Original Article @ Philly.com
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Amanda V. Wagner, Art Attack

It was at the University of Georgia this past April that art critic Paddy Johnson from Art F City boldly told young artists not to move to New York City. Johnson, originally from Canada, but now a New Yorker herself, is not the first person to encourage young artists to shield their eyes from the glare of the city of lights.

Paddy Johnson (left) and Patti Smith (right)

Patti Smith made headlines in 2011, for her remark to writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, saying “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Artists have always flocked to New York City. In the 60s Soho seized the vitality that coursed through Paris in the 20s. The surge that clenched the city fostered a kinetic creativity captured in places, like Pop artist Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory. Soho, amongst many other parts of the city, became a hub for artists, where art movements expanded, and where people felt inspired.

New York City was a muse for the artists who inhabited it, providing those yearning to create with quintessential New York stamina. For some, NYC remains to be that very source of stimulus; yet, in the past decade, whether from art critics or artists, attitudes have been changing towards New York and cities like our very own are becoming the new New York for artists.

Why? Mainly the cost. But where Patti Smith would suggest that the city was taken from artists, Paddy Johnson would argue that it is partially because of the artists that the cost of living is so high. “Where artists go, rents will rise—that’s a story told over and over in New York,” Johnson writes in an article, titled Are Artists Gentrifying Sunset Park?, in The L Magazine. The article continues to describe personal accounts of people in south Brooklyn’s Sunset Park who witnessed the section’s transition from a “working-class neighborhood” to a community that was experiencing the effects of gentrification.

The idea is that artists are attracted to these low-cost neighborhoods because, in them, they can afford studio spaces. However this flux of artists renting out studios inevitably draws attention to these decaying urban enclaves, and after the artists it is not too long before bars, cafes, shops, and apartment complexes pop up.

We have seen similar transitions in our own backyard. Entire neighborhoods have been revamped and restored because of the young and struggling that have migrated to them. Look at Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital area that absorbed the slurry of college graduates and young professionals from bordering areas. Next to what the neighborhood was just a decade ago the region is nearly unrecognizable. Between 2000 and 2010 the average household income in that area rose by 56 percent from an estimated $43,000 to $67,000.

Kensington is undergoing preliminary stages of a comparable conversion. Located in between the lower Northeast and North Philadelphia, Kensington has been one of Philadelphia’s up and coming areas, and much of its progress can be accredited to artists. According to the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC), “Today, because of the rising costs of living in Center City, artists and new homeowners are pushing northward and reviving that great heritage.” Venues like, Crane Arts, Walking Fish Theater, and Little Berlin have surfaced as major cultural contributors to the city, and as a result the surrounding area is evolving.

We can see that, based on the attention the community has received, the housing market is being effected and at a rapid pace. “The median sales price for homes in Kensington, Philadelphia for Feb 13 to Apr 13 was $120,000 based on 135 sales. Compared to the same period one year ago, the median sales price increased 37.9%, or $33,000, and the number of sales increased 31.1%. Average price per square foot for Kensington was $111, an increase of 9.9% compared to the same period last year,” reported by Trulia.

Artists flourish in Philly because of neighborhoods like Kensington that offer artists the space to create. Yet Philadelphia is far from the only city that artists have been moving to as an alternative to the hustle and bustle of NYC. Phoenix, Arizona, Atlanta, Georgia, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have all top lists of the best cities for young artists.

So artists have discovered and populated new cities and the cities are feeling the influence. But is this a quiet sendoff from artists to New York? Are they slowly severing their ties in a solemn, “it’s not you, it’s my wallet.” Perhaps in this way New York has been taken from them, and from all of us.

Major television networks have caught on to the love-hate relationship between the youth and the city, and have capitalized on it. HBO’s current hit series Girls—a show that follows a group of twenty-something friends, depicts a New York City that’s very different from the city portrayed by the previous HBO series that ended in 2004, Sex and the City. Many parallels have been drawn between the two shows, however Sex and the City’s NYC was glamorous, decadent, and full of opportunity, where Girls’ NYC has filled the role of an antagonist that incessantly reminds it’s characters of the difficulty of “making it” there.

Of course, one can still find success in the NYC but the soil that lies beneath the concrete jungle is undeniably dry without the connections and money needed to fuel that growth. The alternative to possessing those resources: obtain them somewhere else.

Artist Jayson Musson moved from Philadelphia to Brooklyn after spending a decade and a half in the city of brotherly love. “When I moved to New York, I moved in a time when there were a lot of opportunities opening up for me because of the Hennessy videos, so I moved at the right time in my career,” says Musson. His work gained popularity after his ART THOUGHTZ videos captured the attention of thousands of online viewers, where Musson teaches art theory under the guise of adroit, farcical art critic, Hennessy Youngman.

Leaving at the “right time” was critical for Musson, as well as it is for the artists that are hoping to survive in NYC. “You get a job to pay for your exorbitant rent, and then on top of that you most likely live in a space that you don’t have room to work in, so you have to get a studio on top of your rent, utilities, insurance, health insurance, and food. It’s really difficult, where during my time here [in Philadelphia] I was able to work out of my kitchen.”

Musson accredits his success to the time he was able to develop as an artist in Philadelphia, but continues to flourish in Brooklyn. In fall of this year, Musson hopes to be releasing a graphic, not-so-kid friendly children’s e-book with publishing house Badland Unlimited entitled “The American.”

Artists know that “making it” in the big apple is not what it used be. It’s possible that without the momentum that hoisted artists like Musson into prominence, by the Internet and the places nurture their talents, they would never have become successful. “I wasn’t rushed to anything living in Philly, I could work at my own place, but New York is more challenging because there is all this pressure,” says Musson. If you can meet the challenge of New York City then by all means do so but, if not, there are plenty of open armed alternatives for artists in search of space to create.

Source: TheArtBlog.org
By Maegan Arthurs
May 23, 2013

Claire Ashley is a Scotland-born, Chicago-based artist who fuses sculpture and painting with a smattering of the absurd. For her latest piece, distant landscapes: peepdyedcrevicehotpinkridge, Ashley has created a series of inflatable sculptures that fill The Icebox Gallery at Crane Arts, transforming the space into a lively and cartoonish environment. Walking around the space, my husband and I decided that the forms reminded us of cloud-watching; the nebulous shapes potentially evoke any number of references. Speaking with Ashley, she confirmed that some of the forms are deliberately naturalistic (horse and cow, for example), while others are intentionally more ambiguous. Even Ashley’s title is meant to be at once both analytical and non-analytical, conveying and inviting any number of possible references.

For Ashley, motherhood is an inspiration
Ashley draws inspiration in part from her role as a mother. In their early iterations, the puffy forms of her sculptures came from Ashley’s protective maternal instincts. Since then, Ashley’s approach has evolved in a way that embraces the energy and silliness of young children. In a personal touch that adds emotional heft to the show, Ashley cuts the forms for each piece from a template of sorts loosely based on the blueprints from her home.

The Happy Collaborationists bring Ashley’s work to life
The dynamic, zany energy of Ashley’s inflatable sculptures is further underscored with their incorporation into a performance by The Happy Collaborationists (“Happy C”), a curatorial collective featuring performance artists Anna Trier and Meredith Weber. Donning two of Ashley’s inflatable sculptures, the pair move and dance around the Gray Space adjoining the gallery to upbeat music.

Ashley’s painting/sculpture hybrids challenge the traditional notion of what defines a painting, an idea Happy C underscore in their performance. Just as a beautifully rendered painting can seem to dance on the canvas, Happy C succeeds in promoting the idea that a painting can literally become a dynamic object while still retaining its beauty as an artistic object.

Jeff Huckleberry explores the challenge of artistic creation through intense yet humorous performance
Jeff Huckleberry’s performance, “8th Rainbow,” follows the performance by Happy C in the Gray Space. Huckleberry, a member of Mobius Artist Group and the artistic director of TOTAL ART, began his performance without introduction; he simply began laying out his various props, which included wooden boards, paint, a belt sander, a box, two cases of beer, and balloons.

What followed from there was a series of actions that, while assaulting the senses in a ridiculous and entertaining manner, seemed also to grapple with the profound challenges artists face when attempting to create their work. This was clearest when Huckleberry filled his pockets with beer bottles and wrestled with an armful of long, wood boards. As he was rolling back and forth through the space, clutching this bulky mass, I empathized with him; Huckleberry seemed to be actualizing the process of wrangling an unformulated creative idea into something tangible and workable – perhaps the most difficult task an artist faces. Huckleberry personified this struggle with humor and whimsy; my husband and I found ourselves grinning constantly during the performance.

The artists create a successful, accessible collaboration
This is not the first time these artists have collaborated and it shows – each piece complemented the other in interesting ways. My husband and I left the gallery that night laughing and chatting excitedly about the show, eager to see more.

It’s wonderful to see art with a jubilant sense of humor that doesn’t shy away from the silly in life.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic
April 27, 2013

On paper, the proposed Soko Lofts project promises to do for its South Kensington neighborhood what the Piazza at Schmidts did for Northern Liberties. Like its paradigm-shifting predecessor two blocks south, Soko Lofts would rim its large block with a dense array of mid-rise apartment buildings, smartly broken up into manageable segments. The spaces between the buildings would become passageways, beckoning the public into a landscaped interior courtyard.

It is a pretty good plan, but it is no Piazza.

For all its effort to replicate the Piazza’s first-rate urbanism, Soko Lofts misses the crucial lesson of that project. The Piazza packed its ground floor with shops, galleries, and eateries, especially along its primary frontage on Second Street. Though not all have succeeded, their presence tied the Piazza into the neighborhood. They made what was just another behemoth residential development into a real urban place.

At Soko, the buildings – bounded by Second, Thompson, Master, and American Streets – would be punctuated by a few token retail spaces. The rest would be long stretches of dullness. And American Street, which should be Soko’s front door, would be the dullest.

Soko’s developer, Canus Corp., envisions a seven-story apartment building there. It would be raised on stilts so a parking lot can be inserted at street level. Two wide driveways would further break up the American Street frontage, destroying any hope that the former industrial corridor could evolve into a walkable, residential boulevard. It is not a good start for South Kensington 2.0.

Philadelphia’s new Civic Design Review committee – a product of the revamped zoning code – meets May 7 to discuss the project, and it has a chance to make Soko better. But will it try? Canus’ owner, Paul Rabinovitch, is quick with an excuse for every design mistake, and the committee has so far not demonstrated that it has the moxie to stand up to a strong-willed applicant.

To be fair, Rabinovitch isn’t one of those my-way-or-the-highway types. After neighbors from South Kensington Community Partners complained about the initial design, he sent his architects, Barton Partners of Norristown, back to the drawing board.

Their second version was a big improvement. They started by breaking down the immense scale of the 2.7-acre site. A pedestrian street now bisects the block, connecting American and Second Streets and providing easy access to the interior courtyard.

In response to neighbors’ concerns about the lack of ground-floor activities, Barton added more lobby entrances for the Second Street apartments. They beefed up American Street somewhat by bracketing the building with retail space. Although some residents still had concerns about the streetscape, the neighborhood group signed off on the project.

That doesn’t mean the Design Review Committee should rubber-stamp the neighborhood decision. With 320 units spread over a full city block, Soko Lofts could radically transform the tattered, postindustrial streets of South Kensington. American Street has the potential to become the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare.

It may not seem that way right now. Once lined with factories, American Street is now pocked with empty lots, partly as a result of 20 years of failed city policy to rekindle its manufacturing glory.

Yet Rabinovitch is concerned that there is too much industry on American Street. His site now faces a small food processor, a furniture maker, and a glass supplier. That’s his argument for putting cars, instead of people, on the ground floor. Philly.com>

Original Article @ Hidden City
MARCH 18, 2013
THERESA STIGALE

Photo: Theresa Stigale

The Crane Plumbing Company imported cast iron tubs from Trenton, NJ by train and stored them on site to be distributed throughout the greater Philadelphia area. The event space known as the Icebox was an open train shed with penetrations for train deliveries. The name Icebox came into use after the Crane company left, when the building housed a seafood company and the products were flash frozen there, in a rebuilt space for that purpose. In the 1960s Random shrimp shells could be found even on the upper floors. The space is now used for weddings, and most notably for benefit art auctions by InLiquid, the arts collective located on an upper floor of the Crane Building. An outside building was used as another distribution center in 1906. In the courtyard, Crane co-developer and Temple University art professor Nicholas Kripal uncovered a sea of Belguim blocks, and used recycled those historic stones to pave the lot.

Photo: Theresa Stigale

The White Space. One block to the east of the Crane Arts, the skyline is dominated by the prominent twin spires of St. Michael’s Church, founded in 1831. In 2011, a development team, including Nicholas Kripal, bought the school adjacent to the church and created art studios and a sunny, flexible open space for performances, exhibits and gatherings, known as The White Space.

Full Article @ Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer Classical Music Critic

“…At the Crane Arts center in Northern Liberties, JACK Quartet, the best new music group of its kind, played Cage’s Four, Music for Four and Five3. The first piece was a quiet one played in a traditional string quartet configuration; even in a setting where you could seriously listen to it, the piece yielded little to the naked ear. Music for Four was executed with the musicians dispersed among the seating area, and realized with all of the contrasting ideas lacking in the previous work. It was one of the most exhilarating moments in the festival so far.

Five3 also had the quartet dispersed, with the addition of trombonist James Hirschfeld, in a piece examining a range of possible music within extremely narrow bounds, this time utilizing the pitch-bending possibilities of the trombone slide and the violin fingerboard. Unlike much other quiet Cage, this performance was enveloping, prompting the following theory: Perhaps the only way to truly understand any given Cage piece is to perform it yourself – or at the very least, be in the thick of those who do.”

Original Article @ Lonely Planet
Dec. 5th, 2012
Robert Reid

4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Forget the cheesesteaks and tri-corner hat, Philadelphia is becoming known as an art capital. In addition to the world renowned Philadelphia Museum of Art, the formerly remote the Barnes Foundation, a once private collection of Matisse, Renoir and Cézanne, has a new central location. And it’s not just the big museums – Philly’s gallery scene is exploding with new venues like the Icebox garnering international attention and turning the Northern Liberties and Fishtown neighborhoods into the new hot arts hub. First Fridays, the monthly gallery open house, long a tradition in Old City, has expanded to the refurbished Loft District, where the party goes on in a host of new bars, clubs and live music venues.

Original Article @ New York Magazine
Aug 31, 2012
Rebecca Dalzell

Paintings by Rebecca Saylor Sack

Explore the thriving contemporary-art scene in Northern Liberties and Fishtown, especially Crane Arts, the area’s hub for almost a decade. Formerly a plumbing warehouse, the massive brick building is home to dozens of studios and arts organizations, as well as galleries (open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, from noon–6 p.m.) like the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Indigo Arts, and the University of Delaware’s art department. Coming to the area in September is a new outpost of Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward, which offers workspace to artists and art classes to the public.

Devote at least an afternoon to the city’s major museums on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Start out at the new location of the Barnes Foundation ($18), which houses one of the finest Impressionist and early modern collections—181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, and 46 Picassos—in the world. The paintings have been placed exactly as they were in Albert C. Barnes’s Merion home, but the new building, opened in May, has abundant lighting that makes the collection look fresh. Afterward, visit the newly reopened Rodin Museum ($8), where 150 of the sculptor’s works line garden paths and airy galleries.

Watch art being made at the Fabric Workshop and Museum ($3), whose acclaimed artist-in-residence program invites painters, performers, and designers to try new techniques with the help of in-house technicians. The current exhibit by multimedia artist Mark Bradford closes in mid-September, but the permanent collection includes work from big contemporary artists like Louise Bourgeois and Anish Kapoor.

Learn the stories behind some of the city’s murals, of which there are more than 3,500, from members of the Mural Arts Program, which offers weekend trolley tours ($25) to different neighborhoods from April to November. The West Philadelphia route, for instance, stops by the 3800 block of Melon Street, where 30 house façades were painted to draw attention to youth homelessness.

Read The Full Article on the New York Magazine website.

Original Article @ TheArtBlog.org
August 26, 2012
Mireille Guy
Guest Writer for TheArtBlog.org

Walking into the current exhibition in the Project Space at Crane Arts, a viewer is greeted by bright and colorful portraits that almost look like movie stills. That is because Girls on Film is a study of the relationship between painting and moving images, between pop culture and feminine identity. Artist Kate Perkins used many pieces from her recent senior thesis at University of the Arts, as well as others, to compose this show, and the result is a vibrant and engaging exhibition.

Perkins’ lush and vivid portraits show characters taken from stills of Bollywood movies, Korean or Taiwanese television shows or the Internet. Painted on wood panels rather than on canvas to better reference a flat screen television or computer, the works accurately reproduce the colors and ambiance of the media. Topics covered range from romance to friendship. Perkins explains in her senior thesis that the purpose of the show is to bring together “…images of young women from a variety of cultural backgrounds, in the context of film stills and portraits, in order to explore the female construction of identity in an Internet-driven world.” She is not trying to paint her interpretation of this pop culture and media, but rather to represent it in the most accurate of lights — its immediate perception.

Most notable in the show are four paintings of pop star Nicki Minaj taken from her music video “Superbass.” The works, titled “Superbass #1″ through “Superbass #4,” exemplify all of the themes mentioned earlier: lush colors, pop media, femininity. What makes these paintings even more interesting is that Perkins has created an animated slideshow using a bar code scanning app to make the animation available by smart phone at the exhibit. I simply had to take a picture of the barcode next to the paintings to download the animation. To see Perkins’s animation, click here.

By animating her paintings, Perkins successfully furthers her theme of the high volume saturation of pop culture into art as well as across our society today.

Crane Arts, by the way, which I had not been to before, is a great space for artists, as it has many exhibition spaces as well as studios and creative resources.

Girls On Film is up until August 31. Perkins is also featured in a two-person exhibit with Rebecca Tennenbaum, opening Sept. 7. at Goldilocks Gallery, 723 Chestnut St., 2nd floor.

Original Article @ Philly.com
March 02, 2012
By A.M. Weaver
For The Inquirer

Amy Orr photographed by Akira Suwa

Amy Orr, beaming a kilowatt smile, almost jumps from her chair when she talks about FiberPhiladelphia 2012, the citywide celebration of textile and fiber art she has spent the last two years organizing with Bruce D. Hoffman.

Orr is a fiber artist, Moore College faculty member, and the biennial event’s director; Hoffman, an independent curator, was part of the Snyderman-Works Gallery’s groundbreaking 1998 fiber exhibition, which sparked what has become an event of international scope, stretching from Friday’s opening till the end of April.

For this sixth iteration, Orr says, “we decided not to engage in the ongoing debate about what constitutes fiber art. . . . People don’t want to define themselves as fiber artists, just artists. A call was placed for excellent artwork that made reference to textiles and fiber art – and the results were outstanding.”

FiberPhiladelphia 2012 features several major juried shows. More than 500 artists applied, from all over the world, and 67 were chosen to exhibit at the Icebox Project Space in the Crane Building and at subsequent juried shows at the Wayne Art Center and the Gallery at City Hall.

Partnering with the nonprofit membership organization InLiquid, participating venues – among them the Art Alliance, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Arthur Ross Gallery, and the Wexler Gallery – were cultivated early on. Orr emphasizes that subsequent participation was highly democratic, requiring only a $100 registration fee. After that, each of the scores of venues could do its own thing with the fiber theme.

With the funds collected on an interactive website, a gallery guide and free lectures were organized. Volunteers essentially run the festival, which speaks to the ability of the organizers to mobilize their constituents.

And to attract related events: A joint conference of Studio Art Quilt Associates and the Surface Design Association will be held March 30 to April 1 in Conshohocken, and will feature tours of the festival’s highlights.

Why is all this happening in Philadelphia? Orr is ready with the answer, noting that it is a “city with Amish quilts and immigrants with rich traditions in the fiber arts.”

“Also of record was the manufacturing of lace and hosiery. There are dye factories from the 1800s that are still operative. . . . With a huge presence of textiles throughout the arts community in Philadelphia, there is a growing interest in bringing textile industries back to the city.”

Original Article @ KnightArts.org/
Thursday, Feb. 23rd, 2012
By Chip Schwartz
For Knight Arts

In Gallery 102 of the Crane Arts building in Fishtown, Second State Press is currently displaying prints by 16 of its members. Located in the basement of the building, Second State is a communal printmaking studio that offers members an affordable and supportive network of like minds and equipment to practice their craft.

The members currently showing in the gallery are all part of the Fob Holder Program, which allows unlimited access to the printmaking facilities for individuals who volunteer to help manage and look after the shop. The “Fob holders” hail from all over the country but currently reside in Philadelphia, where they represent a dynamic community of artists at different stages of their careers. Grassroots, member-run organization is the emphasis of Second State Press and the creative energy this approach fosters is its priority.

Jake Yeager has a knack for making monsters that lie somewhere between creepy and goofy in their appearance. They are cartoony creatures reminiscent of some darker version of Maurice Sendak illustrations with crooked teeth and gnarly grins. There are mystical and occult symbols, like mandalas, goat heads and the all-seeing eye of one-dollar bill fame tied into his images as well, making for a curious depth of content beyond the beasts themselves. The style of Yeager’s prints is almost tattoo-like, and they certainly wouldn’t be out of place on a colorful sleeve.

Primates hatching from eggs are the juxtaposition of choice for Josh Danin. In one image, a baby gorilla pokes its head out of a cracked white egg, in another the appendage is a fully grown human hand. The representations are fairly realistic and well-proportioned, aside from the exaggerated size of the eggs (or the miniature scale of their contents). A strong sense of texture is also a major element of Danin’s prints, apparent in the wrinkles of the hands or the cracks of the eggshells.

Lauren Abshire has a series of photo prints of what appear to be surveying flags. The flags stand alone or grouped together in different configurations, their bright colors standing out sharply against a layer of white snow and dim shadows. Like the flag series, Abshire’s other piece is playful and bright. It seems almost like a map, with a round island-like form and an x marking the spot — perhaps using the very same flags?

There are also winding patterns in the abstract biological masses of Emilia Edwards and a surreal object-like quality to the little boxed prints and cutouts by Daryl Bergman.

Second State Press collectively accosts a very large space with its handcrafted prints and offers a good pick of styles and approaches. What is definitely clear is that this is a group with some quality printmakers serious about their products.

Original Article @ Philly.com
Fri, Nov. 18, 2011
By Victoria Donohoe
For The Inquirer

This is the 75th anniversary of American Abstract Artists, an organization of artists who banded together to create a forum for the discussion, exhibition, and promotion of their art.

One of the few artists’ groups launched in the Great Depression, it had clout from the start, and its effort to build better understanding continues today.

“Abstraction to the Power of Infinity” is its exhibition at the Icebox in the Crane Building, featuring 80 living artists, all New Yorkers except for four invited Philadelphians. The event is curated by Janet Kurnatowski, who directs a Brooklyn art gallery. New York’s O.K. Harris Gallery held a recent AAA anniversary show of similar size, with most of the same artists, but different works.

This display in Lower Kensington also pays tribute to AAA’s first centenarian, painter Will Barnet, a member since 1956. Much appreciated locally as a former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Barnet here offers a vibrant canvas, Joyous, which he painted in 2006.

In this show, strong colors and vigorous strokes activate spatial tensions and create many energetic compositions. And while some of the other abstractions seem familiar and conventional, the best ones show that skill and artistic ambition can be a combustible mixture. Hybrid species of painting and relief sculpture are few, as are other sculptures.

Outstanding are Creighton Michael’s dramatic photo triptych and Mon Levinson’s white-on-white rotund piece. Also worthy of note are pieces by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Steven Alexander, Martin Ball, Gabriele Evertz, Vito Giacalone, John Goodyear, Gilbert Hsiao, Phillis Ideal, Roger Jorgensen, James Juszczyk, Victor Kord, Ce Roser, Irene Rousseau, Richard Timperio, Vera Vasek, Dan Voisine and Stephen Westfall.

The AAA does not play down artists’ honest struggle and achievement, reducing them to a question of who is “in” and who’s “out,” so it is pointless to stick an easy label on these artists. They share qualities of a spirit of experimentation that values questions more than answers, willingness to risk unusual means, courage in getting “messages” across, and also a strong sense of values. And they must keep growing to brush aside conformity and reach toward audacity. A very rewarding show.

Original Article @ http://articles.philly.com/2011-07-17/news/29783663_1_gallery-scene-mfa-creativity
Jul. 18, 2011
By A.D. Amorosi
For The Inquirer

It’s a steamy spring afternoon and members of Pig Iron Theatre Company are in a boiler room at the Crane Arts Building’s neighboring schoolhouse, kicking up dirt.

“This would make a great stage for a performance,” Quinn Bauridel, Pig Iron’s co-artistic director, says at the foot of a furnace straight out of Dante’s Inferno.

Pig Iron and Bauridel have worked at the Crane before. The city’s headiest avant-garde troupe staged the starkly forensic Isabella in the Crane’s Ice Box Project Space on North American Street during the 2007 Live Arts Festival. Now, as director of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training (APT), Bauridel will be only a few blocks away, at 1425 N. Second St.

So will such teacher/artists as Pig Iron’s co-artistic directors Dan Rothenberg and Dito van Reigersberg, company members Charlotte Ford, Sarah Sanford, and Geoff Sobelle, and longtime collaborator Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey. APT is a two-year postgraduate program based primarily in the physical pedagogy of the late actor/teacher Jacques Pierre Lecoq, in which Pig Iron specializes; it is an alternative to a traditional MFA program.

“I’m passionate about helping emerging theater artists find their voice to reenergize this art form,” says Bauridel. “It’s important to evolve, lest things become stale.”

On signing its lease in January, the APT became the flagship tenant of Crane Old School, which is not only a game changer for Pig Iron and Crane Arts, but for the surrounding Old Kensington neighborhood.

“It’s a risky venture, which we’ve undertaken in uncertain times,” says Crane Arts co-owner David Gleeson, who, with artist/partners Richard Hricko and Nicholas Kripal, purchased the former manufacturing site that became Crane Arts in 2004 and bought the Old St. Michael’s School on North Second Street in January. With the Piazza at Schmidts, a handful of theaters, and Frankford Avenue’s gallery scene, the neighborhood is blossoming, and the Crane complex – galleries, offices, studios, exhibition and performances spaces – has become central to that.

“Crane Arts liked the idea of bringing the educational and productive sides of performing arts into the Old School,” says Gleeson. “We’re creating affordable spaces for the production of art and creativity products, as opposed to, say, the consumption and sale of art. There’s so much energy here, at both the grassroots and highest levels. We’re on the cusp of a really great wave of creativity, of which Pig Iron’s school is just one wonderful example.”

The 25,000-square-foot Roman Catholic school, built in 1891, had been vacant since 2005 when the Crane group took over and brought Pig Iron into the picture.

“We’d had such a good experience with them when we did Isabella – not every landlord would be so accommodating to a naked-cadaver Shakespeare production – that we jumped at the opportunity to work with them,” says John Frisbee, the company’s managing director.

Gleeson is quick to mention the advocacy of the city’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (which owned the school), and the project’s lender, the Reinvestment Fund. “With encouragement from those organizations and our desire to see more creative development in our neighborhood, we felt compelled to make this happen.”

So did Pig Iron. After teaching for more than a decade, the desire to develop something deeper than a weekend workshop had grown in Bauridel. He saw his theater students from Swarthmore and Princeton leaving to pursue their interest in physical and ensemble theater at schools in Paris, London, and beyond, and wanted to develop a local program to keep emerging talent closer to home.

Not only did the Pigs seek to pass on what they had learned from Lecoq – his theories on movement, physicality, and “the neutral mask” – with their own diabolical twists, they and Bauridel wanted to teach Pig Iron’s philosophy that an actor is the creator of his/her material, and how to convey that to producers and stagers.

“Actors in Pig Iron don’t wait around for others to cast them in this or that part,” says Bauridel. “They make their own proposals and create their own characters. They are entrepreneurs.”

APT instructor Sarah Sanford elaborates: “It’s not like training an actor to speak Shakespeare or a director to analyze a scene, because each student’s unique theater has yet to be realized. In our classes we combine our own diverse interests as a company – the role of music in theater, what we’ve learned from various collaborators, the vocabulary we’ve developed based on what many of us learned at Lecoq – with the question: How do you teach young theater artists to be creators? How do we forge unique paths?”

Incoming student Alex Bechtel, 25, has a University of the Arts degree in musical theater and acting credits with 1812 Productions and the Walnut Street Theatre. Now, he says, “I’ve begun to make my own work and am at a stage where I’m looking for new ways to do so . . . to honor and follow my instincts, and eventually those will come into a style and technique of making theater that people will identify with me.” That’s the Pig Iron way.

Though Pig Iron received a $150,000 matching grant as part of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge, the school is a not-for-profit venture. Bauridel notes that “we’re not forming a separate entity for the school, as we see the mission of the APT and the company as united.”

The company is raising $800,000 to fund the launch and help cover costs for the first four years. The first class arrives in the fall; the second won’t be added until 2013. “This gives us time to really focus on this inaugural class, to learn and process as we go without crushing ourselves in our second year of operation,” says Bauridel.

If anyone thinks creating a school will diminish Pig Iron’s theatrical output, its board president, Scott Reynolds, notes that while developing APT, the company also (among other things) created the new productions Welcome to Yuba City and Cankerblossom, toured its much-praised Chekhov Lizardbrain, developed work with Toshiki Okada, and started rehearsals for Twelfth Night.

Bauridel was looking for a building that houses artists from other disciplines, and he got it: The studios are filled with diverse artisans, from Raices Culturales, a Latino cultural organization, to the visual artists whose studios are drenched in natural light.

“We hope this will spark collaborations and, through osmosis and chance hallway encounters, enhance the student experience,” he says. “The stars aligned on this one.”

Original Article @ http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/arts-and-culture/art/Escape-to-PHASEscape-at-Crane-Arts-125509308.html
Jul. 13, 2011
Author: Roberta Fallon

With magical treasure maps, Stonehenge-like plinths and allusions to complex non-verbal systems, PHASEscape, a spare show of mostly abstract works, suggests a place out of time.

The sculpture, video, prints and paintings — few in number but several with large impact — occupy the Crane Arts’ Grey Area. This is a cave-like space with smoky grey walls, shade-covered windows and a bare minimum of light aimed at the works. Some art will wither here, but most of the works on view by four Tyler MFA candidates and one recent grad are primal in nature and shamanistic, so they inhabit the hyper-dramatic room with ease.

In the middle of the room, like the brightest star in the galaxy, is Samantha Jones‘ installation of tall nobly and hairy white plinths arranged together in a close circle. Skinny as camel legs and topped with what appear to be perhaps tiny towns for even tinier people, the grouping is Stonehenge-weird. It casts deep shadows, and as if to magnify its mystery and power, it has, hanging above it, a shiny reflective orb that hovers like the mothership in the movie Close Encounters and reflects the piece back as additional eerie spots of white light. Whatever this is about, the piece is captivating, from the shadows to the hovering orb to the nobbly white surfaces that look like curdled white cake icing (probably plaster or resin).

Nearby and seemingly in conversation with Jones’ piece, are three mixed-media paintings by Craig Rempfer that are full of beauty and ornate graphic moves. Like wild style graffiti as if practiced by the Mayans, Rempfer draws shapes and objects that are biomorphic and lines and shapes that repeat in an obsessive and almost ritualistic way. One black, white and grey work in which lines radiate out from a central knot and an “x” seems to mark the spot could be a treasure map — or a warning map. Rempfer’s smaller turquoise, grey and black painting also uses an “x” motif but evokes the mapping of cell division in a petri dish rather than geographical mapping. These works have aboriginal energy and authority.

Erica Prince’s diptych painting involves two cartoon-like kidney shaped windows on boxes. One kidney is white like an egg and the other looks transparent and shows a large number of the same boxes and same kidney shapes inside. Is the white kidney an egg, something innocent and pure, and the transparent kidney the mature, non-innocent and noisy and cluttered version? Whatever the meaning, the piece, with its cartoon affect, seems wrong for this show, as if a Tom and Jerry cartoon had invaded.

On the other hand, Johnny Plastini‘s large intaglio print, which looks a little like a barn on its side with its roof sliced off, is a mystery that goes well. Titled “Gothic Cab Drivers,” the piece, with three dark, hard-edged shapes separated by lots of white space, has little that’s Gothic and even less that’s taxi like. But there is great tension between the shapes and even greater mystery in some repeated white embossed dots that cut like bullet holes into each shape. The piece feels off-balance in an interesting way, and while it hardly seems playful, the work is a pre-verbal puzzle that is interesting to wonder about.

Devin Kovach’s video projection of a building under construction washes the room in pale moving light, and its audio of organ music casts a somber mood over everything. I wanted to be intrigued but this video and the photos of roughly the same subject don’t go far enough to be more than images of building construction sites.

While dramatic, this is a quiet show that grew on me the longer I stayed in the dark room. Some of the work would do well in the stronger light of day (or in a bright gallery) and some would be lessened (Jones’ work in particular). So, see the show here as an example of work that shines in a dark space. More photos at flickr. Read this at Philly Weekly.

Original Article @ http://video.whyy.org/video/1954260801/
May 25, 2011

Crane Arts’ own Milner Carr Conservation was recently featured on WHYY. The video includes some great shots of their work and their headquarters here at Crane Arts. We couldn’t imagine a better home for a conservation company than the beautifully restored Crane Arts Stable.

Watch the full episode. See more Experience.

Original Article @ http://philly.sidearts.com/2011/06/amie-potsic—curating-art-and-career-development-for-artists/
June 24, 2011
Author: DoN Brewer, Philly SideArts

Amie Potsic believes that you don’t have to be an artist, if you don’t want. “Be an accountant, just be good at what you do.” But, if you want to be curated into a fabulous art show like CONSTRUCT at the Icebox Gallery in the Crane Arts Center, receive publicity and media attention, meet collectors and gallery owners, then you better be really, really good at what you do. As the Director of Career Development at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, she creates the opportunity for the Fellows, a group of artists not represented by galleries, to exhibit their work in museum quality art shows like the current exhibition, CONSTRUCT, a critically acclaimed installation that exceeds expectations, a quality Amie Potsic looks for in artists.

Photo by DoN Brewer.

Since the Icebox Gallery offers virtually unlimited opportunity to create site-specific work with it’s high walls, part of Amie Potic’s job is to secure the venue, working with the directors and financial team to make something special happen that individual artists could not make happen on their own. Without a set esthetic, she challenged the artists to create new work, site specific installations or show existing work in the gallery; Arden Bendler Browning’s large paintings just barely fit in the gallery at Moore College Art and Design, but in the Icebox her paintings have room to breathe, the viewer can step back and take it all in at once, really see where’s she’s going. For Potsic the challenge is not just putting on a great, cohesive presentation, but creating a conversation with the artwork.

Even after all the planning, mock-ups and editing, Amie discovers connections between individual pieces, such as the dialog between Lewis Colburn’s installation, Doorway and Seat, and the adjacent painting by Daniel Kornrumpf depicting people standing in line, that develops into a narrative expressed throughout the expansive exhibition. Potsic said when she saw them together, after all the challenges and fun putting together the show, for her it was one of those perfect moments when things come together. As a curator, Amie Potsic’s goal is to create perfect moments on a consistent basis.

For Potsic, craft is key. Bohyon Yoon’s elaborate multi-faceted sculpture was delivered in it’s own hand-made crates, Lewis Coburn’s 14’tower, he typed out Tolstoy’s War and Peace perched on top, is impeccably created out of lowly 2 x 4’s, Alison Stigora’s breathtaking sculpture, Whirlwind, shows the pure intention and hand of the artist. Even if the art is made with simple materials, Amie calls them lo-fi, as long as it is taken seriously and purposeful, if it insists on itself, is clean and beautiful creating a tension dealing with issues and ideas, then it is elevated to another level. When curating a space, Amie wants to get it just right, “Work it out, until it sings.”

The beauty of the CFEVA Fellowship is opportunities for emerging artists to show in superior galleries, corporate offices, public spaces and individualized settings. Amie Potsic says the art scene has changed, there are not as many of the archetypal galleries where an artist is promoted with openings and dinners with collectors. “There is kind of a glass ceiling in the art world.” Now, what is expected is that artists go beyond, “Lot’s of people think the work just has to be good. It has to be fantastic.” Artists that are dependable, easy going, responsive to calls and e-mails and can express themselves about their own work coherently is the new normal. Self-promotion is important but Potsic believes in doing what you do best. If you need graphic design work done, find a designer that will work with you even if you have to trade. So that when the opportunity arises you will be confident your sales materials like cards and artist books appear professional. In Amie’s experience, there’s nothing worse than an artist apologizing or explaining what they meant to do.

Amie Potsic feels a strong responsibility to say all the things about an artist that they won’t say for themselves, introduce them to people, help them develop portfolios and RFPs and gain confidence. CONSTRUCT is the culmination of Amie’s fine editorial eye, she’s a great photographer in her own right, hard work and the compelling content of the art she has chosen for the show. But the current group of CFEVA Fellowship artists exceeded her expectations, too, allowing Amie Potsic to curate a warehouse-sized gallery with many, many special moments.

So, if you don’t want to be an artist? Then, don’t. Do whatever you want. But, if you want to be a professional artist, talk to Amie Potsic, she has good advice. “If you believe in yourself and your product, then sales is easy.”

Artists exhibiting in CONSTRUCT are: Noah Addis, Arden Bendler Browning, Lewis Colburn, Don Edler, Laureen Griffin, Jordan Griska, Ana B. Hernandez, Mami Kato, Allison Kaufman, Daniel Kornrumpf, Maggie Mills, Tim Portlock, Alison Stigora, Jennifer Williams, Kimberly Witham, and Bohyun Yoon.

Original Article @ http://www.inliquid.com/wordpress/tag/amie-potsic/
June 27, 2011
Author: Alison McMenamin, InLiquid

Giving artists ample space to work and an open theme, Construct, curated by CFEVA director Amie Potsic, is broad enough to encompass the foundation’s diverse roster of fellows. On view at the Crane Icebox, Construct is one of the exhibition opportunities that CFEVA artists received as part of their two-year career development fellowships.

Like her performance video, “Dancing with Divorced Men” from 2008, Allison Kaufman continues to set up situations of forced intimacy with the previously married. In Trust Falls, a series of four videos featuring Kaufman and male divorcees, the artist and one of the men perform the relationship-building exercise. Other tasks include mirroring each other’s actions, attempting to maintain the precarious balance of a hammock, and grooming each other. While the initial videos deliver an awkward humor, the final videos of grooming offer a true feeling of intimacy.

Daniel Kornrumpf’s paintings resemble the work of Alice Neel and share the artist’s interest in expressionism and psychological intensity. Despite being seated, the figures do not seem relaxed, but filled with a sense of anxiety, and bear forlorn expressions.

Using natural materials like rice stalks from the artist’s native Japan, Mami Kato’s sculptures reference organic forms. Her entwined mass “Umbilical Field” seems to grow out of itself, suggesting a perpetual motion or cycle.

Hovering in vacuous landscapes or disjointed from their surroundings, the children and adolescents in Maggie Mills’s paintings seem uneasy in their environment. Many of the figures are plagued by natural forces or placed in situations beyond their control.

Laureen Griffin’s inclusion of modern figures in a black and white tableau questions long held expectations of race and gender. With a mash-up of disparate activities, like wearing sparkly heels while reading the sports page, the work questions ideas of gender roles and identities.

“After the Artifact (Waiting Machine)” from Lewis Colburn provides a space to contemplate Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The sculpture’s partially opened door resembles a time-traveling portal, but it only leads to a generic waiting room. For Colburn, the astrophysicist’s seminal text avoids the stereotypical depictions of time-travel in culture and is the greatest source of theoretical knowledge concerning time travel. Also on view is the fifteen foot tall tower, sprawling scroll of paper, and typewriter, which Colburn used during a performance in which he typed excerpts from War and Peace.

Alison Stigora creates an ordered arrangement of charred branches that evokes a mental image of fire. The sculpture’s upright character and the carefully nestled branches suggest a ritualistic burning.

The markings and partitioned sections on Jordan Griska’s oil barrel make the sculpture resemble a grenade and point to an impending danger. The barrel is not air tight with slits along its sides, and the oil inside becomes a hazard to the surrounding environment.

With building materials impaled in a television, Don Edler’s sculpture suggests an environment filled with instability and chaos. Blades of grass are visible under growing stations, bringing to mind an artificial environment where life has difficulty existing.

The other artists on view are Noah Addis, Arden Bendler Browning, Ana B. Hernandez, Tim Portlock, Jennifer Williams, Kimberly Witham, and Bohyun Yoon. With artists exploring a variety of ideas, Construct gives its fellows an opportunity to showcase their diverse talents. The exhibition is open until June 29.

Original Article @ http://theartblog.org/2011/06/construct-from-cfeva-at-the-ice-box/
June 24, 2011
Author: Libby Rosof, ArtBlog

Big is what the Ice Box exhibition space requires. CONSTRUCT, CFEVA‘s show there, delivers the goods.

New York artist Jennifer Williams’ installation photographs splayed on the gallery walls are spectacular. The one resting in a corner delights with the way it engages the viewer physically in its vertiginous urban spaces, delivering a sensation of instability, and at the same time trumpeting the architectural triumphs of the cityscape. The cityscape is a big theme in this show, from Arden Bendler Browning’s now familiar mural-size urban swirls, to Tim Portlock’s digital urban disaster zones, to Noah Addis’ Trump Plaza towering over urban decay (a straightforward photo).

The vulnerability of buildings becomes a metaphor for the vulnerability of living things in this show. And that’s part of Allison Kaufman’s subject–the human need for companionship and loving care, in a series of five silent video loops by the New York artist. Her horizontal lineup of the video screens add up to a strong presence in the Gray Area foyer to the Ice Box. The tactility of a man braiding a woman’s hair or a young woman shaving an elderly man deliver the intimacy between people and show up-close people’s physical and emotional vulnerability. The intimate scale of the videos seems just right given the subject matter–at home with our good friend the telly.

Death and denial are what make Kimberly Witham’s beautiful still-lifes serious. Previously I had dismissed them as slight, based on Internet images. But with a look in the real world, I’m all aboard. These C-prints of road kill in decorative settings hark to the Vanitas tradition and William Harnett’s dead-critter still-lifes all gussied up with Ann Craven-like wallpaper paintings. The fiercest of Witham’s photos, Still Life with Steak and Fox, conflates beauty with bestiality, the red meat a perverse splash of delicious red caught on a hook!

My other favorite of hers is a pair of squirrels floating in front of a blue sky filled with a pattern of white puffy clouds. The giddiness of the squirrels dancing in their blue heaven almost–but not quite–overcomes the questions of how dead the squirrels are–and how far we can delude ourselves as we enjoy their–and our–dance of death.

Installation and lighting conditions in the Gray Area take a toll on two video pieces. I had trouble seeing Bohyun Yoon’s marvelous Sound of Helmet Instrument, a video of a sort of tea ceremony with glass teapot-helmets, and Ana B. Hernandez’s Still Life With Figs, a projection of a performance with a lineup of sexy fruits.

Others in the show are Lewis Colburn (I missed his performance), Don Edler, Laureen Griffin, Jordan Griska (his Oil Barrel), Mami Kato, Daniel Kornrumpf, Maggie Mills and Alison Stigora. The exhibit had a full house opening night.

Original Article @ http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-24/news/29699499_1_artists-radius-portraits
June 24, 2011
Author: Victoria Donohoe, For The Inquirer

‘Construct” at Crane Arts’ Icebox Project space is a show to see and savor. It features 16 artists living within a 100-mile radius of Philadelphia, including several gifted New Yorkers. All are Career Development Program fellows of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) on Rittenhouse Square. The viewing experience of the show, curated by the center’s Amie Potsic, is greatly enhanced by the Icebox’s capacity to display both small and huge works.

Arden Bendler Browning, drawn to urban imagery, paints fleeting, largely abstract impressions directly on Tyvek. It’s her distinctive wide-angle way of responding to the environment she portrays, painted (I like to think) as if at the wheel of a careening car.

The exhibition shows its more socially aware side in the changing streetscapes and bleak juxtapositions of Atlantic City documented by photographer Noah Addis with awesome subtlety. The unpeopled images form a cohesive group, reflecting concern, sincerity, and, perhaps, hope.

Photographer Tim Portlock wears his technique rather than his heart on his sleeve. He photographs abandoned buildings within a 20-block radius of his West Philadelphia home, then uses 3-D animation/special effects software to develop his single images into empty virtual cities that convey a sense of foreboding and a strange emotional power. Also a studio painter and muralist, Portlock has long been interested in linking place and identity.

Laureen Griffin, working in multimedia, continues her “Gender Portraiture Project” in a design setting that emphasizes her adroitness, while Daniel Kornrumpf, with his deft, roguish, supple handling of oil and brush, offers saucy informal portraits of friends and family. Kimberly Witham’s cheery still-life photos – combining objects, flowers, and vegetables from her garden with dead birds and small animals found at the roadside – tremble on the edge of something more edgy and gothic.

These and the other artists constitute an overall impressive progress report on CFEVA’s elite corps of fellows.

Original Article @ http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-07/news/29629453_1_music-touches-pizzicato
June 07, 2011
Author: Daniel Webster, For The Inquirer

A richly curtained proscenium would have been all wrong, but the long, white, high-ceilinged room – once a fish refrigerator – was a provocative setting Sunday for the JACK Quartet’s survey of the intricate, still music of the New York School. The players, ringed by listeners, played music by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, John Cage – and Anton Webern – in the second American Sublime festival event, at the Crane Center in Northern Liberties.

The program summarized the revolutionary thought of the mid-20th century, when composers rebelled against every element of Western music. And, because Feldman, Brown, and Cage were paracletes at the altar of Webern, who removed all traces of narrative, reference, and tonal imperatives from the European tradition, his Six Bagatelles were played as a touchstone, almost as a classic.

The New York School valued music’s fluidity. Scores had interchangeable pages. Players decided the order of performance so the music never sounded the same. Scores were written on graph paper, or encrypted to avoid repetition. Nuance was the music’s lexicon; silence a goal. But players’ virtuosity was assumed.

The JACK players, deep into the technical demands of the program’s terse works, freed the power of miniature touches and implied rhythms. In the whispered brevities of Feldman’s Structures and Brown’s Quartet, the still details made pizzicato sound like a percussion section.

The beauty of the intimate setting let listeners see the scores on the stands, but also the violinists touching strings with the bow’s hair, then the wood, then both. They could see the playing below the bridge, savor the different tunings that asked fresh ears.

Feldman’s piece was played twice, to open and close the program. Its hushed, luminous touches, quick patterns, and witty arpeggios affirmed its title. There are tiny structures in there, flashes and clouds, transparencies and moments. Its atmosphere was so taut and coherent that each performance ended with listeners hushed.

Brown’s String Quartet accepted as a tenet Alexander Calder’s mobiles, works that, by constantly moving, are never seen the same. Brown gave his players choices within a shadowy form. The music proved expressive, mystical, superbly shaded and joined. Brown’s vocabulary is enormous and his power of suggestion, with these four instruments, mesmerizing. The ensemble fits details together neatly without losing the spirit and wit that shines deep within the writing.

Cage’s Quartet in Four Parts offered larger sounds and some echoes of early formal training. Nevertheless, in 1950 it must have seemed iconoclastic and baffling. In this reading it sounded a bit like an American classic, for many of its ideas have been absorbed into the language. Its quickness and refusal to suggest sentiment seemed a portrait of the composer’s mocking grin.

And Webern? In this white-walled context, it sounded like old Vienna. The music’s strong forms, the order of its detailed sounds and bold slashes, and the lack of repetition and reference asserted its monumentality. This was the start, its daring now part of every composer’s language. The performance was touched with gratitude.

Original Article @ http://theartblog.org/2011/04/chickens-sirens-at-new-old-school-studios/
April 22, 2011
Author: Libby Rosof

The chicken was a thing of beauty with a long speckled neck and banded body. She settled next to a small cement mountain. A blue neon light served as a negative sun. A photographer, Mike Kopena, there to document the installation, walked away from his tripod to the other end of the room to alert the two artists: The chicken had dropped a load on the floor–and was sitting in it. Aargh.

The collaborating artists, Jacque Liu and Mike Ellyson, were two of 10 artists invited to create temporary installations at the Old School Studios, the Crane Art Center’s newest project. The event served as an inaugural celebration of the opening of the building. The rooms, most of which used to be classrooms, are slated for occupancy in May, mostly as studios. In the interim, on a warm spring Second Thursday night (April 14), the pop-up invitational exhibit–Experiential, Environmental, Educational–popped with the two-fold excitement of both the art and the promise of the Crane’s expansion.

Getting back to the chicken, Ellyson (one of the Grizzly Grizzlies) and Liu seemed unperturbed. A few minutes later, Ellyson, dressed in white, paused from reading his Bible, gamely scooped up the chicken, and began teaching a Bible lesson in chicken-squawk-ese.

The installation, which is timely and layered, is called An Education with Congressman John Lewis. Lewis, who as a child preached to the chickens in the chicken yard, had this to say about the House Republicans (see full quote on Daily Kos):

I’m convinced that some of those chickens that I preached to in the 40s and the 50s tended to listen to me much better than some of my Republican colleagues listen to us in the Congress today…I think some of those chickens were probably a little more productive. At least they produced eggs!

The show was curated by Jerry Kaba, who included a swell installation of his own. Kaba’s centerpiece was a cooling tower form from floor almost to the ceiling, emitting flashing beams of light along with sirens that cycled on and off, bleeding into all the other installations (the one that suffered most was Katya Gorker’s video in the next classroom). Kaba’s floor of chipped tires created a no-man’s-land disaster zone even though it was fun and springy to walk on. A pair of facility workers in white hazard suits, gas masks and dunce caps wrote their lesson–”I promise to find a better way.”–a kajillion times on the blackboard.

The topicality of the nuclear meltdown turned out to be a double-edged sword–providing delight for relevance to current events, but at the same time overwhelming the nuances of the piece.

Artist Ryan W. Kelly looked like a bobble-head doll, wearing a giant Teddy Roosevelt head and holding a teddy bear in front of what I took to be a national park scene on a stage backdrop. I loved the theatricality of the props and costume creating a scene in the country, and the scale shift of head to body.

The three pieces were a nice sample of the kind of performances that have been increasingly shown in Philadelphia’s off-the-grid galleries. I’m thinking of works I’ve seen at Extra Extra, Bodega and Little Berlin for example. Tim Eads’ slot machine economy flow-chart gizmo seemed somehow of a different ilk. It was not so much a performance but an interactive piece. When I stood frozen before his toy slot machine (I really dislike gambling), Tim must have sensed my distress and kindly gave me some coins to put in the slot. I lost it all, but then discovered the machine spun without money added. (Tim said I wasn’t supposed to discover that. So now I’m feeling really lucky, as if I won a secret). This piece was rich with content about life and risks and of course money, needing it, recycling it, grabbing it. The visuals could have been a little stronger, but the ideas were pretty great and seemingly limitless.

Afterwards I bumped into artist Nancy Agati happy to be carrying a tree branch with flower souvenir she took from Joanie Turbek’s porcelain tree installation (taking was encouraged). Others with installations were: C. Pazia Mannella, Daniel Ostrov, and Jessie Hemmons.

To view by appointment, contact Kaba at jerrykaba@gmail.com. But the show is best served by having seen the performances, and not just the installations.