and torn paper the way a tagger over-writes earlier tags. But Ostroff doesn’t deface property, he confines his low-fi technique of pasting painted colored paper onto a painting background then tearing away the paper like old posters shredded on a South Street Wall. The deep layers of color, intense saturation and feeling of the hand emanates from the surface in perfect abstract expressionism. Curator Jt Christensen is an interior architect who has transformed the old storefront at 333 South Twentieth St. Philadelphia into a hip, aspirational showcase for art, furniture and chic urban style. The Ostroff show with big, bold contemporary art pairs with the modern and mid 20th Century classic furniture in a hip, clean living space vibe gallery, emblematic of the changes taking place along 20th Street, offering a street view tableau of cool desirable furnishings.

Brian Lauer @ studio christensen

Brian Lauer was the featured artist at studio christensen for June but Jt decided to keep many of them because they just look so damn good. DoN noticed them while we discussed Ostroff’s work and thought they were paintings, from the street they read as paintings but on closer inspection the detail emerges from the color and a photograph coalesces. The photo above is Jesus being made up as a Zombie at Tattooed Mom’s on South Street, the chiaroscuro of light across Jesus’ wounds is like a Rubens. The photo below are guys standing along the river in Camden but feels like some Nordic outpost with sad characters staring to sea but it’s just folks enjoying the view of a blizzard on the Delaware River.

Brian Lauer @ studio christensen

Anna Shukeylo @ Prelude Gallery

Prelude Gallery is dedicated to promoting emerging artists in a gallery setting. DoN talked with Creative Director Gaby Heit about their mission and she explained how the gallery is collaborating with art schools to help under-grad and master level artists have opportunities to get their work seen. Heit said the neighborhood has been very welcoming, the gallery a perfect addition to the hip restaurants, salons and shops – Pamcakes is their neighbor, Yum! July 1st was Prelude Gallery’s soft opening but look for new work for the Second Friday art crawl on August 12th.

Kyle Deal @ Prelude Gallery

Christopher Enty @ Prelude Gallery

Gaby asked DoN what his favorite paintings are, a tough question since it was his first visit but Christopher Enty’s portraits of urban youth stand out with a rough beauty that is almost brutal. The characters in Enty’s paintings express the self consciousness of youth in a socially networked society where a profile is suddenly important, revitalizing the significance of portraiture; Heit confided in DoN she felt Christopher Enty is Prelude Gallery’s Soutine.

Benjamin Gonzales @ Prelude Gallery

Gaby Heit expressed to DoN she thought the revitalization of the 20th Street Corridor was coming from the North, the Rittenhouse Square district, but DoN explained how the Beauty Shop Cafe staked out the corner of 20th and Fitzwater Streets when there were still gangs hanging on the corner. And now students and young professionals make the trek to Center City from GHo all the way from Washington Avenue and get their morning coffee at the corner cafe. Art shows were part of the Beauty Shop Cafe plan from the beginning and the current show is really good.

Caitlin Beattie @ Beauty Shop Cafe

Caitlin Beattie is an emerging artist photographer, this is her first art show. It is so gratifying to know that artists have showcases like The Beauty Shop, Prelude Gallery and studio christensen to exhibit their work where it can really be seen by a lot of people but it makes the neighborhood so much more vibrant, intellectual and welcoming, too.

Sabik @ Beauty Shop Cafe

Dreamcatcher, NFS

Beauty Shop Cafe

Jewelry and etchings by Kenzie Gemz. The Beauty Shop looks like an old library or museum with terrariums, collections and photos creating a vibe of a secret society meeting room. As the GHo neighborhood transforms with modern new houses wedging between old row-homes, young families with strollers, hipsters with porkpie hats and folks who have long lived in the neighborhood are now enjoying a renaissance of sorts along 20th Street helping to delineate a terrific art crawl up 20th, across Walnut Street to Sande Webster, down 22nd Street to Twenty-Two Gallery and on to 21st & Pine and the fabulous Gallery 339. Second Friday, now a Center City West tradition, is August 12th.

Photos by DoN

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center

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The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Every corner of the mammoth Icebox Gallery in the Crane Arts Center is activated with visual signs, symbols and sensory stimuli. Last January curator Amie Potsic sent a call for ideas to the Fellows of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists for the huge art space in Fishtown. Site specific works were encouraged, developed and confirmed by April and last week all the pieces fell into place and Construct, an invigorating, unique, studied look at contemporary art and how assemblage, construction and collage is integral to the new way of seeing. The photo above looks so Rauschenberg but it’s mash-up of two large installations, one a trippy multiple collage by Jennifer Williams applied directly on the walls and a large assemblage by Don Edler that sprawls across the concrete floor like a drift of entrancing debris.

Don Edler @ The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Mami Kato in coming to the end of a long relationship with the special Japanese grass she uses to create the sinuous sculptures which take years to make to a new direction using resin for the bio-morphic sculpture in the foreground. Her work looks so beautiful in the Gray Area, tying up the space in a confounding knot of dense yet floaty tubules.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Laureen Griffin plays with styles, textures, composition and sexual role models – huh? DoN overheard a comment, “What’s that girl doing in the chair?” The girl is dressed quite masculine, like a business woman, reading a paper, a strong contemporary image of a black woman set against the grain of an antebellum manor. Intensely conflicting narratives zipped through DoN‘s neural network from stories embedded in the fabric, visual cues in the styling and strangely involving decor. Gorgeous!

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Kimberly Witham was concerned for a moment that the photographs that are so huge in her studio would seem dwarfed by the scale of Icebox, but arrayed salon style, the still life photographs using dead animals, wallpaper and found objects read perfectly well. The beautifully rendered still life photographs are so bitter sweet, we get to look at beautiful creatures living on after death in a work of art, an exquisite corpse of a different kind. Witham’s photographs drew a crowd of people who stood and stared a long time; the mixture of repulsion and fascination, ugly and beautiful, cheery and morbid strums a tender nerve. And the concept that raw steak is not just the color of cabbage roses but can be sexually Dali-nian is genius.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Alison Stigora, Whirlwind, charred wood, site specific installation. Like a charcoal drawing in space, Whirlwind is a feat of imagination swirling up like a tornado; Stigora and a friend hand-charred the wood, pulling logs from the fire and dousing them with water to preserve the scarred luminous iridescence of the wood for the construction. Alison wants all DoNsters to know she is not a pyromaniac, having a healthy fear of fire and does not play with matches. The imposing sculpture continues Stigora’s investigation into the fractal like forms of the natural world, especially trees and all that art owes to them.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Alison Stigora, Whirlwind, detail.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Lewis Colburn was seated atop a 15 foot wooden tower where he typed War and Peace by Tolstoy during a performance at the opening reception; Colburn typed out part of the book relating to a theory about history and calculus, a repetitive process which spilled a long stream of paper into a puddle on the floor. The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Lewis Colburn @ The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Maggie Mills has five paintings included in the exhibit, each artwork representing a bit of the anxiety she feels about the political and ecological environment her young daughter is growing up in. Mills’ paintings incorporate compressed narratives, coupled with coming of age incidents and rituals. In each of the paintings, young people are involved in a manner of play that involves constructions like kites but in a dream state haunted by angst, danger and fear for the future.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Swim Team, oil on panel, Maggie Mills @ The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Panoramic shot of the Icebox Gallery, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists – Construct @ Crane Arts Center.

Artists exhibiting are: Noah Addis, Arden Bendler Browning, Lewis Colburn, Don Edler, Laureen Griffin, Jordan Griska, Ana B. Hernandez, Mami Kato, Allison Kaufman, Daniel Kornrumpf, Maggie Mills, Tim Portlock, Alison Stigora, Jennifer Williams, Kimberly Witham, and Bohyun Yoon.

Construct is on view through June 29th, a short run for such a big show but exhilarating in it’s scope, direction and audacity.

Photos by DoN.

Envisioning Shakespeare – Da Vinci Art Alliance @ Rowan University

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Through April 26, 2011 at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, in collaboration with the Da Vinci Art Alliance, presents Envisioning Shakespeare” an exhibition of art by 24 members artists relating to the works of William Shakespeare in the lobby of Wilson Hall which houses Rowans Pfleeger Theatre.

Artists in the exhibition include: Bobbie Adams, Betsy Alexander, Rosalind Bloom, Bud Boehringer, DoN Brewer, Alden Cole, Lilliana Didovic, David Foss, Linda Dubin Garfield, Sharri Jerue, Carl Johnson, Ona Kalstein, Marie Keane, Rikard Larma, Carla Lombardi, Karen McDonnell and Anthony Cortosi, Deb Miller and Ray Costello, Liz Nicklus, Patricia OHalloran, Francine Strauss, Ted Warchal, Carol Wisker, Burnell Yow!

Click the thumbnails for panoramic views of Envisioning Shakespeare – a Da Vinci Art Alliance Event @ Rowan University, Glassboro NJ.

Envisioning Shakespeare @ Rowan University. Da Vinci Art Alliance is an 80 year old art gallery cooperative located in South Philly; the expansive show of art gleaned from Shakespeare themed art shows from the past examines images, themes and ideas from Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet and Henry IV, Part 1 by artists working in all types of media.

Lilliana Didovic – Envisioning Shakespeare – a Da Vinci Art Alliance event @ Rowan University.

Carl Johnson@ Envisioning Shakespeare – a Da Vinci Art Alliance event.

DoN Brewer and Mina Smith-Segal – Envisioning Shakespeare – Da Vinci Art Alliance @ Rowan University.

Envisioning Shakespeare – a Da Vinci Art Alliance event @ Rowan University. Thank you to the great work by the Da Vinci Art Alliance team for installing the exhibition; director Dave Foss, board members Alden Cole and Ted Warchal transported and hung the show in a coherent, flowing retrospective in the handsome lobby of the Pfleeger Theater with each artwork resonating and reinforcing the messages from the works in proximity. But, Dr. Deb Miller, Da Vinci Art Alliance Board President is the master-mind behind the series which has brought this collection of Philadelphia artists together in a bright, welcoming setting where the art can be seen by theater-goers and students at Rowan University. The on-going series of theme shows allows artists to interpret Shakespeare in their own styles and media, most recently interpreting A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Black Box Gallery at the Lantern Theater Company.

Lilliana Didovic has participated in each of the Da Vinci Art Alliance Envisioning Shakespeare exhibitions and won First Prize this time for her painting in the Envisioning A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the dreamy blue night scene above). Lilliana is dedicated to Da Vinci Art Alliance, volunteering her time and creating art even as she worked at achieving her Masters Degree in Psychology from the University of Chicago this Spring.

Nadia Kunz was thrilled to be exhibiting for the first time with Da Vinci Art Alliance for the Envisioning A Midsummer Night’s Dream art show; Nadia’s construction is a whimsical interpretation of the famous play created with found objects.

Envisioning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“ @ The Lantern Theater’s Black Box Gallery. DoN know’s that’s Ted Warchal’s Puck in the middle but he needs help identifying the others, if you know who’s who in any of these photos please comment so credit can be given to the artists.

Envisioning Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Black Box Gallery at Lantern Theater. See the Da Vinci Art Alliance Facebook page for more photos. Thank you to the Lantern Theater for giving DoN exclusive access to the gallery, normally only theater-goers get to see the art show, the underground gallery has a bohemian vibe synchronizing with the eclectic artist collective’s esthetic, Da Vinci Art Alliance has been invited back for next year’s Shakespeare production.

Photos by DoN. shot exclusively with Kodak Digital Cameras