Monday, September 02, 2013
Friday, June 07, 2013
Friday, May 03, 2013
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Launch Party for
In Open Letters A Secret Appears:
A People's Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art
with a poetry reading by
CAConrad
Junior Fellow Grace Ambrose invited 50 current and ex-Philadelphians to write about an object of their choice from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Taking shape as an edition of 50 postcards, the writings will comprise an alternate history and guide to the museum's holdings, seen through the eyes of the artists, writers, musicians, and friends who live alongside them. At this launch event, learn about the conceptualization of this project, mail art, and the history of the postcard. Grace's presentation will be followed by a reading by CAConrad of his poetry inspired by paintings on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Contributors to "A People's Guide" include the following and more: Sam Allingham, Lily Applebaum, Rayne Betts, Robyn Campbell, Anthony Campuzano, Kristina Centore, CAConrad, Johann Diedrick, Julia Factorial, Becket Flannery, Lucy Gallun, Thomson Guster, Dylan Hansen-Fliedner, Josh Herren, Alex Klein, James La Marre, Mary Lattimore, Trisha Low, Egina Manachova, Alexis McCrimmon, Mike Mckee, Max McKenna, Steve McLaughlin, Linda Pastan, Rachel Pastan, Molly Seegers, Jon Shapiro, Alex Tyson, Laura Reeve, Nicholas Salvatore, Ingrid Schaffner, Herb Shellenberger, Frank Sherlock, Henry Steinberg, Zoe Strauss, Valeria Tsygankova, Catherine Turcich-Kealey, Alejandro Valdes, Michael Thomas Vassallo, Adelina Vlas, Artie Vierkant, Jenna Weiss, Sara Wilson, Dan Yemin, and Jeffrey Ziga.
If you couldn't make the event but would like more information, please send an email with the subject SECRETS APPEAR to grace.ambrose@gmail.com. (probably true for the digital version as well)
The JUNIOR FELLOW AWARD is open to any recently graduated Penn student, especially students who have been deeply engaged with Penn's writing community. If you are graduating from Penn this year, or if you have graduated from Penn in the last two years, please consider applying for this small but very sweet fellowship. For more information, please visit:
http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/juniorfellow/#apply
Monday, February 18, 2013
Friday, October 19, 2012
Friday, September 07, 2012
Ever been to an open-casket funeral in which the mortician had to do a lot of reconstruction on the deceased and gets it almost right, maybe the cheek bones just a little too high or the eyes a smidgen too close together? That’s pretty much my experience of the new Barnes collection in Philadelphia. And yet, because I loved the deceased, I know I’ll be back.
I finally got around to visiting the new location in central Philadelphia the other day, an ambivalent experience for anyone who fondly remembered the masterpiece of high modernism that the collection had been in its 1924 mansion in Merion just outside the city limits. Put together for what was not much more than $250,000 by pharmaceutical magnate Albert C. Barnes, a self-made millionaire & autodidact who hobnobbed with the likes of John Dewey, Albert Einstein & the Steins of Paris, Leo & Gertrude (he much preferred Leo), Dr. Barnes’ collection is one of the great gatherings of visual art as it passes from impressionism into modernism, heavy on the European focus, and with his likes & dislikes. He never much cottoned to cubism, dada, surrealism. Photography is absent; women are the subject of nudes, not artists. But he clearly saw the connection with African art and the decorative folk arts that were not often acknowledged by the artists themselves. An irascible character who held a dim view of the moneyed elite who both ran Philadelphia and, in Merion, were his literal neighbors, Barnes’ will gave them all the finger as he left his worldly goods, including the world’s greatest collection of Renoir paintings, plus more than a few masterpieces by the likes of Rousseau, Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, Demuth, Hartley, Soutine, Gaugin et al to Lincoln University, a black college initially set up for former slaves and freed men at the far end of Chester County near the Maryland border.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
My piece, From Northern Soul (Bury Neon), is now permanently installed in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire just in time for the baseball playoffs in the United States. The work, an homage to the great Chico Escuela, is a part of Wharf Hypothesis, which itself is the opening movement of still-in-progress Northern Soul. Northern Soul is a section of Universe. The sculpture is already part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. This almost certainly will prove to be the most widely read publication I will ever have.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.
Ai Weiwei’s
architecture, installations & objects
Ai Weiwei’s blog
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