Category Archives: Writing

Moth

Black Moth Tattoo and GalleryRiot, Pen and ink on paper, David Jablow

Black Moth Tattoo Parlor and Gallery

Black Moth Tattoo and Gallery, 18 East Lancaster Avenue Ardmore, PA 19003

David Jablow  Further Adventures 

March 1st – March 31st

On first glance, my drawings are clearly narrative. What is often and easily missed is the very specific platform on which all of them are made. The drawings originate on vintage ‘doodle pad’ sheets from 20th century.

I collect and utilize these somewhat risqué novelty drawing pads. These mass-produced pads of paper feature incompletely drawn women (and occasionally men) with instructions to complete- or doodle in- the missing parts. And that’s what I do.  As a lifelong fan of the art and craft of illustration, representational drawing, comics, and cartooning, I use pen and ink to complete the incomplete images to make them my own.

The practice of ‘repurposing’ items from the past is quite popular. We’ve all seen the cable TV shows and passed by boutiques that take old antique doors and turn them into coffee tables, or crafters who take old military artifacts and turns them into lamps. Giving new life to objects left for dead is fun, quirky, and often times environmentally considerate.

What I’m doing with these old sheets of paper is ‘purposing’ them. I’m doing exactly what the printers had in mind when they originally produced and distributed them. I like the idea that I’m doing this decades after they were made, after they’ve been sitting in drawers until someone decided to post them for sale on eBay or Etsy. Perhaps ‘retro-purposed’ would be a more appropriate term for what I’m doing with these old doodle pads.

Regardless of they’re called or how they originate, I’ve found them to be ideal for my creative process.  When artist’s face a complete blank canvas or paper, they face that paradoxical problem of endless possibilities.  Too many options can often be constraining.

I sidestep this with the help of my muse. I simply access that part of the brain that we use when we play the game of charades. “What could she be doing.” my mind asks. Ideas then flow. I mentally sift through them and make loose sketches to narrow down the options. Which would make a drawing that I’d want to make?  What haven’t I done before? Maybe something funny, maybe macabre, or maybe I feel like challenging myself with some complex perspective angle. I get to draw it all..foliage, animals, technology, different eras of human history.  That’s half the fun. It’s always the same challenge and always new and different. –David Jablow

Free and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. More information can be found at https://www.facebook.com/events/622854208172944/

Black Moth Tattoo and GalleryAttack #3, Mixed Media on Wood, Wendee Yudis

Works by Wendee Yudis

April 1st – 30th

Wendee Yudis is a serigraph mixed media artist whose paintings and prints have been exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries in NYC, Chicago, and Philadelphia since the mid-1990’s. The females in her work become icons that reoccur in new contexts and combinations to create a visual vocabulary. Many times they question the females’ role in society as well explore the various roles within ourselves. By juxtaposing various images, nuances are implied and tension is created to imply and explore new meanings. She primarily uses printmaking along with painting rather than printing in edition because it allows her more freedom to create spontaneously and to explore the subtleties of printmaking. Yudis typically print images or icons in combination with other images to create not only a dialogue between the images but also to create an illusion of being camouflaged by translucency, patterns, and layers to explore relationships seen and unseen.

Free and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. More information can be found at https://www.facebook.com/events/628873590917632/

Black Moth Tattoo and Gallery

“A new fusion of custom body art and curated exhibitions brought to Montgomery County by local artist, Steve Martin. Expect more of the great ideas you have come to know me for. With 9 years professional experience I cover a range of disciplines in tattooing; from mandala and geometric designs, Japanese, neo-traditional, traditional Americana, custom lettering, as well as black and grey realism.

Celebrating 2 years in historic Ardmore, we’re turning heads with its premier tattoo parlor. I look forward to bringing to you, the art enthusiast and collector, a select presentation of custom tattoo designs as well as some of the finest works of art month after month. You can expect the professionalism, mindful customer service, attention to detail, and quality products in a clean and safe setting that you have known from me all these years.”

www.BlackMothTattooandGallery.com

18 East Lancaster Avenue
Ardmore, PA 19003
P. 610-642-1500

Thank you to Steve Martin for the content of this post.

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Modern Times

Modern Times, Charles Demuth, Lancaster (In the Province No. 2)Lancaster (In the Province No. 2), 1920, by Charles Demuth, American, 1883 – 1935. Oil on canvas, 30 x 16 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-5-1.

World-class Modernism Exhibition at The Philadelphia Museum of Art

By Bob Moore

The works of art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘s Modern Times exhibition, covering a period of artistic upheaval from 1910 to 1950, are seldom unexpected or unfamiliar. The modernist trend which they embody is deeply etched into our cultural unconscious, the background or context to everything that has happened since in the art world. Marcel DuChamp‘s nude descending her staircase, Georgia O’Keefe‘s succulent flowers, Marsden Hartley‘s colorful World War I compositions: these were the visual soil that Americans like myself grew up in.

Modern Times, Alfred Stieglitz, The City of AmbitionThe City of Ambition, 1910 (negative); c. 1930 (print), by Alfred Stieglitz, American, 1871 – 1944. Gelatin silver print, image/sheet/mount: 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949-18-47.

Walking through the 160-some pieces in the exhibition is like paging through the Modern American Art section of an extensive History of Art, with few outright surprises.

What is surprising (at least to me) in this exhibition was how many of these works are owned outright by the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘ (PMA). Not on loan from some internationally-recognized museum, but property of the PMA. Ours, all ours. This highlights a side of the exhibit not about Art but about Acquisitions. PMA’s Chief Executive Officer, Timothy Rub, in a foreword to the associated book, notes that “It was during the 1940s that the PMA’s holding of modern European and American art were established through several important gifts…” including donations by Albert E. GallatinGeorgia O’Keefe and Alfred Steiglitz, and Walter and Louise Arensburg (not Annanberg, another Philadelphia philanthropist who bequeathed his collection instead to the rival Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).

Modern Times, Marsden Hartley, Painting No 4 (Black Horse)Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915, by Marsden Hartley, American, 1877 -1943. Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 31 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949-18-8

There are a few works in the show not owned (yet) by the PMA: the book identifies one statue lent by a Museum Trustee and some fourteen paintings (including Charles Demuth‘s sizzling Jazz lent by another Trustee, with a note hinting at their eventual acquisition by the Museum.

The Modern Times exhibition curator was Jessica Todd Smith. In an essay in the associated book, she tells how the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) pioneered Modern Art in Philadelphia. But an ill-fated one-month PAFA exhibition of works from the collection of Albert C. Barnes in 1923 caused a ridiculous public outcry (the work was “trash,” and “the creations of a disintegrating mind,” said reviewers; think of peasants with torches and pitchforks).

Smith says the “critical reaction to the Barnes collection in 1923 scared PAFA’s board from presenting any further exhibitions of modern art until the 1950s…” The controversy also led to Barnes’ alienation from the Philadelphia art scene and all that followed. See Philadelphia Inquirer, Barnes at the Pennsylvania Academy: A scandal in 1923, May 4, 2012, by much-missed art critic Ed Sozanski.

The PMA then “picked up the modernist gauntlet,” Smith writes, under museum director Fiske Kimball. Smith says other figures in PMA’s acquisition of American Modern Art included R. Sturgis Ingersoll and Carl Zigrosser.

In a footnote 41 to her essay, Smith notes that some work was excluded from the exhibition, including “work that wholeheartedly embraces abstraction to the exclusion of any hints of figuration, leaving out most geometric abstraction and, on the more painterly end of the spectrum, Abstract Expressionism…” She also regretted that the museum had holes in its collections, including Social Realism, Regionalism, Native American, and Central and South American art.

In footnote 25, Smith lists the various art clubs that kept Modern Art alive in Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Philadelphia Art Alliance — but most notably not including the Plastic Club, an artists’ club which has been around since 1897.

The drama of acquisition politics and finance aside, however, the work in the Modern Times  show is a world-class exhibition put on single-handedly by our local museum. Don’t miss it!

MODERN TIMES: American Art 1910 – 1950Philadelphia Museum of Art April 18-September 3, 2018

(Associated Book) AMERICAN MODERNISM: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Jessica Todd Smith

Thank you to Bob Moore for the content of this post.

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The Bridge

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

The Bridge, Field Guide for the Female

Magazine and Blog by Aubrey Fink

Hi!

I was skimming your website today and realized… hey! I have something they might be interested in!

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

I am a junior graphic design major at the University of the Arts. Last year, I received a grant from the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy to create a ~new~ kind of women’s magazine. Jump cut to now… Issue No. 1 has been published! The Bridge Magazine features 17 original articles written by everyday women on topics like international breakups, uncomfortable conversations with your gyno, how to tell your boss that you are pregnant, first loves, and felony convictions.

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

This is a small project that was completed as a love letter to the amazing women I know, with the hopes of growing that circle, if even by a little bit. I partnered with Girls Inc. of Greater Philadelphia, with 25% of the proceeds benefiting their incredible programming for young women.

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

It would mean the world if you would consider highlighting the project on your website. I think your readers would be interested in the story of a project that is giving local women a platform to share their experiences. Thank you for your consideration! – Aubrey Fink

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

I had the idea for this project after realizing how little I was getting from the articles in women’s magazines. I could get better advice on life, love, and work from my dog… he is a REALLY good boy. I recognized that I was getting incredible advice from the women in my family because they actually have my best interest at heart. There’s a level of love, kindness, and realness in their wisdom. They are the ones who get real with me about how to deal with the three luscious black hairs that grow out of my chin. I needed a way to collect and revisit the great advice I was receiving from the wise women around me. Hence, The Bridge was born.

The Bridge, Aubrey Fink

About Girls, Inc.

In partnership with schools and at Girls Inc. centers, we focus on the development of the whole girl. She learns to value herself, take risks, and discover and develop her inherent strengths. The combination of long-lasting mentoring relationships, a pro-girl environment, and research-based programming equips girls to navigate gender, economic, and social barriers, and grow up healthyeducated, and independent. Informed by girls and their families, we also advocate for legislation and policies to increase opportunities and rights for all girls.

Thank you to Aubrey Fink for the content of this post.

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Unwilling

Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy

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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Bark!

Bark! Bark! Bark for My Park! Dr. Jessica Dimuzio

Jessica Dimuzio, award-winning children’s author, will read from her book

Bark! Bark! Bark for My Park! at DVAA

Jessica Dimuzio, VMD, conservation educator, author and veterinarian, will read from her book Bark! Bark! Bark for My Park! on Saturday, March 24, 2018 at 10:30 AM at Da Vinci Art Alliance, 704 Catharine Street in Philadelphia. This program is presented in collaboration with the Bella Vista Neighbors Association. This reading is appropriate for children 4 and older, conservation educators, gardeners and animal lovers of all ages.

Dr. Jessica Dimuzio graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, specializing in wildlife preservation. She has conducted research on elephants, rhinos, and wild baboons and taught conservation programs in Africa, Asia, and North America. Dedicated to wildlife conservation, Dr. “D.” loves to get kids of all ages excited about wildlife and their natural habitats through her nonfiction writing, “too true” storytelling, classroom talks, and nature walks. She provides these programs through Nature Tales and Trails, LLC, the company she founded in 2011.

Dr. Dimuzio, a member of Patchwork: A Storytelling Guild uses humor and suspense to share her international experiences with audiences of any age.

Her international award-winning book Bark! Bark! Bark for My Park! recounts the real story of how her five-pound puppy, Johnny Angel, saved a 690-acre farm park from destruction and is one of the few children’s books written on saving open space. It received the Silver Medal from Mom’s Choice Awards in the Green Earth Category and a rare RECOMMENDED from the US Review of Books.

Bark! Bark! Bark for My Park! Dr. Jessica DimuzioDa Vinci Art Alliance (DVAA) provides artists with a community that fosters artistic expression and growth through our exhibitions and programs.

Da Vinci Art Alliance (DVAA) was founded in 1931 to serve the needs of local artists and artisans and to promote the edification and appreciation of the arts in the community. Our building in South Philadelphia was obtained in 1959 to provide community space and studio, and gallery spaces for our membership. DVAA members are a diverse group of creatives of all ages and backgrounds, including those with advanced degrees in their fields and those that are self-taught. Members include award-winning artists whose works are in museums and private collections across the country as well as emerging artists, showing work for their first time.

The Bella Vista Neighbors Association (BVNA) improves Bella Vista’s quality of life and strengthens community bonds. BVNA encourages civic involvement, provides a neutral and public discussion forum, preserves and augments our institutions and character, supports the delivery of government services, and promotes dialogue with elected officials.  They are an independent and nonprofit organization.

Thank you to Linda Dubin Garfield for the content of this post. For more information, contact Linda Dubin Garfield at linda@davinciartalliance.org

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