The Woodmere Art Museum is now exhibiting A Force Of Nature which documents a Philadelphia born-and-raised movement in contemporary visual art. The extensive retrospective focuses on Elaine Kurtz (1928-2003), who first debuted at Philadelphia Art Alliance, Gross McCleaf Gallery and Locks Gallery in the 1970s. The museum smartly deconstructs Kurtz into her elements. Visitors first pass through an anteroom where her geometric and color studies demonstrate a highly analytical mindset. Some of these works are reminiscent of Gestalt images in that they trick the viewer. For instance, diametrically opposed spectrums of color create blind spots along their center, where entire […]
ARTSY: Mayhem Is My Business; Business Is Good
BY MIKE WALSH If you enjoy Weegee’s famous crime and disaster scene photos from the 1930s and 1940s (as who doesn’t?), get yourself to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan where Murder is My Business, an exhibition of Weegee’s most famous photos recently opened. Weegee’s photos are fun, trashy, insensitive, and full of suffering and blood. What’s not to like? The great thing about this exhibition is that it includes wall plaques of information about the specific car crashes, tenement fires, suicide, and gangland murders depicted in the photos. It does not leave you speculating about why the […]
ARTSY: The Great Beyond
You might not know it from the recent media focus, but there are photographers living and working in South Philadelphia not named Zoe Strauss. One of them is Ted Adams, who just unveiled an overview of his work stretching back to the 80s at the Robin Rice Gallery in the West Village. The small exhibit is an overview of Adam’s photography, some pieces dating back to the 90s. These’s nothing digital in this exhibit. Adams shoots with a vintage Leica and Kodak Tri-X film. He also processes his own film and prints in the darkroom at his house. In fact, […]
ARTSY: The Afterlife Of Vivian Maier
BY MIKE WALSH In 1951, at age 25, a young woman named Vivian Maier moved from France to New York City, where she worked for some time in a sweat shop. Maier also had a camera, and she spent much of her free time walking around NYC working class neighborhoods taking photos of people, places, and buildings. She used a Rolleiflex camera, the type you look down into a two-inch lens to aim and focus. It used 120 mm film, a large format that, in the hands of someone like Maier, can capture incredible richness, detail, and depth of field. […]
EARLY WORD: Wowie Zoe
South Philly photographer Zoe Strauss has come a long way since she received a camera as a gift in 2000–so far, in fact, that an exhibition of 150 of Strauss’s photos (titled Zoe Strauss Ten Years) opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this Saturday night. Despite the amazing achievement of a museum show for Strauss, she also convinced the museum and Clear Channel to finance the placement of 54 of her photos around Philly on billboards, substituting the unreal optics of advertising with the real thing. PMA managed to bring her inside, but in the process, Zoe managed to […]
ARTSY: Zooey Deschanel As Lizzie Borden
“Does This Make My Eyes Look Bluer?” by Kevin P. Ruin, the first in his “Slaughterhouse Starlets” series, via Etsy. And you thought Etsy had no edge!
ARTSY: A Picture Worth Thousands Of Words
[“Mattress Flip” by ZOE STRAUSS] PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: On the day that Boo was shot, a group of older male family members went to Dorney Park in Allentown. Boo [pictured above, right] stayed behind. Richards remembers that morning and her son’s last words to her. “My mom was cooking for Father’s Day. He came in and said, ‘Mom, I’m getting ready to be a dad.’” “I said, ‘You better leave something behind!’” Boo loved kids. He babysat family members often. His cousin Robyn, 25, was pregnant at the time. “He wanted to be the godfather,” says Robyn. “Every time he’d see […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Cartoonist Dan Clowes
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the occasion of yet another swell New Yorker cover by Mr. Clowes, we are re-running our interview with him from last spring. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out […]
ARTSY: Let There Be Light
RELATED: REMAIN IN THE LIGHT: A Q&A With Post-Punk Stained Glass Sorceress Judith Schaechter
LIFE LESSONS: A Pep Talk For OccupyPhilly
AP TICKER: I’m getting lots of letters about why I haven’t shown my face at any of the Occupy Philly protests. I wholeheartedly, endorse and support their endeavors and while I talk a good game about revolution and overthrow of this plutocracy, the sad truth of the matter is……..I’m a very very lazy man. As I have said many times before, my favorite hobbies are as follows, lying on my couch and being very very quiet. I and my couch bound brethren, represent a subset of The Greatest Generation that I have coined “The Lazy Generation” This true silent majority […]
ARTSY: Smile, You’re On Philly Photo Day
Philly Photo Day is coming up on Friday, October 28th! Everyone in Philadelphia is invited to take a picture of anything you like as long as it’s taken on the 28th within the city limits. You’ll have until October 31st to select your favorite picture and upload it onto our website. (form/instructions available after Oct 28) Then on November 10th, from 6-9pm, join PPAC at the Philly Photo Day Opening Reception. Every single picture we receive will be printed and hung for exhibition in our space at 1400 N American St. Reprints of all the images will be available for […]
ARTSY: The Architecture Of Madness
Asylum: Inside The World Of Closed State Mental Hosptials, a photographic exhibition of some of America’s most infamous mental health institutions, will haunt Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery through October 29th. Photographer Christopher Payne’s outsized pictures, some of which have been blown up to be over a meter tall, pull back the curtain on the forbidding and largely hidden world of what used to be called ‘insane asylums.’ Still, appearances can be deceiving. “Once I got inside, they really weren’t that creepy,” Payne told Phawker. Once inside, Payne, who has a masters’ degree in architecture, explores the everyday use of rooms, […]
ARTSY: The Photojournalism Of Stanley Kubrick
Before gaining his reknown as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine. In 1949, a 21-year-old Kurbrick was sent to Chicago for an assignment: “Chicago, City of Contrasts.” MORE RELATED: At the age of 13, his father bought him a stills camera and he soon became fascinated by photography. He soon became an excellent amateur photographer, selling his pictures to magazines whilst still at high school. Later when he was looking for a job, Helen O’Brien, a picture editor at “Look” magazine, whom Kubrick had befriended, asked him […]