October 22, 2024: Laynie Browne: On the Way to The Filmic Woods

Laynie Browne, Sister Abdomen, 2021

Join us for a reading and art opening with Laynie Browne for her new collage show "On the Way to The Filmic Woods." About her process, Browne writes: “When words grow weary I sit on the floor with collage. What if each day I were to construct an image of the figure I am to inhabit, and then set out as this image? Last night the fox ran across my yard three times within an hour, always from the left corner to the right, along the back perimeter. I move through pages inscribing with a similar concentration. In scraps of disassembled paper I searched for a way to exit habit — filling in, from left to right and top to bottom. How else to remember the one not reliant on any circumstance? I found myself lost in a passage I must simultaneously recognize and disown. If only it were as easy as getting dressed and undressed.”

Laynie Browne's recent books include Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter, 2023), Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar), Letters Inscribed in Snow (Tinderbox Editions, 2023), and the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel (Nightboat, 2021). Forthcoming books include Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award. She teaches and coordinates the MOOC Modern and Contemporary Poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.


October 8, 2024 : Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers

This performance and discussion coincides with a Brodsky Gallery installation of work from Upstage (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), a book in which words by Bruce Andrews and visuals by Sally Silvers combine to explore distinctive looks, textures, and language of pandemic-era Asbury Park, NJ.

Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, sound designer, & retired social scientist, Bruce Andrews was born in Chicago, earned a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD from Harvard. He moved to New York City in 1975, where he taught Political Science & Political Economy at Fordham in the Bronx (specializing in U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, covert activity, cultural studies & the JFK assassination) for the next 37 years. Closely associated with the post-1970s experimental literary movement, so-called Language Poetry, he coedited the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Charles Bernstein. He has published 30+ books including Edge, Film Noir, Wobbling R + B, Love Songs, Give Em Enough Rope, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened), I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut up, or Social Romanticism, Tizzy Boost, EX WHY ZEE, Lip Service, Designated Heartbeat, Swoon Noir, You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, A Change Is Gonna Come, & The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman. His essays on literary theory & poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Long involved in collaborative multi-media projects — including the performance group Barking (started with Sally Silvers & Tom Cora), staging large cast theater/performance spectacles in the 1980s — for decades he has been Sally Silvers Dancers’ main music/sound collaborator — composer,sound designer, & improvising music mixes & editing texts live in performance.

Sally Silvers is an award winning choreographer who also has published articles, essays, and poems in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies. She continues to have an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement, offering a no-holds- barred exploration of movement possibilities often tilted toward the eccentric, awkward, and unexpected. Silvers has performed in South Korea, London, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico, Berlin, Sweden, and Denmark, at the Joyce Theater, and many other national and international venues. She was a core member of the faculty at Bennington College Summer Choreography Project for 5 years and a guest teacher at the European Dance Development Center in Holland for a decade. She is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & is known for several community curatorial projects including TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of “live choreography’ – starting a new dance live in front of the audience on the spot).. From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer. She has been collaborating with poet/writer/sound designer Bruce Andrews since the early 1980s. For more information visit SallySilversDance.com.


March 26, 2024 : PIXEL TO PRINT

The “Pixel to Print” art exhibit will feature the works of current and past students of Kayla Romberger, including those in her Pixel to Print class in the School of Design. Join us at 5:30 for a risograph poster making workshop and stay to tour the show!


February 13, 2024 : OUTSIDE IMAGES: STUDENT PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW

Join us for an art opening and reception for “Outside Images,” a student photography show in the KWH Brodsky Gallery. “Outside Images” features a diverse body of photographs, where the focal points are rarely humans. Primarily landscapes, this show contrasts urban with rural, congestion with emptiness, and asks the viewer to find the tensions between space. Curated by Lila Shermeta (C’25), this first Brodsky Gallery exhibition of the spring semester will feature photography by Philadelphia-area college students. Join us for a reception with some of the artists and tour the show.


November 2, 2023 : ART IN THE LAB OPENINGS

Alison Dell, Ph.D, is a cell biologist and artist who creates drawings and designs based on living materials and systems. Over the last decade, Dell has worked to promote an expanded definition of STEM that includes creative spaces and research practices that broaden participation and promote community engagement in science. Through BioDesign, BioArt, and biomedical science, Dell pursues research experiences that bridge studio and lan and engage community-based practices.

In 2015 Dell co-founded Art in the Lab – an ongoing series of free public workshops mixing drawing and lab work, which engage social practice, promote access to science, and synergize with a studio practice grounded in drawing and print. Dell’s work in lab, studio, and outreach often manifests in writing including “Soil Narratives: Toward a Symbiotic Art-Science Activism” Public Art Dialogue (2019), and “Shadow Ecologies” in From the Lab to the Streets: Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance (Bloomsbury, 2022). Dell received her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she now teaches Biodesign in the Weitzman School of Design.


September 12, 2023: A Conversation with Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Jillian Tamaki is a cartoonist, illustrator, and educator raised in Calgary, Alberta. She is the author of the Eisner Award-winning graphic novels SuperMutant Magic Academy and Boundless, and the author-illustrator of two picture books, including most recently Our Little Kitchen. With her cousin Mariko Tamaki, she is the co-creator of the young adult graphic novels SKIM and This One Summer, which won a Governor General’s Award and Caldecott Honor. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Mariko Tamaki is a Canadian writer living in California. She is the co-creator of the graphic novelsSKIM and This One Summer with Jillian Tamaki, and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me with Rosemary Valero-O'Connell. She writes superhero comics for DC Comics, Darkhorse and Marvel. Mariko was the recipient of the Eisner for Best Writer in 2020. Collectively, her works have received Printz Honors, Eisner, Ignatz, Ringo and Prism awards. She is the curator of the Abrams LGBTQ imprint, Surely Books.


March 30, 2023 : UNSOVEREIGN ELEMENTS: GEOLOGICAL POETICS IN CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE CARIBBEAN AND ITS DIASPORA

Featuring artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora, this exhibition, curated by Cecilia González Godino, examines the ambiguous role of geological elements in the (re)production of the archipelago — certainly exhausted by modernity as discursive instruments, yet always retaining a poetic potential that far exceeds their materiality.

Come meet the artists in conversation, followed by a curatorial tour and reception.

This Brodsky Gallery exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Student Initiatives Fund at the Kelly Writers House, the Brodsky Gallery Fund, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH), the GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS).


January 20, 2023 : Mindful Painting Session

Join us for a mindful painting session, hosted as a collaboration between Penn Art and Wellness and the Brodsky Gallery. Participants will paint on a number of large, communal canvases. No rules apply! Make your own unique contribution to the canvas, or build upon what others add. Let the brush guide you in whichever direction your creative mind takes. The goal is to de-stress and use the process of art-making as a form of relaxation. You may join or all or part of the session. There will be a brief guided meditation midway through the event.

Penn Art and Wellness is an all-inclusive, non-judgmental student group at the University of Pennsylvania where students participate in collaborative painting sessions. Our club facilitates art therapy, meditation, and special wellness events to promote mental health at Penn. We host weekly sessions where members are given access to art supplies provided by the club. There are also larger, monthly events in which non-members can participate. Additionally, Art and Wellness is introducing a community service component where Penn students will have the opportunity to mentor students in West Philadelphia in varying mediums of art.


November 11, 2022 : ARTWORK FROM THE "I AM" COLLECTIVE

The "I Am" Collective is a storytelling initiative showcasing the diversity of social identities that exist within the University of Pennsylvania. Through multimedia art, we aim to elevate voices invisible at the university, namely those of staff, as well as students, faculty, alumni, and other Penn-affiliates. For our showcase, we asked artists to consider finishing the sentence, "I am ___", in any creative way that felt right for them. The result is a blend of ink, paint, words, and most importantly, passion and power.


September 16, 2022 : Make Your Mark

Make Your Mark is a chance to experiment with physical media to convey a story. Starting from the idea of sequential narrative and comics (but not tied to it), participants will use many kinds of mark-making devices – pen, pencil, pastel, marker, charcoal – to create work for our Make Your Mark Brodsky Gallery show. Artists of all experience levels welcome, including people entirely new to drawing.


March 16, 2022 : Black Radical Comics by Ben Passmore

Ben Passmore's work contains cold takes on politics, riots, anarchism, police brutality, history, sports, and identity. He's appeared in the New York Times, Believer magazine, and LAAB magazine, as well as frequent contributions to The Nib. His book, Sports Is Hell, won the 2021 Eisner award for Best Single Issue. His latest graphic novel following the lives of seven armed Black revolutionaries, These Black Arms To Hold You Up, drops in 2022.


February 1, 2022: Late for Revision, drawings by Jen Wroblewski

LFR 7, 14 x 11 inches. Graphite on paper. 2021.

LFR 7, 14 x 11 inches. Graphite on paper. 2021.

Late for Revision is a group of small graphite drawings by Jen Wroblewski that investigate the peculiar capacity of line and mark to cohere into narrative that exists outside of syntactic structures. Liberated from the limitations of recognizable language, the line is free to offer a different narrative experience for the viewer/reader. Please join us for a conversation between artist Jen Wroblewski and artist and writer Etty Yaniv. Jen and Etty will talk about the drawings in the show and offer thoughts on the ways creative processes cross boundaries, mediums, and bodies. There will be space for a larger conversation within the group.

Jen Wroblewski (born California, 1973) is an artist, professor, and curator whose work is grounded in an interest in drawing as object and performance. Fluent in the histories of mark-making, she defines drawing as an accretion of marks, or as the relic of the physical act of drawing. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the NYFA in printmaking/book arts/drawing, and Aldrich Radius fellowship, and the A.I.R. Gallery fellowship. Her work and projects have been discussed in the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Brooklyn Rail, and NJ Star Ledger and many books and online publications. Exhibitions include Resistance Movement in collaboration with Kellie O'Dempsey at the Kentler International Drawing Space, Endogenic Flux Machine at Kansas State University, Timeless: the art of drawing at the Morris Museum, New Monuments to the AntiConcept at A.I.R. Gallery, and Draw to Perform 2 in London. From 2006-2016 she taught at the SUNY Purchase School of Art+Design, and she also designed and taught a descriptive drawing curriculum for designers at the University of the Arts and has been a visiting professor at many universities and studio programs. Her current project is Gold/scopophilia*, a contemporary art gallery in Montclair NJ where she shows work by artists who demonstrate idiosyncratic material fluency (and is comprised mainly of women.) Exhibitions at the gallery have been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, ANTEMag and ArtSpiel.

Etty Yaniv works on her art, art writing, and curatorial projects in Brooklyn. She exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including The Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, Newark Museum of Art, NJ, Monmouth Museum of Art, NJ, Torrance Art Museum, CA, AIR gallery, Brooklyn, Sheen Cultural Center, NYC, Long Island University, Brooklyn, Purdue University, IN, UCONN University, Stamford, CT, Helen Day, VT, Musée Héritage Museum, St. Albert, CA, Zero1 Biennial in San Francisco, and Leipziger Baumwollspinnerie, Leipzig Germany. Her work is in institutional and private collections nationally and internationally, such as State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, The Foundation Center, NYC, ElephantArt, Switzerland, and other private collectors in USA, Israel and Canada. She was awarded the Two Trees studio program in 2018. She is running the online magazine Art Spiel.


November 21, 2021: Brodsky Gallery Presents Bird Houses

Over fifty Writers House community members responded to a call to make or modify a bird house for our second gallery show of the fall. Come admire their handiwork — with paint, yarn, collage, and other materials — ahead of the garden installation


October 21, 2021: Printing & Postcards

Want to learn about letterpress printing? Join Mary Tasillo and members of Common Press for a hands-on event. Pull a print from our mobile press, snag a letterpress printed postcard for mailing to a friend, and view a retrospective of Common Press prints made by Penn students and other artists. Not sure what letterpress printing is? Come by and find out how we set blocks of old type to create new art, and find out how to get involved. We'll provide all supplies -- including postcard stamps!

February 24, 2021: Grab Bag Brodsky Gallery Opening: Art By Mail

Last month we sent out mystery kits of art supplies to community members who wanted to make things! Join us tonight to see some of the work they made — drawing, knitting, sculpture and more — and an informal conversation about art by mail.

January 27, 2021: GRAB BAG BRODSKY GALLERY MEET-UP: ART BY MAIL

Do you miss all the cool art supplies at KWH? Miss crafting in a community? We want to make art together, even if apart. So this month we’re sending out mystery kits of art supplies to anyone interested. Your job: make whatever you like with them. Draw with them, knit them together, make an oversized contemporary art sculpture in your town square. For this special meet-up we’ll have an optional joint crafting session through Zoom for participants. Then in February we'll round up your work for an online exhibit through KWH’s very own Brodsky Gallery. All kinds of art and all levels of experience welcome! (Participant sign-ups full.)


November 12, 2020: PORTRAITURE ART WORKSHOP

Join Kelly Writers House and Equilibria magazine on for a workshop on portraiture art, led by Zahra Elhanbaly. Zahra is a graduating senior in the Weitzman School of Design, majoring in architecture, whose passion for portraiture comes from the infinite sources of inspiration that can be combined in one. No experience needed or expected — just a willingness to try! Bring a pencil and paper, or a digital drawing program of your choice.

Of portrait art, Zahra writes: "You can do a hundred different drawings of the same person, and still not fully capture them. You can try to capture all their facial expressions from different angles with various lighting conditions. You can experiment with colors and mediums; an oil painting looks and feels much different from a pencil drawing, even if it’s the exact same subject. You can play with abstraction or you can stick with realism, or something in the middle. And all that is just in with one person. When you try to consider doing this for every person you know or every face you see, you really can understand how there’s an infinite number of drawings you can make. That’s what I think makes portraiture special. It’s a process that never really ends There’s an endless supply of inspiration all around us everyday, from every person that we see, to our own reflections."


January 23, 2020: PHILADELPHIA CARTOONISTS

Co-organized with the comics project Sequential Philly, Philadelphia Cartoonists features work by six local cartoonists, including Jaz Malone, Steve Teare, Corey Bechelli, Anna McGlynn, Derick Jones, and Anuj Shrestha. For the show's opening event, Sequential Philly will lead a panel discussion about cartooning in Philadelphia, and you'll have the opportunity to purchase prints and minicomics from the artists.


November 12, 2019: THE ART OF THE SMALL

Life is often small. Days are made of small moments: brief encounters, passing memories, minor hiccups and pains. We often think of the small as meaningful only in accumulation, but what value can smallness hold? What meaning does the tiny hold by and of itself? This fall, the Brodsky Gallery at the Kelly Writers House invited student artists to consider the minuscule - and to contribute small-scale visual art to a group show. Please join us in a celebration of their collective work, which includes tiny paintings, sculpture, prints, and more. This opening event for the show will feature short (very short!) talks by some of the artists, followed by a reception.


September 10, 2019: THE WORD MADE MANIFEST

Curated by Mary Tasillo of the Common Press, this exhibition brings together work from artists working with handmade paper as an explicit art form. The pieces in this exhibition feature text, wherein the text is physically part of the piece of paper. Techniques range from watermarking to shaped pages to an array of approaches to stenciling pigmented paper pulp into the sheet of paper while it's still wet and freshly formed. Experience the word and the page becoming one.

This opening event for The Word Made Manifest show will feature a hands-on paper-making demonstration, led by The Soapbox, a nonprofit community print shop. All are welcome to participate!


April 1, 2019: POEMS (IN COLOR) BY BERNADETTE MAYER

Join us for a discussion of our newest Brodsky Gallery show, with poet Bernadette Mayer and show curator, Emily Rush (C'19).

Bernadette Mayer is a synesthete who sees letters in color. For this Brodsky Gallery show, Emily Rush (C'19) produced a Pantone alphabet key, matching Mayer's synesthetic vision as closely as possible, and then re-typed a series of Mayer's poems. The show features art by Alyson del Pino (C '21), Autumn Wynde (C '19), Kayla Ephros, Laynie Browne, and more.


February 7, 2019: PRINT SHOW: ALYSON DEL PINO, HARRY GALIANO, BRONWYN KATZ, AND HEIDI LEE

A showcase of student work featuring prints by Alyson del Pino, Harry Galiano, Bronwyn Katz, and Heidi Lee. Join us at a reception to meet the artists and chat about print work and printing practice at Penn.

Bronwyn Katz is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences studying art history and fine arts. She is from Atlanta, GA, and has been printmaking since high school.

Heidi Lee is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Fine Arts with a minor in Consumer Psychology. She works with drawing, painting, screen printing, and with film photography. Her work has been influenced by and is often drawn from photographic images drawn from her own personal archive. She is from Los Angeles, California and her work often ties back to her childhood in South Central LA.

Alyson del Pino is a sophomore English major concentrating in Book History. Her love for print culture began in her hometown of Miami, Florida, where print works from hodge-podge zines to careful, artisan ephemera coexist in a loving community. Between her roles as studio assistant for the Common Press and co-curator of the KWH Zine Library, she finds herself engaging with print culture every day. In her work, Alyson looks to printmaking's unique relationship to repetition to explore identity in an immigrant city under the constant gaze of tropical sun.


November 6, 2018: LIANA FINCK

Liana Finck's cartoons appear regularly in the New Yorker, and on her Instagram feed. Her latest graphic novel, Passing for Human, came out in September.


September 27, 2018: LAS VOCES DE MARIA

Las voces de Maria, is a multimedia project, facilitated by writer Syra Ortiz-Blanes and photographer Cameron Hart, that profiles Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria who came to Philadelphia after the storm. Part text, part video, and part photo, Las voces de Maria, which first ran on The Philadelphia Citizen, hands over to Puerto Ricans the opportunity to share their stories through different tools and mediums. Evacuees sat for hours with Ortiz-Blanes and Hart, unraveling their lives inside the gray spaces of local bureaucracies - nonprofit and governmental alike - which left them homeless, distressed, and hungry. They met in hotels, cramped basements, coffee shops, and the apartments and homes of relatives, friends, and strangers. They shared their stories, often for the first time, often when no one else had asked them or even understood them.

At least 2,975 passed away in Puerto Rico because of the hurricane, destroyed infrastructure, and government negligence. But the evacuees who came to Philadelphia also lost life as they knew it. Maria was deeply felt on both a personal and collective level. Las voces aims to reflect both the intimate and national losses. The cyclone's survivors who are featured in the project come from all over the island and from all walks of life. Each piece provides people with the space to share their perspectives and opinions.Together, all the stories form a chorus on life before, during, and after the hurricane. This reconstruction of narratives, like the reconstruction of our island, is vital to our healing process.

Las Voces de Maria is dedicated to those who left, those who stayed, and those who will come back. And to Puerto Rico, which doesn't need to get back on its feet, because it never fell down.


March 14, 2018: SCIENCE / FICTION: "We are Here," works by Kaitlin Moore

Brodsky Gallery show "We Are Here" will feature works of wide field astrophotography from University of Pennsylvania senior Kaitlin Moore. The show will open with SCIENCE / FICTION, a discussion – moderated by the artist – between writers, scientists, and scholars on how to work among similar concepts through different means.

Earth lies about a third of the way along one of the vast spiral arms of dust and light and that compose the Milky Way Galaxy. Estimated to be some 100,000 light-years wide and 1,000 light-years thick, the Milky Way contains more than a thousand million stars. To photograph these celestial bodies, to peer back through time and see them as they were millions of years ago, is to glimpse some ancient core of understanding. Astrophotography is an attempt at grasping the workings of the universe, to peer further and to find something more beyond our world's fretful compass. The practice allows us to point to a starscape and proclaim simply: we are here.

This show and program are co-curated by Kaitlin Moore and Connie Yu.

Kaitlin Moore is a time traveller, tourist, and newly discovered cryptid. Combining an inexplicable love of physics with a stubborn attachment to writing, Kaitlin crafts (with varying degrees of success) stories that experiment with time, space, and superpositive cats that are both alive and dead. She is the author of four novels, and her works of short fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Mad Scientist Journal, Stylus, Supplement, Tinge, and others. She just wants to take a nap.

January 17, 2018: A/PUBLIC: a group show of femme / queer Asian artists

A/PUBLIC : a group show of femme / queer Asian artists, is a convening of artists of a particular community, not only calling upon shared identity, but also assembling toward differential cultural learning and political processing; same cities, component archives. Here, at the Kelly Writers House, we mark a space and time to call for our audience, share our practice, test our designations, and navigate what onward looks like to us. Up for discussion, by and for us: How to bear illegible and erasable archives into a future? How to tease the topos of diaspora into local entity? How to make together for each other?

A/PUBLIC, on show through March 5, will feature painting, prints, and videowork from 15 Philadelphia/New York artists. Also available for critical browsing: a temporary library of the artists' collected books & ephemera, and a print object of texts from local artists, writers, and kin. This public program – featuring a lecture by Joan Oh, a reading by Oki Sogumi, and a video screening by Eva Wǒ, and a performance by Maya Yu Zhang – will open with a reception at 7PM.

This group show and program are co-curated by Adrienne Hall, Monika Uchiyama, and Connie Yu. Artists on show include Soumya Dhulekar, Quinha Faria, Charlotte Greene, Adrienne Hall, Cole Lu, LuLu Meng, Marria Nakhoda, Joan Oh, Anydrienne Palchick, Provisional Island, Cecilia Salama, Monika Uchiyama, Alina Wang, Eva Wǒ, and Maya Yu Zhang.


November 15, 2017: Interfaces: Work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Collage poems as an inter-art practice characterize recent work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, featured at the Brodsky Gallery through December 21, 2017. These collage poems, in serial groups like Churning the Ocean of Milk, Life in Handkerchiefs, and Numbers, are charged by DuPlessis's mix of aphorism, aesthetic perception, and sociopolitical comment. A bright visuality, intense poetic commentary, and a confrontative intertextuality combine in these personable and evocative works on paper, which negotiate the afterlife of debris by vibrant uses of its traces. INTERFACES will open on November 15 with an illustrated talk by DuPlessis on selected collage poems, and a reading from her newly-released Days and Works.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, critic, collagist is the author of Drafts (written 1986 through 2012). Post-Drafts books include Interstices (2014), Graphic Novella (2015), Days and Works (2017), as well as Numbers (a collage poem from Materialist Press) and Around the Day in 80 Worlds (BlazeVOX), both slated for 2018. Her critical books include The Pink Guitar, Blue Studios, and Purple Passages - a trilogy on gender, poetry and poetics. She has edited the Selected Letters of George Oppen, and The Oppens Remembered, coedited The Objectivist Nexus, and has written on Oppen, Zukofsky and Niedecker.


September 6, 2017: Things Fixed and Stuck

Our September show is organized around intentional objects — circumstantial, accumulated, habitual, sentimental — and what to make of, and from, them. This group show will consider spatial and discursive ways of positioning oneself that complicate what the production of material life looks like. Owen Ahearn-Browning, Aimee Gilmore, and Emily Slater, three interdisciplinary artists working in the hold and care of objects, will show work and the stories, orientations, and languages situated therein.

Open thru November, Things Fixed and Stuck will commence with a program on Wednesday, September 6, featuring an artist talk, a conversation, and a musical performance. There will be a print object produced for the occasion, and other objects for sale and for looking. Come support the artists, spend time with the work, and enjoy our reception!

With a serious interest in story-telling and time-based perspective, Owen Ahearn-Browning creates through singing, performance art, writing, comic book-making, and drawing. His narrative thread spans time and space, pulling content from television and his own childhood with equally powerful immediacy and sense of ownership. With these cryptic, humorous drawings on note cards, a fluid feeling of connective understanding binds the viewer immediately to the work. Deceptively simple statements of objective truths are both ironic and deeply sincere. Ahearn-Browning's Book about Furniture was recently published for the Philadelphia Art Book Fair. He has been creating artwork at Center for Creative Works since 2014, and he lives in Bala Cynwyd.


Aimee Gilmore is a multi-media artist currently based out of Philadelphia. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts with a minor in textile design from Moore College of Art & Design. Aimee works in sculpture, installation and printmaking and explores the topic of motherhood focusing on the continuously shifting and complex binaries, like connection and separation that shape the role.


Emily (or E.) Slater is an interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. Her work looks at relationships of reciprocal transformation and reconfiguration between bodies, spaces, and language systems. In particular, she is interested in the alternative possibilities that arise from the twisting and reshaping of our worlds. Emily received her BA with a major in Fine Art and a minor in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Most recently, she has shown work at Tiger Strikes Astroid, the Woodmere Art Museum, and Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia as well as The Luminary in St. Louis. Until recently, she used Belshaw as her last name for studio work. IG: @emily.slater_ WEB: emilyslater.net.


March 28, 2017: COMMUNITY FUTURISMS: MAPPING MEMORIES 001

An installation of sound, maps, surveys, and ephemera from the quantum time capsule of Community Futures Lab, a pop-up oral history/oral futures recording lab, community resource library, workshop space, and gallery located in North Philadelphia exploring eminent futures and temporal domains of housing and displacement. Community Futurisms considers time, memory, and temporality as experienced by people and communities identifying as Black or African-American in the United States and across the diaspora and explores alternative and cultural, communal, and personal temporal-spatial frameworks.


January 19, 2017: NIGHT OF ZINE MAKING

Kick off a semester of zine workshops by coming together to produce zine pages in a fun and dynamic collaborative event. Before being xeroxed and bound, the zine pages will be installed on the KWH Brodsky gallery walls for the first exhibition of the new year!


November 9, 2016: BODY PARTY: WORKS BY LIZ BARR

Liz Barr is an interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia and a recent graduate of the Penn Undergraduate Fine Arts Program. She generally works around the themes of beauty, ritual, religion, pop culture, and gender-based power dynamics.


September 29, 2016: DAMAGE WITHOUT INJURY: WORKS BY LINDSAY BUCHMAN

Damage Without Injury is an exhibition featuring LINDSAY BUCHMAN's interdisciplinary work spanning photography, artist books and writing, centering the themes of private and public memory in conversation with the archive.


April 18, 2016: activating the archive: the symbiosis project

Help us celebrate the latest issue of SYMBIOSIS, the annual Penn publication featuring artist/writer collaborations, at this month's BRODSKY GALLERY OPENING. Enjoy a statement by editor-in-chief, Gina DeCagna, and become a part of our interactive and collaborative art exhibit, while getting the chance to mingle with Symbiosis staff and collaborators.

For more information and the chance to read this year's edition online, please visit Symbiosis' website.


January 2016: Organize Your Own: Organized by Daniel Tucker

Organize Your Own is an exhibition and event series featuring new work by contemporary artists and poets that responds to archival materials related to the history of white people organizing their own working-class white neighborhoods in Philadelphia (the October 4th Organization) and Chicago (the Young Patriots Organization) in keeping with the mandate from the Black Power movement to "organize your own" community against racism. The exhibit features work by the following artists: Mary Patten (Chicago), Dave Pabellon (Chicago), Dan S Wang (Madison), Rosten Woo (Los Angeles), Robby Herbst (Los Angeles), Mat Neff (Philadelphia), Amber Art and Design (Philadelphia), Works Progress with Jayanthi Kyle (Minneapolis), Irina Contreras (Oakland), and Anne Braden Institute (Louisville). Major support for Organize Your Own has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

For more information please visit OYO's website.


November 2015: The Limner: Works by Sinead Cahill

On Wednesday, November 16th, the Writers House debuted a new Brodsky Gallery opening featuring Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts graduate Sinead Cahill. Cahill's show was called "The Limner," and the title was featured on a broadside designed by students working at the Robison Press. Before attendees walked through the gallery, Cahill shared a presentation about her methods and the evolution of her art. Cahill works primarily with fabrics and the lithograph, designing pieces as varied as fabric sculptures, Girl Scout-style badges, and tiny pillows. Her Girl Scout-style badges are all inspired by specific people or places in her life and she said the project of making them was a way of finding her own place in the world and specifically Philadelphia. She often begins with drawings which are transferred to the lithograph -- drawings that are, as she put it "not about what they are but instead about what they become."


September 2015: Poetry and the Art of the Book

This exhibition is a showcase of a selection of exciting contemporary small press and hand made and printed work from four small, poetry-focused presses -- Belladonna*, Fact-Simile Editions, Nightboat Books and the Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The show explores the ways in which scale, color, texture, construction, choice of materials and more come together with the text when poetry is represented as a two-dimensional art object. Members of each press are represented in the show -- Rachel Levitsky of Belladonna*, Travis and JenMarie MacDonald of Fact-Simile Editions, Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books and Brenda Iijima of Portable Press -- and they spoke at the exhibition's opening event, both about the works in the show generally and about their specific printing and design processes. Afterwards, the conversation was continued in the gallery with a reception, and time was given to read and view all of the small press works on display.

This show is a collaboration between the Writers House and the PHILALALIA annual small press, hand made poetry and art fair, with special thanks to Kevin Varrone who helps organize PHILALALIA and to Brian Teare for his help in organizing the gallery show.


April 2015: Symbiosis: Spring 2015 Issue Release

Symbiosis, an undergraduate student magazine of collaborative visual art and writing, celebrated their 2015 issue's release with a reading in the Arts Cafe and an art showing at the Kelly Writers House's Brodsky Gallery. From photography, to comic art, to cyantope prints, the collaborators in this year's issue of Symbiosis create a diverse collection of art, showcasing the creative talents of Penn's undergradautes. Visit Symbiosis online here.


January 2015: Samantha Mitchell: In Grain - Prints

Samantha Mitchell (b. 1986, New York City) is an artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, and lived and worked in Illinois, Utah, California, and Oregon before enrolling in the MFA program of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating in 2012. Mitchell is primarily a drawer and printmaker who seeks to investigate the relationship between order and chaos through different processes of mark-making. Her work has been exhibited at the International Print Center (New York), the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia), the Woodmere Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Projekt Gallery (Berlin), and at the David Hotel (Tel Aviv). She is an editor at Title Magazine, a Philadelphia-based online arts magazine, and a contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. Mitchell works as an adjunct professor at Delaware County Community College and an arts educator at the Center for Creative Works. In February, she will begin an artist's residency at Caldera Center for the Arts in Sisters, Oregon.


November 2014: Uncontested Spaces: Works by Keren Katz

Keren Katz is an Israeli illustrator and cartoonist. She received her MFA in Illustration from The School of Visual Arts (New York) and her B.Des from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jersusalem). She has been sketching guerrilla poetry events and adventures events since 2006 and has created titles like: The Night Poetry Class in Room 1001, Crossing The Rubikon, Chronicles of the Falling Women, Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Coat Check Dream, Fire Theatre, Rashomon Ramat-Gan, Before The Dark Gate, Only Three of Them Were Real and Uncontested Spaces. For more of her work visit: here or here.


October 2014: From the beyond: works by Emi Gennis

Emi Gennis is a cartoonist and illustrator from the Midwest. Her often macabre historical and true crime comics have appeared in several online and print publications, including Irene, The Cartoon Picayune, Bitch Magazine, and The Hairpin. She has also produced comics journalism for The Nib and Symbolia. Gennis is the editor of Unknown Origins & Untimely Ends, an anthology of nonfiction mystery comics (Hic & Hoc Publications, 2013). Her work appeared in the 2013 documentary Oregon Experience: Portland Noir, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Sequential Art from the Savannah College of Art & Design. Gennis currently resides in southeastern Kansas where she teaches art at Pittsburg State University. Her work can be found at emigennis.com.


April 2014: Symbiosis: The Crossraods of Art and Writing

Founded in September 2012, Symbiosis is a project based in the Kelly Writers House dedicated to uniting visual and literary artists. The project pairs artists with writers and encourages them to collaborate. Central to the mission of the Symbiosis project: the free exchange of creative ideas across disciplines. Scientifically, "symbiosis" is the interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association. For people, "symbiosis" refers to a mutually beneficial relationship.


January 2014: prize every time: works by Ryan Collerd

Ryan Collerd grew up in Northwest Jersey next door to an old volcano (it's true look it up) and not far from the Appalachian Trail. He's currently a freelance photographer in Philadelphia whose clients include The New York Times, The Wall St. Journal, Monocle, Philadelphia Magazine, and more. When he's not making pictures for them you can find him floating on a river in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey in his one-person canoe. No it's not a kayak.


November 2013: Rex Works: works by Francie Shaw

Francie Shaw is an artist who lives in Philadelphia with her husband, poet and Penn professor, Bob Perelman. She shows at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City.


September 2013: Recent Works by Erin Murray

Erin Murray was born in Philadelphia in 1979 and currently lives and works in that city. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. Her work draws on the built environment to empathically explore themes of humanity. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York, the Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, and The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, DE. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia and Salon Zurcher in New York. In 2012 she was awarded the West Collects acquisition prize and joined the artist's collective Vox Populi. You can find her work published in New American Paintings, Tabletop Zine, and Dirty Laundry Magazine.


April 2013: Comic Sans MS

January 2013: Mary Smull

Mary Smull is an artist, writer, and curator living in Philadelphia. Recently, her work has been exhibited regionally at the Philadelphia International Airport, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA, and nationally at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Public Fiction Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Internationally, she has shown at the Korea National University of the Arts in Seoul, South Korea and Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her work has been featured in Fiberarts Magazine, American Craft Magazine, and will be featured in the upcoming publication The Unfinishables, funded by the Arts Council of England. Smull teaches in the Fiber Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI.


September 2012: Imaginary gardens, real toads: works by Kaitlin Pomerantz

Kaitlin Pomerantz (b. 1986, New York City) is an artist based out of Philadelphia. Her work explores relationships between nature and culture, material and memory, objecthood and representation, and draws from the history of the still life genre. Pomerantz received a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Chicago and studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been shown in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Palouse, Washington; most recently at the Invisible Dog, Brooklyn, and the University City Arts League, Philadelphia. Pomerantz will serve as resident artist this fall at Annmarie Garden in the Southern Chesapeake, where she will conduct a site specific installation and oyster restoration project.


March 2012: Handmade/Homemade: works by JenMarie Davis, Deborah Poe, and Bushra Rehman

This exhibition at Brodsky Gallery, HANDMADE/HOMEMADE, is a collaboration with Philadelphia poet and bookmaker JenMarie Davis and represents a stunning collection of broadsides, limited edition works, chapbooks, and posters, all of which are all handmade, homemade and letterpress printed by multiple artists. The opening event will feature readings and discussion with some of the artists, followed by a reception that will include the opportunity to explore the handmade book arts with a small book-making demonstration table.

Deborah Poe is author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010), Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008), and "the last will be stone, too" as well as a novella in verse, "Hélène" (Furniture Press 2012). Her writing regularly appears in journals, most recently in Denver Quarterly, Mantis, Bone Bouquet, Peep/Show, Yew Journal, and Open Letters Monthly. With her colleague Ama Wattley, she is co-editing a fiction anthology, Between Worlds: An Anthology of Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang 2012). She is also co-editing an anthology of Hudson Valley innovative poetry with Anne Gorrick and Sam Truitt (Station Hill Press 2013). Deborah is assistant professor of English at Pace University, Westchester. For more information, please visit www.deborahpoe.com.

Bushra Rehman's mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things. Bushra was a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a bookbag full of poems. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, Mizna, and in numerous anthologies. Bushra is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Her novella "Bhangra Blowout" is forthcoming through Upset Press. www.bushrarehman.com.

February 2012: Recent works on paper by Amze Emmons

Amze Emmons (b. 1974, Amsterdam, NY) is a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. Emmons received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and a MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He has held solo exhibitions at Space 1026, Philadelphia; OHT Gallery, Boston; and Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including EFA Project Space and the International Print Center, New York; the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington; the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; and The Print Center, Philadelphia. Emmons has received numerous awards including a Fellowship in the Arts from the Independence Foundation; an Individual Creative Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council; and a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. His work has received critical attention in New American Paintings, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, among other publications. He has taught at the University of Vermont and the University of Iowa and is currently an associate professor of art at Muhlenberg College. Emmons is also a co-founder and contributor of the popular art blog, PRINTERESTING.


November 2011: Holocaust Prints: works by Sigmund Laufer

Sigmund Laufer (1920-2007) grew up in Berlin until age sixteen, when he emigrated to a northern Palestinian Kibbutz as part of the Youth Aliyah of European Jews threatened by the rise of Nazism in Germany. He then moved to Jerusalem where he met his future wife, Miriam Laufer, also an artist and a refugee from Berlin. After the war in June 1947, they emigrated together to New York City, where they had two children, Abigail Laufer and Susan Bee (Laufer). Sigmund began working for the Board of Jewish Education as a book designer, calligrapher, and art director of the children's publication, World Over. He was employed by the BJE for 44 years from 1948 to 1992. Upon moving to New York, Laufer simultaneously began his career as a printmaker and artist, and created black and white and color etchings and lithographs. His first exhibition was just two years after arriving in New York, as part of a group show at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1949. He had solo shows in New York and was included in many group shows. His work was widely reviewed. Laufer's prints are part of many collections, private and public, in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the National Library in Paris, and the National Museum in Jerusalem. This series of nine Holocaust etchings, which were created in the 1960s, have not been exhibited together since then.


September 2011: Philadelphia Future Perfects: a Curatorial Show

The first Brodsky Gallery exhibit of the 2011/2012 season will feature prints of Philadelphia city-planning maps depicting large-scale projects that never came to pass—at least not quite how the maps had promised them. Ranging from hand-drawn sketches to scaled blue-prints, this selection gathers proposals from architects and planning authorities from throughout Philadelphia's urban history, revealing the cities that could have been. Harris Steinberg, executive director of PennPraxis and life-long Philadelphian, will begin the evening with a discussion of maps, city planning, and Philadelphia histories past and present. The talk will be followed by a reception during which attendees will be invited to read and peruse the maps. This opening also serves as the kick-off for a year-long collaborative chapbook project which will aim to collect writings from and about these "alternative Philadelphias."


March 2011: Derek Beaulieu

co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders

Author of five books of poetry (most recently the visual poem suite Silence) and three volumes of conceptual fiction (most recently the short fiction collection How to Write), Derek Beaulieu's work is consistently praised as some of the most radical and challenging contemporary Canadian writing. His work has appeared in over 150 journals internationally, has been translated into Turkish, Polish, French and Icelandic and has been featured in over 200 small press publications. His conceptual novels Flatland and Local Colour, both explorations of texts without texts, were published in the UK and Finland respectively and are limit cases of prose.


January 2011: State of the Union: works by Linh Dinh

Born in Vietnam, Linh Dinh is a poet, fiction writer, and photographer. His photo blog, State of the Union, tracks our "deteriorating socialscape" with 2,100 photos and counting. Dinh is the author of two collections of stories from Seven Stories Press, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), five books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006), Jam Alerts (Chax 2007) and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax 2009), and a novel, Love Like Hate (Seven Stories 2010). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006).


November 2010: A Retrospective: works by Susan Bee

co-sponsored by: Feminism/s and the Wexler Family Fund

Susan Bee is an artist, editor and designer who works and lives in New York City. Her work examines and questions intersections of identity, gender roles and secular Jewish culture. As an artist, she believes strongly in the role of the imagination and the importance of poetry, humor, irony, memory, and fantasy in art. She also believes in idiosyncratic, individualistic, and eccentric art making. She has published six artist's books with Granary Books, including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe, A Girl's Life, with Johanna Drucker, Log Rhythms and Little Orphan Anagram with Charles Bernstein and The Burning Babe and Other Poems with Jerome Rothenberg. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists, critics, and poets, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996 and is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.


September 2010: Hiroyuki Nakamura

Hiroyuki Nakamura was born in 1977 and grew up in a suburb of the small industrial city Hamamatsu in Japan. Like many Japanese children, Nakamura was fascinated with trains and at the early age of five he started to photograph this fascination in earnest. When he was eleven years old, Nakamura and his family moved to Chicago where he spent three years at a private Japanese middle school with the intent of returning to Japan for high school. During that time, Nakamura planned out a series of road trips with his family in order to photograph trains and the vast American landscape. By the end of middle school, Nakamura and his family had driven through most of the 50 states, an experience which Nakamura says certainly influenced his decision to stay in America when his parents returned to Japan.

After graduating from a private military academy turned prep school, Nakamura moved to Philadelphia in 1996 and studied photography at Drexel University. While at Drexel, he started a series of what he called "one-of-a-kind" photographs in which he treated his printed paper negative as a canvas; drawing, scratching and adding other elements to create surrealistic mixed-media prints which he then enlarged. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he received his MFA in photography in 2002 from the School of Visual Arts. While at SVA, Nakamura started moving more towards mixed media photography, until finally replacing the film negative altogether with canvas in 2004. Since then, Nakamura has been painting exclusively. Currently he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.


March 2010: Group Show

Synaptic Mimes: the Private Spectacular

Synaptic Mimes: the Private Spectacular was a seven-artist exhibition, featuring work by Matthew Albanese, Nadja Bournonville, Miguel Cárdenas, Selena Kimball, Mary Mattingly, Ryan Mrozowski, and Patricia Smith.


January 2010: Jessica Nissen

Uncommonly Selected: Rorschach Drawings

Jessica Nissen splits her time between NYC, where she works as a scenic artist for the entertainment industry and Vermont, where she keeps a studio and occasionally teaches in the Art Dept. of Middlebury College. Nissen received an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art in 1998, a BA from Middlebury College in 1990 and earned undergraduate credits from the Rhode Island School of Design and Tyler. She has been a fellow at The Corporation of Yaddo and the Chautauqua Institution. Since 1991 she has exhibited extensively and has participated both as an artist and as an organizer/curator in several large-scale interdisciplinary art events.


November 2009: Christian BÖk

Umlaut Machine: Selected Visual Works

co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994, Coach House Press), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Eunoia (2001, Coach House Books), a bestselling work of experimental literature and winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bok has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bok is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.


September 2009: Group Show

Poem Posters: Small Press Broadsides

In conjunction with the broadside exhibition Poem Posters, comprising letterpress work from small printshops around the country, San Fransico to Brooklyn. Poem Posters presses included Ugly Duckling Press of Brooklyn, NY, The Common Press of Philadelphia, PA, Littoral Press of Oakland, CA, Dead Skin Press of Portland, ME, Hermetic Press of Minneapolis, MN, New Lights Press of Oakland, CA, Phylum Press of New Haven, CT, Propolis Press of Northamton, MA, Axel & Otto of San Francisco, CA, Intima Press of New York, NY, Auto Types Press of New York, NY, C&C Press of Pajaro, CA, Punch Press of Buffalo, NY, Poltroon Press of Berkeley, CA, and Small Fires Press of Memphis, TN. KWH Art presented a press fair to showcase a number of press projects from all over the country, San Francisco to Brooklyn. The exhibition's title is borrowed from Charles Henri Ford's short experimental film featuring (and named after) his 1965 Poem Posters, exhibition at New York's Cordier & Ekstrom gallery.


April 2009: Curatorial Show

Spin Glasses and Other Frustrated Systems

Spin Glasses and Other Frustrated Systems comprised a series of wallpaper patterns designed from a constrained set of source materials: 13 books cherry-picked from one afternoon's visit to Strand Bookstore, NYC. Each wall's pattern distorted graphics and schemata from a single book, such as mechanical drawing manuals, cathedral architectural plans, encyclopedias, and texts on linguistics and condensed matter physics. In a doubled-over process of abstraction, diagrammatic information was re-translated and permutated as formal motifs into background noise.

The opening for the exhibit included a group reading from the selected texts, excerpted and doctored by Michelle Taransky, Cecilia Corrigan, Timothy Leonido, Diana Hamilton, Eddie Hopely, Vladimir Zykov, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Trisha Low,Steve McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, Ian Davisson, Johann Diedrick, and James La Marre.


September 2009: Group Show

That's What She Said: Female Voices in Embroidery

The exhibition included selections from Andrea Dezsö's sampler series "Lessons from My Mother" and Elaine Reichek's "As She Likes It."

Andrea Dezsö is an artist and a writer. She has shown at the Jack Tilton Gallery, The New York Armory Show, Art Basel Miami, Museum of Arts & Design and BravinLee Programs. Her work was reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Print, MarieClaire and Metropolis. Her writing appeared in McSweeney's, Print and Esopus. A book about Dezsö's art, creative process and obsessions titled Andrea Dezsö: Fetish Book was published in 2006. Dezsö is the recipient of a 2008 Kamiyama Fellowship, 2007 NYFA Fellowship, a 2007 Six Points Fellowship and the Ucross Foundation's 2005 Lois Nellie Gill Award for Female Visual Artist of Exceptional Merit. She is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. You can see some of her work at her website.

Elaine Reichek is an artist known for her use of the age-old medium of embroidery to examine contemporary issues. In many works based upon the sampler—a traditional embroiderer's exercise incorporating narrative images, patterns, and motifs framed by verbal homilies and lessons—Reichek remakes existing images from high and low art, replacing the aphorisms of the sampler with quotations from a wide variety of sources throughout history and literature. Born in New York, she received a B.F.A. from Yale University and a B.A. from Brooklyn College. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, OH, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel. She lives in New York City.