Citywide

From the UArts site:

More than 25 artist-run collectives collaborate to present a celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art this November

September 20, 2013

This November, more than 25 artist-run collectives will join forces to present a month-long celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art with CITYWIDE, a “massive collaboration” that will include a publication and feature performances, panel discussions, gallery openings and other programming in a variety of venues across the city. A Kickstarter campaign is underway through October 6 to help raise funds for this cross-collaborative event.

The University of the Arts, at the heart of Philly’s artist collective culture, is well represented at CITYWIDE, with a long list of alumni, faculty and staff whose work will be showcased during the exhibition. Participating UArts community members include Senior Lecturer and Academic AdvisorJordan Rockford BFA '00 (Photography), Craft & Material Studies Senior Lecturer Christina P. Day BFA '99 (Crafts), MFA in Studio Art Lecturer H. John Thompson MFA ’09 (Studio Art), Print Services staff member Jason Chen BFA '08 (Animation), Photography and MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking Senior Lecturer Julianna Foster MFA '06 (Book Arts/Printmaking), Sara McCorriston BFA '09 (Theater Design & Technology), Mary Smull BFA '95 (Fibers), Sculpture Shop Supervisor Lewis Colburn, Assistant Professor of Glass Alexander Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Lecturer Erica Prince and Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Senior LecturerDaniel Gerwin.

These artists are members of the 25-plus participating collectives that includes Vox Populi, Space 1026, Little Berlin, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Grizzly Grizzly, Marginal Utility, NAPOLEON, Fjord, Mt. Airy Contemporary Artists Space, Rebekah Templeton, Highwire Gallery, Basekamp, McCartney/Belknap Projects, Practice, Traction Company, InLiquid, Paradigm Gallery, Magic Pictures, Termite TV Collective, the Soapbox, Title Magazine, the Nicola Midnight St. Claire, Pterodactyl, Art/ Assembly, BYO Print and the OOF Animation Collective.

CITYWIDE is the recipient of a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge Grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“Philadelphia artists are dedicated community-builders. We pool our resources and volunteer our time to create gallery spaces, to make sure the art we're seeing and are moved by can be seen by anyone,” said Grizzly Grizzly artist curatorial member and former UArts lecturer Mary Smull. “CITYWIDE is possible because our audience has really responded and grown, and the Knight Foundation sees that and wants to support it.”

IMPORTANT DATES
Sunday, October 6
Kickstarter campaign ends

First Friday, November 1
CITYWIDE exhibit openings commence and continue through the first two weeks of November

Wednesday, November 13, 11:30 a.m.
CBS Auditorium
Nicola Trezzi Lecture: the U.S. editor for Flash Art will speak in conjunction with CITYWIDE

Wednesday, November 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Moore College of Art & Design
CITYWIDE Panel Discussion on artist-run spaces, moderated by Richard Torchia and including Matthew Higgs, Kaytie Johnson, Nicola Trezzi and others

Saturday, November 16, 2 – 5 p.m.
CITYWIDE Trolley Day: shuttle bus service between all participating sites

Tyler School of Art//Visiting Artists

FWM lectures

ROB SWAINSTON @ MARGINAL UTILITY

ROB SWAINSTON: WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION

6 September – 20 October 2013

Opening reception Friday, 6 September 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Artist reception Friday, 4 October 2013, from 6-11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION, a solo exhibition by the New York based artist Rob Swainston.

The show explores the interface between political and institutional structures, historical memory and print technology by exposing the “unstable image” in moments of visual interference—moiré, bitmap, collage, and line.

The exhibition draws its title from an illustration heading in a mass-market edition of Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s Utopia, picked up for free at New Harmony Vegetarian in Philly’s Chinatown, several years ago.

The illustration, Woodcut Map of Utopia From the March 1518 edition, is now out-of-copyright and displayed in cheap reproduction on self-destructing paper. This mass-market paperback is a shadow of a reminder that once people could write a book describing an idealized society via a fictionalized conversation between two people that did actually exist.

While print technologies were once cutting-edge methods of disseminating representations (maps, fine art reproductions), or political machination (treatises, manifestos, proclamations, or representations of historical events), we now have the fragmented and democratized pixel.

Swainston’s Woodcut Map addresses the dismantling of the printed image. The theme is explored in multiple forms in which different print media masquerade as each other; the line between print, video and painting is blurred; cast iron poses as wood; and a deconstruction of Léon Frédéric’s Four Seasons is translated as an inscrutable color explosion, matching our current state of “global weirding,” to Frédéric’s 1894 Academic idealism.

Swainston’s recent work employs print-based installation, video, and works on paper to explore print technology, the meaning of the image and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image.

Mario Ybarra @ Fabric Workshop

Mario Ybarra, Jr.: Books Of Drawings, Beyond Our Dreams, Blame Our Dads, Brains On Drugs, Better Off Dead

August 30, 2013–Fall 2013

Opening Reception:

Friday, October 4th, 6:00–8:00 pm
Press & Members Preview: Artist talk by Mario Ybarra, Jr. at 5:30 pm

The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) presents an exhibition of new work by artist-in-residence Mario Ybarra, Jr. whose work involves examining hidden histories of U.S. street culture through large-scale, mixed media installations. Ybarra, Jr.’s collaboration with FWM serves as a vehicle for telling a creative, visual narrative of his former street crew B.O.D., established in 1990.

Bio
Born 1972, Wilmington, California. Lives and works in Wilmington.

Mario Ybarra, Jr. received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2001) and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1999). Recent solo exhibitions include Double Feature at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Mario Ybarra Jr.: The Tio Collection at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (2012); Wilmington Good at the Cardi Black Box, Milan, Italy (2011); Silver and Blacks at Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2010); Take Me Out…No Man Is An Island at the Art Institute of Chicago (2008); and Black Squirrel Society at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York (2008). Ybarra, Jr. has been included in such group exhibitions as Made in L.A., the Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART (2012); Invisible Cities at the Instituto Cervantes, Madrid, Spain (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles (2008); Prague Biennale 3 in Prague, Czech Republic (2007); The World as a Stage at the Tate Modern, London, UK, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007); the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2006); and Alien Nation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2006). 

Virgil Marti @ UArts

Sep 4 2013 10:00AM - 12:00PM

CBS Auditorium

Virgil Marti creates hybrid objects and environments informed by a wide range of art-historical and pop-cultural references. Known for inserting high décor into fine art contexts, his installations are rich in humor and shrewd observation. After attending Skowhegan in 1990, he worked for many years as a master printer and project coordinator at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

His work was included in "The Jewel Thief" at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum (2010), "La Biennale de Montréal" (2007), "Whitney Biennial 2004" and "Apocalyptic Wallpaper" at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1997).

Recent collaborative projects and solo shows include "Set Pieces" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); "Ah! Sunflower" at the Visual Art Center, Richmond, Va. (2008); and "Directions: Virgil Marti/Pae White" at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2007). His solo exhibition, "MATRIX 167," opened on August 1 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn.

Above: "Sigmund," 2010; Frame materials: plywood, foam, cotton muslin, metal gliders. Upholstery fabrics: foil coated metallic leather, acrylic faux fur (wolf, mink), vinyl (faux ostrich), embroidered silk, printed cotton, cotton tapestry, linen velvet, embossed velvet, cotton bullion fringe.

Homepage: "VIP Room," detail, 2010; seven-color screenprint on Tyvek.

Hamilton Hall

320 S Broad Street

Philadelphia, PA 19102

United States

JASON RHOADES @ ICA

JASON RHOADES @ ICA

September 18 through December 29, 2013

Opening reception: Wednesday, September 18, 6-8pm

Jason Rhoades, Four Roads will be the first major American museum exhibition of the work of this exceptional artist who died in 2006 at the age of 41. Rhoades lived and worked in Los Angeles, however his art has been little seen in the United States until now.

Jason Rhoades, Four Roads will occupy the entire ICA, with four installations to be navigated by four interpretive paths or roads: Jason Rhoades, American Artist; Jason the Mason, (a biographical thread named for a childhood nickname); systems (language, scale, indexing, economies), and taboo. By foregrounding these themes, the exhibition aims to open up for investigation Rhoades's spectacular, overloaded installations. Immediately accessible and eye-catching, these works are at the same time deeply systematic, detailed, and rewarding of careful engagement. Using neon, plastic buckets, power tools, snaking wires, figurines, sound, and a vast range of other materials, including a V-8 engine, Rhoades's work brings the viewer in with humor, vibrancy, and the provocative audacity of his vision. The show will be anchored by four major installations: Garage Renovation New York (CHERRY Makita), 1993; The Creation Myth, 1998; Sutter's Mill, 2000; and Untitled (from My Madinah: In pursuit of my ermitage...), 2004/2013.

Jason Rhoades, Four Roads is among the most ambitious exhibitions ICA has ever presented. A catalogue co-published with Delmonico/Prestel will accompany the show, which will tour internationally beginning at the Orange County Museum of Art.