Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus by Wangechi Mutu, 2004, Glitter, ink, collage on found medical illustration paper You may not have heard of Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, but you will soon. In the fistful of years since her graduation from Yale’s MFA program, her work has shocked, angered, disfigured, and been applauded by curators across the United States. Dr. Joe Gregory, chair of Drexel’s Department of Art and Art History, saw a piece of hers in the MoMA a few years ago. He was instantly taken with her work. Like so many gut-wrenching desires, Dr. Gregory’s went unrequited for years. […]
ARTSY: Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto
Photo by JOHANNA AUSTIN BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT Oriza Hirata, an experimental playwright of international renown and director of Osaka University’s Seinendan Theater Company, often ventures into uncharted territory. He’s bringing two of his recent works to Philadelphia this weekend that feature robots in lead roles interacting with human co-leads. The robots were created and programmed by a leader in the field, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. Dr. Ishiguro is director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University and has worked toward creating robots that look shockingly human-ish. The first breakthrough in this vein occurred in 2005 when he unveiled […]
REWIND 2012: The Year In Phawker Interviews
Talk is cheap, especially on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations from the past year that are worth re-visiting: Dick Dale, King Of The Surf Guitar; graphic novelist Charles Burns, the Edgar Allan Poe of right now; photographer Joe Kazcmarek, who tirelessly chronicles the murder-scarred backstreets of North and West Philly; Jim Reid, lead singer of The Jesus And Mary Chain; Anton Newcombe, cult leader of The Brian Jonestown Massacre; Hardball host Chris Matthews; […]
ARTSY: Postering Over The Fiscal Bluff
RELATED: Our country isn’t broke — It’s being robbed. Stand up against cuts to vital programs and demand the wealthy pay their fair share. You’ve probably heard about the political game called “The Fiscal Cliff.” But, it’s actually a Fiscal Bluff — a self inflicted crisis designed to create urgency to make us believe our nation is broke and that we must cut vital programs. This is false and we won’t stand for it. Corrupt billionaires, tax-dodging corporations, and those who serve them have manufactured this crisis and are refusing to pay their fair share. Join us in telling them: […]
ARTSY: Dada On The Dance Floor
BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Dancing Around the Bride, courageously attempts to explain the work of Marcel Duchamp, one of the most important and enigmatic artists of the 20th Century, in terms that people who don’t have a Ph.D. in the meta mechanics of modernism can understand. Duchamp [PICTURED, BELOW RIGHT] re-imagined the definition of art — and more or less invented punk rock — when he entered a urinal as a piece for a museum exhibit and called it Fountain. It was the first of his series, entitled “readymades” and it started […]
ARTSY: An Extremely Rare And Factual Q&A With Cartoonist & Illustrator Extraordinaire Chris Ware
BY RITA BOOK* In the hands of Chris Ware, the funnies aren’t particularly funny. Unless, that is, lonely misfits and their existential lives of quiet desperation is your idea of comedy gold. Ware’s deeply felt, darkly told and beautifully illustrated stories, including the partly autobiographical “Jimmy Corrigan” and “Rusty Brown,” have won awards in the U.S. and abroad, drawn comparisons to “Ulysses” and Duchamp, and landed the Chicago-based cartoonist on bookshelves, museums and galleries, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Esquire. Ware’s latest, the groundbreaking and gorgeous “Building Stories,” has already been called his magnum opus and a […]
EARLY WORD: There Will Be Blood
Alpha Beta house is the oldest and most elite sorority in the world. Some of the most influential politicians, celebrities and scientists are Alpha Girl alumnae. After performing long hidden rituals, some of the sisters suspect that their good fortune is tainted by demonic evil. They quickly realize firsthand that the consequences of their curiosity are much more gruesome than any of them could have possibly imagined. Welcome to Alpha Girls, the new horror movie written and directed by Tony Trov & director Johnny Zito, a pair of South Philly natives who still live in the neighborhood they grew up […]
ARTSY: Turd Blossom
“Karl Rove” by Mark Brodzik
INTERVIEW WITH A FRINGE DWELLER: Q&A With Nick Stuccio, Producing Director Of The Live Arts Festival And Philly Fringe
Illustration by GRAHAM SMITH BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT Nick Stuccio has been the producing director of the Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe Festival from the very beginning. This year marks the 16th time that performance artists from Philadelphia and across the globe will showcase their work, communicate new and sometimes radical ideas, collaborate, brainstorm, party and, in some cases, get naked — not necessarily in that order. Before Mr. Stuccio became a presenter of the performing arts, he danced for the Pennsylvania Ballet and started the AIDS fundraising program Shut Up and Dance in the mid-1990s. Now, he […]
ARTSY: Zoe Strauss Nominated For Membership In The Illustrious Magnum Photo Cooperative
THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Zoe Strauss, Jerome Sessini and Bieke Depoorter are Magnum’s newest nominees. Strauss is particularly known for The Billboard Project, a series of photos displayed on 54 separate billboards, traversing dozens of neighbours in Philadelphia. Strauss took the images during her travels around the US, including Grand Isle Beach in the Gulf of Mexico, Venice Beach in California, Rosedale, Mississippi, and Fairbanks, Alaska. MORE RELATED: Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Magnum is a community of […]
ARTSY: Fame Kills
ART NEWS: When Arthur Fellig, the New York street photographer known as Weegee, moved to Los Angeles in 1947 to become a technical adviser on The Naked City, the film-noir classic named after his 1945 book of photos, he had big Hollywood dreams. Like many aspiring stars before and after, he didn’t quite find the magical landscape of the movies, and he declared that Hollywood was Newark, New Jersey, with palm trees. Weegee was famous in New York for grisly crime-scene photos. He earned his nickname from his job as a darkroom assistant, or “squeegee boy,” for the New York […]
ARTSY: From Russia With Love
OLEG DOU: I was born in the artistic family and faced the art when I was a little child. Once I was looking at the book with Proto-renaissance artists which became my favourite for many years. I found a lot of awesome portraits with strange weird emotions in that book. Some people was ill, some angry, some crazy and some had empty indifferent eyes. It was not used to show the people that “perversion” way nowadays and that was real discovery for me. Since that time I had a passion for a human face and tried to find that kind […]
THERE BE MONSTERS: The Dark Side Of Sendak
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative […]