Shanna Waddell lives and works in Philadelphia and is represented by Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. She makes large-scale, visionary oil paintings that engage cubism, abstraction, 90’s grunge, cult worship and false utopias. After an interplanetary visit to her studio, we conducted the following question and answer session in April 2013 by email.   

Christopher Davison: The gestural flurry of your paintings teeters between cosmic bursts of energy and more fixed representations of objective reality. Can you talk about how you find your balance between abstraction and representation?

Shanna Waddell: Recently, I have been dealing with Cubism as a formal structure to house gesture and subject within my paintings.  As I do have interests in abstraction, I want to feel out where abstract expressionist painters were coming from, and as most of them were coming out of cubism, I am using these languages as a springboard to place gesture within a structured framework of sorts.  As for representation, it lies in affinities: winged people and angels, applied to such people as River Phoenix, Satan, and Kurt Cobain, who serve as a type of flying resurrection.

CD: Do you start most paintings with a specific representation already in mind, or do they begin with more abstract formal concerns?  

SW: Usually, I will start with the subject or idea, for example: Kurt Cobain’s head. Then I think of what I want him doing, like flying or wearing a crazy leopard sweater or funky jeans. I often have in mind whether or not I will be including hands or feet. Then I work out the space and how I will be painting the piece.  Color considerations run alongside the planning. The planning for my paintings is done in my head and usually takes three to five days of flipping around content, structure, and color.  I know when there is a good cycle of painting coming up when I start cleaning the house and going to the grocery store, and then flying to the studio in a fury to translate the ideas into work.

CD:  That’s nice to hear you say because I really believe there is something to that pre-work cleaning, cleansing phase. On the outside it might look like procrastination but before a heavy phase of production it seems to be essential. I love the visual of you flying into the studio “in a fury.” Can you talk a bit about the relation between the physical act of painting and the scale and materials you work with?

SW:  I work mostly on large-scale paintings: around 69 x 96 to 96 x108 inch canvases. Since moving my studio to Amber Street Studios, I have been working on large-scale drop cloths as well. I choose the size of the canvas then go into the idea.  When I paint the canvas almost disappears. It becomes about translating.  Lately, I have been into making my work look as if it is otherworldly and explosive.  Once I feel I have accomplished the idea, I tend to want to move on.   As for materials, I work with oil on canvas about 98% of the time.  There is a skin like quality that you get in oils that is hard to achieve in acrylic.  I also like that there are different drying times, as well as getting wet into wet qualities, surface build up, etc.

CD: Is there a relationship in your work between the soaring, otherworldly aesthetics and the all too worldly fate of cults and other false utopias? Do the paintings reveal what can only truly exist in imagination?

SW: I was listening to NPR the other day. They had a guy explaining that if you are over the age of 18, get along with others, and are in good physical standing, you can take a spacecraft to Mars. The only catch is that you can’t come back.  You live on mars with the other people who decide to live on the planet as well.  He also went further to explain how the early settlers who went out to sea on a ship didn’t know whether there was land to settle on or not.  I am interested in how people aspire toward a utopia and continually find what underlies the opposite of their aspirations a delusive contentment.   In the Heaven’s Gate cult, a subject that I have worked with in the past, the followers got engrossed with the idea of taking their lives to ride an alien space craft that followed Comet Hale Bopp to the “Next Level.” an uncertain afterlife. I wish for my paintings to reveal the process of aspiration that the Heaven’s Gate members strove for.  When one looks at my work, I hope to direct the viewer with a slow revelation of the initial allure and intrigue, with color and energetic gesture, then with what lies behind: people with shrouds over their bodies hoping to ultimately arrive at the “Next Level.” I am not against aspiration. I am fascinated by the process of hope and how humanity and this world too often get in the way.

http://shannawaddell.com/

http://christopherdavison.com/

Through June 1

By Daniel Gerwin

The other night I dreamt I was running through an empty, decrepit city: buildings were crumbling onto the street, the pavement was broken up, and there was no one in sight.  I was panicked, searching for my wife and ten-month-old son.  A group of dangerous looking men blocked my path and surrounded me.  As they circled closer I saw more of their group nearby, carrying maimed but living captives, and I somehow understood that these prisoners were being kept as food.   I woke up and realized I was dreaming Amze Emmons’ current exhibit, Informal City, at Works On Paper.

Trained as a printmaker, Emmons has an immediately recognizable touch in that medium, characterized by his ability to break apart print language even as it constructs an image.  For example, he devised his own recipe for the hard ground used in etching, adjusting the traditional method such that his ground does not perfectly protect the metal plate from the acid bath.  As a result, the printing surface becomes pocked and decayed even as the image is formed, and lines have a rough quality.  The parallel in Informal City’s drawings and paintings is the visibility of leftover preliminary linework, as in Public Knowledge Base (2013), and incongruously colored halos surrounding certain forms (presumably from earlier layers), as in the suitcases in Rollerboard Shelter (2013). The show also includes screenprints on MDF shaped to fit pictures of things like cell phones, disposable cups, and water bottles.  These prints are affordably priced, reflecting Emmons’ desire to give his art a life outside the realm of luxury goods.

It is tempting to call the show post-apocalyptic, but I think that would be a mistake. Modern Popular Movement (2011) looks to me like a reference to the U.S. military’s decision to set up shop in Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces during the Iraq war, though given the title and date it more likely points to the Libyan revolution. Emmons stages his scenes in ruined urban environments that compare to today’s Syria, yesterday’s Iraq, and also resemble blighted areas of Philadelphia.  The shanties, stolen electricity, and water tanks he portrays are a global phenomenon fueled by refugee crises and extreme poverty, and the environmental havoc implied by an image like The Lost Pageant (2008) is already well underway. We never see the inhabitants of Informal City, so we know little about them beyond their need to survive after civil society has evaporated.

Emmons generally delivers his harsh visions in candy colors, which may be a strategy to help the medicine go down, but also points to consumer culture as one source of our problems.  His color comes from things like plastic toys, low-end advertising, and commercial packaging.  Ghost Cargo (2013) drives the point home with its colorful collection of handbags on display outside a makeshift dwelling that looks unlikely to survive the large chunks of ice falling from the sky.

Daniel Gerwin is an artist living in Philadelphia.  His work can be seen this summer in the group show In Front of Strangers, I Sing at the Woodmere Art Museum, and in a three-person show at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, curated by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Jen Mergel.

by Gabriela Vainsencher

Walk into Locks gallery anytime between now and May 10th, and you will be delighted: the vast gallery is filled with colorful paintings of lush indoors and lovely outdoors. The rooms depicted are French and gorgeous, with high vaulted ceilings and exquisite furniture, paintings, and chandeliers. The outdoor scenes are all Vietnamese (sort of, we’ll get to that in a second) and feature pure open skies, jungles full of temples and palm trees, and seas filled with boats. If you look at all these, and don’t read the press release or the paintings’ labels, you will come out believing you understand what it is all about – I thought the paintings were a backward look toward impressionism, at the conflict between the landscape that inspires a bourgeois mural and the mural itself – never a correct representation of one place, always an amalgam of variously-sourced exotica. Maybe I thought they were about colonialism in a general sort of way.

Locks gallery chose Malouiniere Mauve, 2012, for the show’s invitation card with good reason. The painting contains the basic elements of the show: European interiors, Vietnamese exteriors, and the fiction-making medium between them, the mural – in a tight bond. In the painting, a light-filled luxurious French interior painted from observation in one of Jane Irish’s recent trips to the Brittany region of France, is decked out in diaphanous curtains and plush upholstery. The painting offers two views of the outside world: one through windows and French doors, in which we glimpse a general, luminous countryside, and the second is a mural, framed by a decorative trompe-l’oeil edge, which offers a seaside view of what Irish describes as a mix of oriental exotica, something a wealthy French family would commission to have painted in its living room in the Rococo era. On the gallery’s opposite wall is a corner-hugging mural-sized painting (Sông Hu’o'ng, 2013), in which the same decorative edge returns, this time to frame Irish’s own composition of actual places along the Sông Hương river in the Hue region of Vietnam.

Irish’s painting style is post-impressionistic, something between revelling in the effects of light and suffering the effects of 21st-century guilt over beauty felt by many painters today. The paintings move from meticulous renderings of architecture and furniture to almost harried vertical stripes that do little more than cover up some of the more beautiful details. To me, that seemed like the most interesting conflict contained within the works: what could, and should, a painter in the 21st century do with so much beauty? Irish acknowledges having a double conflict with beauty: firstly, she sees herself as an artist driven foremost by a political agenda rather than a formalist one – two painted vases on display feature images of Vietnam Vets Against the War (VVAW), whose cause has been Irish’s main motivation for over a decade. Secondly, according to her, she consciously tries to make the paintings “not too frou-frou”, or overly done, a mechanism of conscious self-vandalism that has a long history in art.

Sông Hương: Withdrawing Room is at once deeply satisfying to look at and equally tricky to understand: seemingly on display are French interiors and Vietnamese exteriors. Actually, several of the rooms depicted were a pastiche of multiple spaces Irish painted in, and some of the landscapes were not painted from Irish’s observations of Vietnam, but from her observations of French murals, which, in turn, did not depict Vietnam, or any other place, accurately. But some of her paintings are of real places in Vietnam like Sông Hương. Irish told me that her work is about Americans: how American aristocracy developed its taste according to a French model, aided by the likes of art dealer Joseph Duveen, and about the cause of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and about doing the right thing for the Vietnamese people by depicting their country’s beauty as it really is. While Irish’s complete and sincere devotion to the political causes that have propelled her to travel and paint in Vietnam and France is compelling, it is striking how much this show, despite its creator’s intentions, does not scream “political art!”. Furthermore, I think it is exactly this show’s relative ambiguity, compared with previous bodies of work in which VVAW rallies were juxtaposed with traditional Vietnamese poetry, that makes it more interesting and more effective.

The show’s most intriguing work is the large Yellow and Red, from 2013. It looks like a giant sketch-pad, an enlarged version of what we might find in the hidden depths of an impressionist’s trove of preparatory sketches: set atop a flat milky-ochre background are the red, purple and burgundy images of elephants, temples, droopy flags and flying ships. A giant tree-trunk in mid-descent hangs from the top edge of the picture. This scattered, bewitching painting seems like a strong direction for Irish’s work, as it embraces its own inherent confusions and intricacies.

Gabriela Vainsencher is an Argentinean-born Israeli artist living and working in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Her drawings, installations and videos have been shown in the US and abroad, most recently in 2012 at the Musee d’Art Moderne, Le Havre, France, where her latest video Reconstruction, premiered. She is the founder of the Morning Drawing Residency, writes about art for Title Magazine and occasionally teaches art at Williams College, in Williamstown, MA.

By Anne Schaefer

Kate Abercrombie is a Philadelphia-based artist working out of her home studio in Fishtown. Earlier this month, I visited her and her studio assistant, Polly the cat, to see new works in progress and discuss her studio practice. 

AS: One of my initial observations in your studio is the richness and density of color, form, and patterning in the paintings.  Although pattern and density often provide the potential for an all-over-and-at-once experience, you seem to resist such an experience and introduce elements that build a visual hierarchy.  There are moments when visual rhythms of the work shift, structures build or dissolve; often there are moments where the work becomes static or quiet despite the visual excess. Can you talk about how this is achieved and how it reveals your intent for the work? 

KA: The shifts and disruptions are what I am most interested in. I construct places in the paintings on the edge of coming apart in an attempt to convey a particular tone for each work.  Forms, color and patterning exist on an equal playing field– I don’t consider one more essential than another. I utilize subtle shifts in their interaction to form the paintings.

I begin by drawing and choosing a palette. The drawings are almost diagrammatic, both in their approach and in how they are used at this stage of the work.  The material I often paint with, gouache, can require some planning because layering can be limited.  More importantly I am interested in how pattern, repetition, and the relationship between forms can create tensions through interaction and color choice. The underlying structure of repeated forms allows me to make more intuitive moves that introduce new layers and forms.

The work relies on a kind of call-and-response of planning and intuition, each gaining validity when acting with the other. The scale of forms and the overall quality of the work relate to my interest in words on a page. I think a good deal about the viewing experience having a connection to reading. The size of the work often relates to this connection, but sometimes scale is dictated by the labor involved in the creation of the work.

AS: When you describe the paintings as having a relationship to language and reading, do you consider the use of color and scale in repeating motifs analogously to a noun augmented by different verbs, adjectives and adverbs? Do you align visual rhythm to cadence of writing or syntax?

KA: This is a tough question in a way because I am a dreadful writer but a careful reader, so I can only approach it speaking as a reader. I think that writing and art are both about communication and craft, which allows me to draw an easy connection between them. In both, I am interested in formal constructs. The way language is crafted, how the specificity of word choice can alter the rhythm of a written work is a definite influence on how I think about abstraction. I do not specifically associate to parts of speech in a nameable way as you described in your question. My thought process is more abstract and intuitive, but there are main elements with supporting forms. Scale, color and form are very much the vocabulary of the work and their interactions control speed and determine the visual hierarchy in the work.

AS: You brought up the labor involved in making your work. The scale and complexity of the forms, the layering of form, and the tightly controlled surface call attention to the time necessary to create the paintings.  I find myself thinking about the connection to labor in the viewing experience. These attributes of time, layers and surface seem essential to an understanding of your studio practice. 

KA: I used to worry about labor a great deal with the work. I was mostly concerned that it would become a gimmick in some way or would make the work seem quaint. I am kind of over past worries right now because the labor and time are necessary to craft the work. Because of the initial planning and drawing I do for each piece, the basic elements of the work are often set in place in the early stages, and a good deal of time can then be spent on subtle choices of color and clarity of form. Each of these has the potential to shift the work dramatically as I build the paintings by layering.

I tend to work on a number of pieces at once. Smaller, quicker pieces allow for more immediate experimentation. Working on multiple pieces allows me to step back from the paintings so I don’t get too finicky.

AS: When you are working on multiple pieces at the same time, are they related and/or do you see them as a series? Looking around the studio, it seems that there are re-appearing motifs.  Does working with the same or similar motifs in a body of work help you to develop ideas?  Additionally, related to motif, how do you work with referential imagery or recognizable patterning (Islamic tile, kaleidoscopic geometric forms, a faceted gem)? 

KA: It is a mix. I feel some works are connected and constitute a series while other pieces I view much more independently. There is always a connection on some level because the work feeds from one piece to the next. When making a piece, new questions arise that trigger a need to make subsequent work. Also, while working on multiple pieces simultaneously, I think there is some crossover that naturally occurs – they are in dialog with one another in the studio. I repeat motifs to explore differing avenues of approach and to find how subtle shifts can change the work.  I pull referential imagery from a variety of sources, but I tend to be drawn to imagery that has strong geometry and is often already quite abstract, although that is not always the case for all works. For example, the current work in my studio has a mix of imagery drawn from life with found imagery. I am interested in creating levels of visual legibility in both the source imagery and their interactions within the works.  I tend to be drawn to imagery that may not be specifically nameable but is present in visual culture or has a recognizable quality.  I think that this allows an entrance for the viewer to the work and can make the more dissolved areas in the pieces have a better support system.

AS: What is your relationship to beauty? Do you think that the aesthetics of the piece can similarly attract the viewer or provide a comfortable point of entry, just as some of the patterning you have just described does?

KA: I am lucky because I do not have much baggage associated with beauty. I am very interested in aesthetics. Although I do not have a stance set in stone, I lean heavily toward inclusion.  Pleasure in work is something that I do not wish to shy away from.  Much of my source imagery is predesigned to be visually inviting to a viewer, and my work is both an embrace of this as well as an attempt to complicate things.

AS: How do you establish a timeline for working? Do you visit the studio every day?

KA: Time is a constant struggle, but I think that is universal.  I try to check in daily (this can be a few minutes to many hours). On some days, my visits are almost in hope that things have progressed or changed over night. It is easy to visit my studio since it is in my home,which is nice because you can work with your pajamas on. I work a full time job and do try to sometimes have a social life so time in the studio varies. Weekends are the best time for solid long periods. On the weekdays, I have to visit the studio before or after work.  Sometimes I am super productive and excited to be in my studio while other days I force myself with the promise of mini rewards. I think that my experience is pretty common. I can only structure time in advance if I have a pressing deadline, at which point life sort of shuts down outside of my studio. Otherwise, it is a balance, trying to keep things moving and my presence constant.

Kate Abercrombie is an artist who lives, works and teaches in Philadelphia. She received her BFA in 2000 from Tyler School of Art and MFA from University of Texas, Austin in 2011. She is currently a Master Printer at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Abercrombie has exhibited at Philadelphia galleries Vox Populi and Fleisher/Ollman, among others. She has shown at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and has been the recipient of a Philadelphia Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. 

This discussion took place on Sunday, March 31st, 2013 at Vox Populi for the closing of Collection, an exhibit that featured works of art from Vox Populi Members’ and Board Members’ personal art collections.  Five guest speakers were invited to discuss a myriad of different avenues involved with art collecting.  One avenue under discussion was particularly close to my heart: collecting art in Philadelphia.  Libby Rosof, John Ollman, Debra Ward, Jacque Liu and Anne Schaefer offered a wide spectrum of conversation on the subject of art collecting due to each of their unique roles.  Libby Rosof is an artist and art critic for the famous Philly art blog, theartblog.org.  John Ollman owns Fleisher/Ollman gallery, and as an art dealer has helped shape a number of collections embracing self taught artists.  Debra Ward is President of Vox Populi’s Board of Directors and an avid art collector who collects predominantly Philadelphia artists. Jacque Liu and Anne Schaefer contribute their experience organizing relationships between collectors and artists through the Community Supported Art program.  Jacque and Anne are also involved with their own artist-run galleries.  Jacque Liu is a member of Grizzly Grizzly and Anne Schaefer is the director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid.  Did I mention they’re artists too?

Vox Populi Members and Board Members were invited to participate in a cell phone tour that accompanied the Collection exhibit.  The prompt was open for them to share a story of their choosing in relation to the artwork.  In addition to sharing with you audio from the panel here are a few clips hand picked from the Collection exhibit.  Thanks for listening.

Beth Heinly is a member of Vox Populi and co-organized their recent exhibit, Collection. Her website is domesticwildcatrefuge.com

Joy Feasley from the collection of Linda Yun

Jocelyn Lee from the collection of Kelsey Halliday Johnson

Lee Godie from the collection of John Ollman

Amze Emmons from the collection of Erin Murray

Collection: A Panel Discussion

by Rachel Reese

 

L-R: Susan York, Tilted Column (left),, 2008, graphite pencil on BFK paper; Susan York, Untitled, 2008, graphite sculpture; Susan York, Untitled, 2008, graphite pencil on Arches 88. Photograph by Rachel Reese, courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art, all promised gifts of Marleen De Bode and Marc Olivie

 

In early February, I traveled south on 1-85 for a few hours to take a day trip to Columbus, GA. I went to visit Dawn Black’s exhibition, Conceal Project, at the Columbus Museum of Art and became engulfed with Promises of Great Things to Come: Future Gifts to the Collection of the Columbus Museum on view in its third floor gallery and organized to celebrate the Museum’s 60th anniversary [December 4, 2012-February 3, 2013].

This exhibition was not only successful in demonstrating the active collector base in the area that is supportive of the Columbus Museum, but highlighted challenging contemporary artworks the Museum will acquire (or has ‘recently’ acquired in the past 60 years). There was a focus on select collectors’s personal histories as well as a video that demonstrated to museum-goers how an art object travels and transfers from private to public collections.

One such acquisition, a triptych installation of works by Susan York, held me captive—not only for its individual staying power, but also for its common sensibilities with the late Philadelphia artist Bill Walton, whose estate has only very recently began actively exhibiting and receiving considerable attention. York, an artist living and working in Santa Fe, uses graphite as the common denominator between her 2D and 3D forms. She casts solid graphite to build (mostly) rectilinear forms that are composed of both hard and soft edges—the medium allows for both conscious manipulation and compromises.

The Columbus Museum is acquiring three individual Susan York works from 2008 as promised gifts of Marleen De Bode and Marc Olivié: Tilted Column (left), an oversized graphite work on BFK paper; Untitled, a small-ish graphite sculpture (installed in the middle of the triptych); and Untitled, a graphite pencil work on Arches 88. The large framed drawing is propped or leaned onto the wall—both embracing its gravity and scale and also referencing the graphite object (and its implied weight) that was used to produce the drawing. The other two works act as an intimately self-referential pair: The middle graphite sculpture was used to produce the drawing on the right, so there is not only a somewhat uncanny mirroring that happens, but also there is a direct conversation to process and York’s methodology.

Susan York, Diptych, 2010, 30 x 22 inches, graphite sculpture and paired drawing, copyright of the artist.

Bill Walton, Sue’s Coat #4, n.d., brass, copper, 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and the Estate of Bill Walton.

Bill Walton (1931-2010) is one artist whose works balance and define relationships with scale, material and space. One might say that speaking in verbs serves his practice fittingly—to prop, to stack, to lean, to bend, to balance—all come to mind, and this is clearly a driving component in York’s visual language as well. Both show an awareness of larger, cognitive space—our individual experiences of the works and their spatial relationships created—as well as an inter-relational and reflexive scale. And it feels necessary to speak of ‘intimacy’—not only as a function of size, but as an attitude and practice towards their respective mediums. In this way, a reverence for the handmade combined with a frugality of gesture allows concise formal decisions to speak volumes. Both York and Walton play with ideas of rest versus action by instituting constructs on nature—using and manipulating natural materials and elements (graphite for York; wood, lead, palladium, iron, linen etc. for Walton)—while at the same time allowing nature to impose itself on the work (via imperfections for York, chemical reactions for Walton).

Installation image, Bill Walton: Sculptures, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, February 24-March 26, 2011, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and the Estate of Bill Walton.

The Columbus Museum of Art holds a lot of contemporary surprises—new acquisitions by Leo Villareal and Sally Mann are also promised gifts that delighted—and the first floor exhibition revealed several works from their permanent collection such as an early Sam Gilliam painting (So and So from 1965), a striking Roger Brown painting (Trailer Park, Truck Stop from 1971), and a color video triptych by Bill Viola (Poem A from 2005). While the museum’s floor plan is odd and a lot of space feels wasted by a large, central atrium, spend time in the galleries and you just might find your own Susan York moment.

 
Rachel Reese is an independent curator and arts writer. She produces Possible Press, a curated newsprint publication of artists’ writings, as well as Possible Projects, a curatorial program with her husband Trevor. She is the Editor of BURNAWAY Magazine in Atlanta. Most recently, Reese was Assistant Director of Fleisher/Ollman Gallery from 2010-2012 and the Financial Director of Deitch Projects during its final years, 2009-2011.

Permanent Residents is a monthly column curated by Andrew Alexander:
In arts writing, there is a lot of focus on the new and the temporary. What about works that are permanently here in our city? This column seeks to address that imbalance by asking guest writers to engage with work that’s part of our shared permanent collection, providing them the space to reflect on a work that intrigues, excites, and is permanently available for contemplation by readers.

 

 

To call Sarah McEneaney a Philadelphia artist is only half-true. The city and, more specifically, the neighborhood she has called her own for forty years is frequently front and center in her painting. But McEneaney embodies worldliness by equal measure, in practice and subject matter. She bears the standard for Philadelphia when visiting far off places, often literally. In a medium that cannot communicate subtle behavioral traits that may indicate local origin, a visual aid is necessary. For McEneaney, a Phillies cap does the trick. Beyond a literal depiction of fandom and hometown pride, it communicates a lifetime of personal history.

In her essay for ICA’s 2004 McEneaney exhibition, curator Ingrid Schaffner wrote: “To say that Sarah McEneaney is a narrative painter immediately begs the question: What story does her work tell? That she paints in a miniaturist style, further demands: And what are the details?”[1] The Phillies cap, one such detail, is an accessory that has appeared in McEneaney’s recent work with some regularity. She appreciates baseball caps for their utilitarian purpose, shielding one’s face from the sun, as well as what she calls a “quintessential Americanness.” They also function as a connector to Philadelphia, whether traveling around the world, as in Brittany, France (2011) or sitting in the ballpark and rooting for the home team, as in Baseball (2010). In both cases we view her from the back, making the “P” insignia invisible. Knowing that the cap represents the Phillies is a coded detail that adds to the richness of her painted world.

The start of McEneaney’s relationship with the Phillies coincided with their historic hot streak in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though not a native of the area, she decided to settle in Philadelphia after finishing at PAFA in 1979 and bought the Callowhill property where she still lives today. She never played a team sport growing up, but it did not stop her from being recruited to a softball team of artists. Her responsibility was twofold: pitcher and equipment manager. Being personally involved with an amateur team reinforced her burgeoning interest in the city’s professional club. The Phillies, who had strung together consecutive regular season successes (1^st in the National League East from 1976-78) followed by postseason failures, were on the cusp of making good on their promise for a run at the championship.

McEneaney’s team played in Franklin Square and made nearby Paddy’s Pub their post-game watering hole. At that time the regular Paddy’s crowd was a steady mix of young artists (the Painted Bride Art Center being just around the corner) and older blue-collar drinkers. It was here in 1980 that she watched the Phillies clinch the NL pennant and triumph in the World Series. She recalls hopping in a car with friends, horn blaring, to circle City Hall after the decisive game six win, as well as turning out for the victory parade. The Phillies charged onward into the 80s with diminishing returns, aside from an unsuccessful return trip to the World Series in 1983. McEneaney remained involved with her softball team for many years until the group eventually dispersed. Like all of her personal activities, softball found its way into her art. In her 1987 triptych Mondays, the day the team practiced, McEneaney stands at the mound, arm cocked to deliver a pitch. In the contemporaneous After Softball, we see her having just arrived back home, glove still on.

Separated by more than two decades, there is a steady through line that links Mondays and the later painting Baseball (2010). The two scenes convey the same love of being outdoors as do McEneaney’s plenteous scenes of hiking, skiing, or swimming. It may seem that she and her friends are simply spectators watching the game from the right field upper deck. But she has distorted the dimensions of the field, making it appear to be much wider than it actually is. The players are barely-identifiable specks down far below (more on this later). The grandstand looms in the distance like a mountain ridge. Only a slice of the sky peeks through at the top of the diamond-shaped canvas. Citizens Bank Park remains recognizable as a manmade structure, but McEneaney treats it much like the rugged landscapes that she often shows herself traversing. Immersed in a stadium that can seat upwards of 40,000, or at least in her vision of it, she is able to feel as solitary as she is in nature.

Lest anyone think that McEneaney’s perception of the Phillies is entirely rosy, she is quick to point out her uneasiness over the tension in major league baseball between athletes who are in it for the love of the game and more avaricious types who gravitate towards its big business potential. The club and Mayor John Street ran afoul of McEneaney in 2000 when a new stadium development plan was announced to replace The Vet. The proposal called for much of Chinatown to be taken over by eminent domain and leveled; her Callowhill neighborhood was to be severely affected too. At the time nobody was organized to fight back, so McEneaney sprung into action mobilizing fellow residents. Together they were ultimately successful in forcing an about face on the plan, driving attention back to South Philadelphia for a new site. Campaigning against the stadium became a regular part of McEneaney’s life for a short while, which she portrayed in the painting No Stadium (2000).

But for the potentially negative outcome, the stadium scare was a good learning experience in the art of community organizing and petitioning City Hall. McEneaney subsequently cofounded the Callowhill Neighborhood Association and now serves as its Board President. She has said, “My studio process is a very solitary one, but I think that one of the reasons I have gotten so involved in neighborhood activism is because I want to be connected to the world I live in.”[2] McEneaney remains upbeat about an individual ballplayer’s capacity to do good deeds for the city. Chase Utley is a current favorite of hers because of his charitable efforts for the SPCA. Paradoxically, she finds it difficult to become too attached to any player because of the ever-present specter of what she calls an “inevitable fall from grace.” Case in point: she held Carlos “Chooch” Ruiz in high esteem until the end of last season when he tested positive for PEDs. If anyone, the Phanatic is her evergreen preferred team personality.

Turning back to the depiction of players on the field in Baseball, their anonymity is emblematic of McEneaney’s tempered attitude towards the modern game. It could be said that much of the visual art made about sport—from the Classical age through present day—puts hero-worship front and center. Surprisingly, for its status as America’s pastime, few examples of art about baseball spring to front of mind. Those that do (cf. Thomas Eakins or Norman Rockwell) are more about the players. In contrast McEneaney shows the spectator experience, as well as the varied personal rituals of a fan, casual as her support might be. She stands miles apart from whatever the outside world’s vision of an archetypal “Philadelphia Fan” is but still shares in those daily decisions guided by impulse, like whether to pull on a Phillies hat or a shirt, as she does in Twilight (2012).

At the opening of the 2013 Major League Baseball season, general consensus trends towards the Phillies’ recent slide being terminal. The dizzying heights of the Charlie Manuel era, which for many rekindled an interest in the team and rallied local morale for a time, are unlikely to return soon. A fallow period of rebuilding is imminent, but the cyclical nature of team performances over time suggests that success will return. Does it mean that we will see fewer Phillies hats, jerseys, and jackets being worn around the city? Perhaps the way to address the question is to consider the comprehensive experience of following a local team. Being a fan stipulates devotion in thick and thin; the victories are sweeter and they ameliorate leaner years. There is also an intrinsic give and take, because where would a professional team be without its fans?

Likewise, Sarah McEneaney is simultaneously a fan and a player in a real life game operating on levels micro to macro. The personal mission of championing Philadelphia will continue to provide autobiographical narrative for her art and be mirrored in her support of the Phillies.

Chris Davison is a Philadelphia-based artist, currently sharing a two-person studio in the Crane building in Kensington. His mixed-media drawings explore an ever-evolving ‘psycho-mythological’ world culled from his sub-conscious and daily experiences. Throughout March, Chris and I discussed his most recent work, views on drawing, and fascination with Art History.

Mark Stockton: I want to start our interview with this idea of identifying one’s own practice as drawing.  Where do you place yourself and studio practice in relation to this qualifier? Does it matter?

Christopher Davison: In general I align myself more with drawing than painting. I agree with the standard definitions: drawing relying more on line and painting relying more on shape. Still, what really makes something a drawing to me has more to do with its construction. There is something essentially candid about the way drawings reveal their history. Even when viewing a painting in which process is playing an important role, what I often find myself responding to is the impressiveness of the end result. Perhaps there is something so approachable and utilitarian about “line” that when we see a drawing, we cannot help but contemplate how it was used to construct. The great drawers from art history are like magicians showing off how their tricks are performed. Despite the insight, when the trick is done well we still get the sinking sensation we have just witnessed something unreal or impossible. It’s the tension between showing all your cards and pulling off the illusion that I am attracted to.

MS: You bring up this interesting idea of witnessing the unreal.  Your work consistently contains a figurative component embedded within a surreal environment based in materiality and mark-making. What is the inspiration for your subject matter?

CD: The imagery is derived from memory. Drawing from reference is often about capturing a singular moment in time, whereas working from memory allows me to simultaneously portray several disparate moments. All of the memories are from my life, waking or otherwise. If the work appears mythological or supernatural it’s probably due to way that memory allows various modes of perception to mesh together. For example, one drawing may combine the memory of an interesting person that I saw on the subway, an animal with a human face that I met in a dream, and an exotic location that I read about in a book.  Ultimately, subject matter is more important during the earlier phases of a drawing where it’s used to give the composition a sense of direction and meaning. As a work develops the central focus becomes shape, color, and pattern.

MS: One of the interesting things about your overarching body of work is that even though it goes through different phases of both form and materiality (print-making, pen and ink, color pencil, water colors, oil painting, animation, and so on…) the visual vernacular still remains unmistakably particular to you.  How do you retain a consistent voice in this wide range of media?  How does process inform your personal language?

CD: When I start a new piece I work myself into a state of mind where mark making is the result of an overwhelming sense of urgency, and formal decisions occur at a primal or unconscious level. It’s like the rudimentary “fight or flight” part of my brain is doing all the work and I’m just relying on instinct. To complete a piece I have to be in complete control of pattern, shape and color. But to start a piece I try to remove my conscious self from the process as much as possible. The consistency in visual vernacular is probably a result of this “removal.” It’s as if the unconscious self has a unique aesthetic fingerprint that leaves its impression from one piece to the next.

MS: As apparent in both your studio and tumblr page, you often work on many pieces simultaneously.  When do you know or get the feeling that a work is complete? Are there cast-aways?

CD: By developing several things at the same time, the work begins to have a dialogue with itself; each piece suggesting possibilities for the next. Part of my job in the studio is to listen to that dialogue. I know something is complete when I step back from it and the urge to add, subtract, or otherwise change something is absent. I’m always a bit surprised or taken off-guard when I arrive at that moment. If the feeling holds true for a couple of days, then I know things are done. Sometimes a piece is finished after only a day or so, while other times it can take weeks, months, or even years. There are rarely cast-aways, but it’s quite common to paint over particularly irksome passages or entire pieces.

MS: You’ve spoken about the urgency behind starting a new drawing. Does all of your work get made in your studio, or does the urge to make find it’s way back into your home?

CD: The inspiration to start drawing can hit me at the most random times throughout the day. It’s the urge to flesh out form or an arrangement of forms. Any small shaky sketches done at home, or when I’m out for a walk can then be transferred to larger surfaces back in the studio for more in-depth study. This allows drawing to be about being in the world instead of being in my isolated studio.

MS: On my visit, we talked about our mutual interest in being “art history geeks” and travelling to see some fairly obscure shows in person. Who are your current ‘old school’ favorites?

CD: The artists that inspire me are the ones who deal with the dynamic tensions between life and death, light and dark, creation and destruction. A short list includes Lucas Cranach The Elder, Goya, William Blake, Durer, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Otto Dix, Giotto, Picasso, Egon Schielle, Grunewald, El Greco, Martin Schongauer, Brueghel, etc. For the record I look at a lot of contemporary artists as well, but the bulk of the inspiration for my art is derived from the work of the old masters.

Christopher Davison is an artist who lives, works and teaches in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in 2006 from Tyler School of Art and is represented by  Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles. 

by Sarah Burford

Defining “outsider art” is a fraught task to undertake. As the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s opening panel to “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection asks, such art is “Outside of what,” exactly? Aligned at the beginning of the twentieth century with art of the mentally ill, the work of “outsider” artists has historically sustained associations with Art Brut, folk art, and, most recently, the description “self-taught.” After viewing a landmark 1982 show of African-American folk art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, collectors Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz’s interest in self-taught artists blossomed. In “Great and Mighty Things,” the Bonovitzs’ incredible promised gift of works produced outside of academic or traditional avenues of art making is well positioned for inclusion in a widened art historical canon. The phrase “Great and Mighty Things” comes from the artist Reverend Howard Finster, whose spirited assemblages combining text with popular and religious imagery are included in the show alongside works by other well-known self-taught artists, including James Castle’s wonderfully tactile stitched collages and Bill Traylor’s masterful, enigmatic watercolors. According to John Ollman, owner of Philadelphia’s Fleisher/Ollman gallery and a longtime dealer of self-taught artists, the Bonovitz collection is cultivated largely based on the resonance of particular artworks, rather than a need to collect guided by encyclopedic or chronological impulses.

Such a decision on the part of the collectors perhaps best reveals the nature of the work itself: created outside the mainstream art world, there are some aesthetic similarities among certain artworks, but one is loathe to pin down a particular set of formal characteristics that define a work as “outsider.” This is a good thing, and the show correspondingly presents particular sections of the space devoted to the work of each artist. While the twenty-seven artists featured in “Great and Mighty Things” possess powerful personal histories and have some biographical details in common—many come from a rural background, some have spent time in mental hospitals, others create their work following a moment of divine inspiration, and many speak to historically marginalized American experiences—the format discourages viewers from considering their work through biography alone. Instead, one is offered an opportunity to view the art on its own terms, reinforced by an installation within the typical institutional parameters of the white cube. This clear and conventional framing is frequently at odds with the original context of the pieces. The excellent audio guide accompanying the exhibition, which includes archival photographs of the artists with their works, is well worth perusing for a more thorough sense of each artist’s technical process and the visual potency the works possess in a variety of contexts.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s works open the show, kicking off the exhibition’s particular strength in sculpture. His delicately molded, luminescent ceramics aligned in glass cases along the wall recall both installations of ancient pottery and the shimmering ceramic works of Lynda Benglis, while the artist’s Chicken Bone Thrones and Chicken Bone Tower transform earthy found objects (supposedly leftover from TV dinners) into intricate, whimsical architectonic forms. It is easy to see why the Museum of Modern Art held a solo exhibition of William Edmonson’s work in 1937 (the first African-American artist to do so); his abstracted, elegant limestone sculptures of birds, horses, and sheep bring to mind modernist sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. The shadows and slight swaying of Emory Blagdon’s delicate hanging sculptures Balance, Single Balance, and Airplane are framed beautifully in their installation, inset into a three-sided, box-like space. Their wiry forms are all the more compelling when one discovers that these sculptures originally numbered in the hundreds, installed in the artist’s Nebraska shed in a colossal environment Blagdon dubbed “The Healing Machine,” an effort to mobilize art’s power as a restorative force to ward off threats of illness following the deaths of the artist’s parents from cancer.

Many of the exhibition’s two-dimensional works refuse to remain defined as such, incorporating found materials that energize their surfaces. Simon Sparrow’s wildly decorative Assemblage with Faces, a lush accumulation of shells, glitter, buttons, and other objects on wood, juxtaposes statuettes of American colonists, Star Wars characters, and angels’ wings, revising their symbolic associations in the process. William Hawkins’ eye-catching Boffo deftly uses bright color and a fantastic tactile quality to depict a bull’s mane and horns, jutting out from their two-dimensional frame. The dates and materials incorporated into many of the works in “Great and Mighty Things” have proved challenging to determine. In the audio guide Curator Ann Percy remarks that several conservators and conservation specialists tested the works in order to best determine what materials the artists may have used. In Hawkins’ Boffo, for example, the museum discovered that the bull’s mane, made from what first appears to be asphalt, was in fact constructed using cornstarch covered in black paint. The rich material and tactile qualities of these pieces are complemented by the canny use of line and color in many of the exhibition’s works on paper, including the bold forms of Martín Ramírez’s complex compositions, delicate pen and ink drawings by Consuelo González Amezcua, and George Widener’s stunning mapping of numerical and temporal sequences in Blue Monday (Reversal).

In a passionate advocacy for further integration of works by self-taught and academically trained artists in museum collections, Roberta Smith writes, “Homogeneity dulls the eye and lulls the brain. It is the discrepancies that grab our attention and make us look more sharply and deeply.” (“Curator, Tear Down These Walls,” The New York Times, January 31, 2013) One indeed learns to look more sharply and deeply when walking through “Great and Mighty Things,” which for visitors might mark an important initiation into a whole pantheon of works, and a corresponding history of American artistic practice, rarely encountered in mainstream art museums. With this also comes an appreciation that one is, in viewing such fresh, reenergizing pieces, just beginning to scratch the surface of possibilities for displaying and organizing exhibitions incorporating these works. The PMA already has a well-established tradition of collecting and exhibiting work by self-taught artists (as in the recent James Castle retrospective organized in 2008). The Bonovitz Collection’s promised gift marks an exciting opportunity, which one would hope is taken up not only by the Philadelphia Museum of Art but also by other institutions, to revise, rupture, and expand the art historical canon, and to build upon the rich visual possibilities such work yields for future curatorial and collections practice.

Sarah Burford is an MA/PhD student in History of Art at Bryn Mawr College and works with the programming department at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. 

Vox Populi

Through March 31

By Daniel Gerwin

Collection is a show brimming with love, and it might just be the start of a felicitous thaw at Vox Populi.  Over the four years that I’ve lived in Philadelphia, Vox has felt rather frosty, not so much because of the art on display as because of a chilly vibe that has permeated the place, even at sweaty summer openings.

But this show is different: each work belongs to either a Vox artist or board member, and the space is set up to be homey, filled with things like plants, lamps, chairs and coffee tables from the rooms of the people lending the work.  The gallery is redolent with the intimacy that evolves over years of living with a work of art.  There is fun to be had in looking at who each work belongs to: the fabulous James Castle is, of course, from the home of John Ollman (whose gallery, Fleisher Ollman, represents Castle); Sarah McEneaney has lent work by the marvelous painter Katherine Bradford, not to mention Fred Tomaselli and Philly’s own H. John Thompson.  I found myself imagining the story behind each piece: a terrific painting by Amze Emmons is lent by Erin Murray – did they trade, was it a gift, are they friends?  And in general, the quality of the work is extremely high, with memorable pieces by more artists than I could possibly name here. Rumor has it that this exhibit was conceived by Vox’s newest members, which is why it may be a sign of good things to come as new blood pumps through the group’s veins.

Collection also serves as a provocative rebuke to the Modernist white cube.  Most galleries show art in a barren, white-walled space in order to present the art as autonomous. In recent decades this conceptual foundation has taken on the unmistakable airlessness of the high-end marketplace, where everything is sleek and gleaming, including the staff at the front desks throughout Chelsea.  The result is antiseptic and anti-art.  Collection corrects all this by putting artwork in its best context: life as we live it every day, in our own homes.  Art is most vibrant in its contingency: how it feels in the company of this plant and that table, what it’s like to stop noticing something on your wall for a week, then suddenly rediscover it and fall in love all over again.

Daniel Gerwin is an artist living in Philadelphia, and his work can currently be seen in the latest issue of New American Paintings, no. 104 (Northeast).

Grace Ambrose loves Philadelphia. “I frankly find the city extremely inspiring; I feel very happy to be developing my practice and my work here,” she tells me over tea near the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she currently serves as the Spiegel Fellow. After graduating from Penn and attending a curatorial graduate program in London, Ambrose returned to Philly and began work on In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ambrose’s project weaves together Philadelphians and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a refreshingly personal way—through postcards. I talk to her about In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, her relationship with the PMA, and why she thinks Philly is “the greatest place to live in the world.”

Alina Grabowski: Could you describe In Open Letters A Secret Appears for me?

Grace Ambrose: I was living abroad and got really into sending postcards about art objects to people. It was a way to engage with art and art objects that I didn’t normally do in my own practice as a curator and an art historian. For this project, I asked 49 other Philadelphians to choose an object from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An image of that object will go on one side of a postcard, and their writing about that object—which can take whatever form they like—will go on the back. The postcards will be mailed out once a week for a year to 100 different people in Philadelphia, and they’ll also be sent out by e-mail because the demand is so high.

AG: It seems like you’re interested in the play between private and public that is inherent in a postcard. Is that something you wanted to explore?

GA: Yeah, one of the ways that I became interested in the postcard is because I wrote postcards about art objects to someone I was in a really intense emotional relationship with while I lived in London. I wrote about the idea that postcards are public—they’re open backed—and anyone who encounters them can read them. In some sense they only achieve their full meaning when they’re in the hands of the intended recipient, because you can encode things in a postcard that only that person will understand. The project takes its name from the phrase “an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably,” which comes from a Jacques Derrida book called The Post Card. What Derrida writes in the book doesn’t really have much to do with what I did here, but I thought that the phrase was perfect. I also thought of the idea of secrets within the museum, and my own personal experience with the museum, and secrets that I’ve found in it, and how a public institution can function in very private ways to people who live in the city with it. Even though the museum is for everybody, it’s for everyone in different ways. So I’m hoping that this kind of writing will allow the participants in the project, whether they know it or not, to express their own secrets in the process.

AG: So the initial seed you had for the project was your relationship with someone in the States while you were in London?

GA: That’s where I realized that this is how I enjoy writing. I developed the project through thinking about how to engage with the community that surrounds the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was involved through their Junior Fellows Program (which is funding the project), and with my own community of artists and writers. And with random people in Philadelphia that I like—how can I engage them in this project? I like the idea of the museum as a place full of objects, where you go to see objects. So rather than just doing a website, I decided to do something where people receive objects, and look at them and distinguish them as objects—postcards, that is.

AG: Why did you choose the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the foundation of the project and not, say, the Barnes?

GA: The PMA is the encyclopedic museum in Philadelphia. For In Open Letters A Secret Appears, people have chosen to write about everything from a plastic radio to the great masterpieces that you’re familiar with. The museum is a place that holds a lot of meaning for the city as a symbol. I’ve worked at the PMA, so I have a very personal relationship to it. While at the museum I worked with the artist Zoe Strauss on her exhibition there, which was really transformative for the museum, reaching all kinds of new audiences that they hadn’t encountered for many years.

AG: What do people tend to write about?

GA: Some people write specifically about the object and the personal memory they have with it, about the object’s art historical significance, or the artist who made the object. And some people use the object as a starting point to write, say, a poem, or a short story—a very short story—or some people use it as a way of continuing their own writing practices. The poet CAConrad makes these things called (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises, and he wrote a miniature one to fit on the back of a postcard for the project.

AG: What are you hoping will happen to postcards after they’ve been sent out and received?

GA: I’m hoping that people will keep a little stack of them. I really wanted to create a handmade box for everyone to have to keep the postcards in, but there wasn’t enough funding to support that. In some sense they’re intended to become an artist’s book that accumulates over time. And I hope people keep them and treat them in a way that they would treat the Philadelphia Museum of Art Handbook of the Collections, which is a book about objects in the collection. I hope people will keep their stacks of postcards next to their official handbook to the PMA, and have a different view of it.

AG: The project is obviously very Philly-centric. Would you say Philadelphia serves almost as the muse of the project?

GA: It’s one of the best places to be an artist or a writer, or a young person. You can have a job but also have the time to do the things you want to do. It’s a place that’s small enough that when you are able to do these types of things, a project can resonate. It’s a place where the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art can find out about your project and be interested in it. To me there’s a community that is very responsive to what goes on within the city. And that’s one of the reasons I came back here. It’s a place where what you do doesn’t just get lost in a sea of everyone doing things. What you do reverberates and makes a reaction, and people can relate to it and understand it. I plan to stay in Philly for a long time. So yeah, it is a muse; I love the city. I have some international subscribers, some people who live across the country, and some people who have never been to Philadelphia, and I hope that this project helps them see the city though a new light.

AG: Did you intentionally involve a wide variety people in the project, Philadelphians of all different disciplines?

GA: I invited people whose writing I liked and people I found so interesting that I thought they would be able to write something fantastic for this project, even if they didn’t necessarily identify as writers. So I asked people from all different aspects of my life in Philadelphia, like Zoe Strauss, Tony Smyrski from the Philadelphia photography magazine Megawords, Anthony Campuzano, who’s an artist, and CAConrad, who’s a poet. I asked people who I thought would be excited about this project, people who love this city and the objects within it. I asked a bunch of my current and former colleagues from the ICA. I think it’s a really good mix of art people and writing people, and also people who don’t identify as either. It’s been so exciting to see the objects people are picking. Some people are picking objects that the museum is known for, which is understandable. Some people have picked these incredible little objects that I didn’t even know existed, or photographs that have not been seen in the museum for 20 years and probably will not be shown again. It’s a really good way of mining the collection. It’s amazing for me to see what artworks people were drawn to in this collection of 25,000 objects—you can find little hooks that draw people in.

Interested in getting involved with Open Letters A Secret Appears? E-mail grace.ambrose@gmail.com for more information, and visit http://secretsappear.tumblr.com/ for updates.

“Turn around once and you’ve seen it,” joked Dr. Joseph Gregory. He was referring to the old space that housed Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. Tucked into the lobby of the unwelcoming Nesbitt Hall, the gallery was a veritable shoebox, incongruous with the growth and ambition that defined the presidency of Constantine Papadakis and which has continued under John Fry. The homely 1970s edifice housed Drexel’s College of Media Arts and Design (CoMAD) before it moved into the state-of-the-art URBN Center in late 2012.

The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery has a new home as well. The URBN Center Annex, a completely refurbished space that once served as a childcare facility, sits on Filbert Street just north of the URBN Center proper. The gallery has seen its square footage quintupled in a building that also contains a black box theater and a 100+ capacity screening room.

Dr. Gregory, Chair of Drexel’s Department of Art and Art History, has been involved with the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery since it was started in the late 1990s in honor of its late namesake, a university trustee and booster of CoMAD. Even though the gallery had no fixed home, it scored a major coup in 2002 with Threads of Majesty, a show of Chinese textiles. In spite of being on view for only two weeks, the New York Times put the show on the front page of its “Arts” section and the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. was present for the opening reception. Visitors flocked from all over the east coast to see rare silks being exhibited in the U.S. for the first time.

After the gallery had been allocated a home in Nesbitt Hall, Dr. Gregory began organizing exhibitions of ever increasing ambition, which culminated in the trifecta of Ink Not Ink (2009), Ni Una Más (2010), and Half The Sky (2011). The scale and number of works featured in each show meant they had to look beyond their tiny gallery space. The facility that now houses the URBN Center Annex, prior to its renovation, served as a pop-up gallery for the latter two of these three projects. The shows also set a high bar of achievement that displayed to the intramural community what a great exhibition can do. Drexel, historically best known for its engineering program, still had some catching up to do on nurturing broader valuation its fine arts.

With the full backing of CoMAD’s Dean Allen Sabinson, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery now has a space that befits its ambition. The next step is completion and implementation of a strategic plan that will enable more robust fundraising efforts. At present, the gallery is run by a part-time team of three, none of whom can devote their undivided attention to it. One of them is a graduate assistant drawn annually from Drexel’s Arts Administration program who, in addition to regular duties, is given the chance to curate a show during the summer. Dr. Gregory also sees opportunities to triangulate with other departments at CoMAD via the gallery, such as student and faculty exhibition exchanges being cultivated with fine arts universities in China. He has established a track record of staging exhibitions of international scope and he intends to build upon these global relationships.

The inaugural exhibition featuring artist Wangechi Mutu (on view through March 30) is one such example. Though she lives in New York, Mutu was born and grew up in Kenya, at that time still navigating the throes of post-colonialism. Mutu works in a variety of media: collages on display commingle clippings from adult magazines with antiquated medical diagrams depicting pathology of the female reproductive system; videos show her as a protagonist, in one laboring at the futile task of “cleaning” dirt and in another acting as a loony vagrant who hurls shoes at the viewer. The grandest piece is Suspended Playtime, comprising balled-up rubbish bags suspended from the ceiling. These spherical forms mimic the soccer balls that are fashioned by children living in slums, unable to afford proper sporting equipment but handy enough to improvise. The shape that is formed by the distribution of these suspended balls seems to demarcate the footprint of a small court at the varied moments in a game when the ball is passed through the air.

The gallery’s first opening reception in the new space was well-attended, a good sign for what Dr. Gregory hopes to achieve on campus. His attitude is the very opposite of the “leave us alone” isolationism that can sometimes infect professors or departments within a university. We can expect the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery to be a beacon at Drexel and to cement its prominence among the strong array of visual art forums in University City.

Jeffrey Bussmann works at the Institute of Contemporary Art  at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently completing his master’s thesis on Brazilian art and cultural organizations.