Artblog Radio

Clint Takeda and Scott Hewicker met 15 years ago when Takeda was head preparator at the ICA and Hewicker was a featured artist in Alex Baker's East Meets West exhibition. This month the two meet again in an exhibition at Grizzly Grizzly.

José Ortiz-Pagán grew up in a small town in Southern Puerto Rico where he was a skater and a fledgling grafitti artist. Fast forward a few and now, he's been in Philadelphia for seven years. The Tyler MFA in printmaking and sculpture talks about being an activist and about the political roots of his current work at the new Latino art commercial gallery, RACSO.

Lee Tusman has curated up a storm at many places in Philadelphia (e.g., Little Berlin) and elsewhere. Now, he's got a really great-sounding one-night-only performance–Room 21–he's organized in collaboration with Ars Nova and DJ Jace Clayton and the Prometheus Chamber Orchestra. I talked with Lee about the musical performance, which will take place on Saturday, September 9 at the Barnes Foundation, and asked why it's at the Barnes and is Room 21 one of the Barnes gallery rooms. Take a listen and see! Then rush out and get tickets (here: $10/$8 for Barnes members)

Earlier this year, I was invited to curate a week of content on Curate This, the peppy new online arts publication whose mission -- like Artblog's mission -- is to tell the whole wide world that the Philadelphia art scene has great art and artists. Curate This, started by writers/artists Amanda Wagner and Julius Ferraro, is now almost one year old, and I sat down with them recently to talk about how their publication is coming along and what they're excited about. Curate This is a platform for artists and writers to speak their minds about issues involved in the arts (yes, there is some complaining).

At the Barnes Foundation, Nari Ward’s direct engagement with issues of race, culture, and class in contemporary America makes for an interesting counterpoint to the African art collected by Dr. Barnes (and by the Penn Museum) in the early 20th century. Finally, the three shows of contemporary photography, textiles, and architecture that fill the first floor of the PMA’s Perelman Building leave us with lots of questions about the “Africa” in “Creative Africa.” Just how fixed is regional or even national identity for both artists and artworks that circulate widely thanks to the global art market? What makes African art African?

2016 Pew Fellow Tiona McClodden makes documentary films and videos and sculptural environments. She's also made music videos and her work is political, exploring gender, race and under-known history. In our talk she tells me about selecting Philadelphia as a place where community she found a community of black working artists. The interview was recorded live at the Galleries at Moore's radio booth on July 7, 2016.

Roberta interviews Pap Souleye Fall about his unique body suits, stitched up while he is wearing them. Pap is also a wonderful maker of sculptural installations, and he's a dancer. Give a listen!

Jamar Nicholas wears a number of hats, as do many artists. He's a teacher -- he teaches narrative storywriting at Drexel and has taught at Moore College of Art and Design and Arcadia University; he is Fine Arts Curatorial and Administrative Assistant at Arcadia University Art Gallery, and he makes his art -- drawings of narratives that become comic books about superheroes, like the Hip Hop Cop Detective Boogaloo, which ran -- daily -- in the Philadelphia Metro in 2015.

When Daniel de Jesús performs he looks just like a painting of the Virgin Mary or a statue of a saint come to life. He wears a blue silk robe and his blue and purple eye make-up runs down his cheeks like tears. His voice resounds in unison with the cello between his knees; a drum machine may keep time or offer up haunting sounds.

Most rooms in The Colored Girls Museum are dedicated to women of color; their names are framed in the doorways. This is a museum of Herstory told through art, through shout outs to accomplished and heroic women, and through everyday stories about ordinary and extraordinary lives.

Jennifer Zarro talks with photographer Shawn Theodore, alias _xST, about his work--including why he shoots in large-format and how people react to his photos.

Although the festival was put together almost on a whim last year—Settle and her artistic director Cesar Alvarez were seeking a way to use an empty Merriam Theater for two weeks—it became an instant success.

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania has given over its second-floor galleries to the New York art team Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez. One of the galleries is simply a radio on a table. It plays an original radio play the duo wrote: a science fiction story about voice recognition technology.

Harris is not afraid to investigate and offer in his collages and other artworks a new version of our national and cultural history, one which often illustrates a confounding unfairness we have all inherited.

Krimes seems to humanize art theory by putting it through a process of deep reading, personal reflection, and even letting the words suggest alternative readings. His current body of work, on view at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University, is the result of this approach, his intuitive pathfinding, and chance.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a book turned into a film and now, into an opera. WHYY's Peter Crimmins has more.

Kukuli Velarde describes Corpus and also discusses her painting practice in this Artblog Radio interview conducted by Jennifer Zarro and recorded in the artist’s home and studio in Philadelphia in December, 2015.

[Erica Prince is a graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art. She spoke with us two years ago about originally planning to be a research-based artist, and about her love for “architectural utopias”–which makes sense given her brand-new, dollhouse-based exhibit at Vox Populi! — the Artblog editors] Erica Prince talks here of her love of […]

[We’re excited to be presenting a panel on Activism, Evangelism, and Art on March 23 with Slought, Ken Lum, and Amy Sadao! Get to know Amy’s background here. — the Artblog editors] Amy Sadao, Director of the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)  has won many awards for her work as a curator, organizer and leader in […]

Matthew Green’s realist oil paintings depict the natural world punctuated by pieces of the built environment that intrude and insist on the human presence in the landscape. Green’s works are pristine and forlorn and raise issues of ecology and the age-old struggle of humankind to subdue the natural world. We met Green in 2003, our first […]