Artblog Radio

Carl(os) Roa is bringing Andean Mountains, his Fringe Festival solo performance, to Taller Puertorriqueño Sept. 7-15, 2017. Roa tells Roberta and Imani that Andean Mountains is about a generational displacement between Latin youth who love anime and manga and their elders' who love telenovelas. How can the children of immigrants reconcile the various streams of culture coming at them? By repurposing familial culture and making it your own, says Roa. Andean Mountains will have digital elements, movement, and storytelling, in English and Spanish. Get your tickets now, this is going to be great!

Earlier this year, Karen Chernick wrote about the missing Royal Theater mural, a history mural on South Street commemorating the legacy of the Royal Theater, a once-thriving black theater where Billie Holiday, among many others, gave concerts. The mural, painted by Eric Okdeh depicted jazz greats who played at the Royal, and neighborhood greats, like Ron Washington, of Ron's Ribs, a restaurant landmark at 1627 South St., across from the theater. In this podcast, Roberta and Imani Roach (Artblog Managing Editor) speak with Brandon Washington, son of Ron. Brandon talks about the neighborhood, his father's important role as a community leader and of his own and his brother's hope to revive Ron's Ribs in the future in a Ron's Ribs food truck.

In this podcast interview, Matt Kalasky talks with Amanda Buck and Alexa Smith, two of the editors of Apiary Magazine, a beautiful Philadelphia literary publication in print and online, started in 2009 and publishing a wide variety of community voices, in a variety of genres including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Apiary also includes visual art.

Ron Klein is an artist, a sculptor who thinks big, travels the world to research and find materials, and whose works evoke the cosmos and thoughts about the place of humans in a bigger context. Ron's got an installation at Abington Art Center now through June 23. Don't miss it.

In the gig economy many artists work multiple jobs. Grimaldi Baez works about seven, most of them in the community art realm, where he teaches and leads projects. For the Yabucoa, Puerto Rico-born, US-raised artist committed to idea of social justice, it makes for an exhausting but fulfilling life. Among other things in this wide-ranging interview, Grimaldi tell us how he relaxes.

Enjoy this podcast with Douglas Witmer, in which he talks about his community project, "Neighbor Who," and about his love of art and music, and his family's roots in the Mennonite community in Lancaster County, where he grew up, although not, he says, driving around in a horse-drawn carriage.

Betty Leacraft has been making art with fibers since she was young and learned how to sew from her maternal grandmother. Respectful of those early teachings and thirsty for learning about her ancestors, Betty has studied the fibers practices of her African ancestors and traveled to Ghana. She and her work have traveled to South Africa, as part of the Women of Color Quilters Network, to participate in an international exhibition there. Outside of the art school traditions and acting as what she calls a "cultural custodian," the artist teaches workshops in fiber art in her West Philadelphia neighborhood and many other places in Philadelphia and has been recognized five times by the Leeway Foundation. Betty participated in the Mural Arts Program's 2015 Neighborhood Time Exchange program and is part of the PMA's Philadelphia Assembled project that will debut this Spring.

Rose Luardo is a performer, singer, comedy sketch artist and artist. You may have seen her with Andrew Jeffrey Wright in the New Dreamz or as a singer with Sweatheart, the alternative rock band. In her first solo exhibition at Practice Gallery (over Feb. 26), she has created a theatrical tableau with several big elements, one of which involves the viewers climbing into a psychedelic-patterned coffin in the middle of the gallery space.

Playwright, performer, theater and dance critic, and co-founder of Curate This, Julius Ferraro is a multi-tasker par excellence. Julius has a new play, "Parrot Talk" that will be performed at DaVinci Art Alliance at the end of March. The show will take place over two weekends, a month apart, where the second staging may (or may not) look and feel very different than the first. The interview with Julius took place Feb. 17 and it's 31-minutes long.

Quietly building steam over the last four years, the community project, Philadelphia Assembled, will burst into the world this April, with actions, workshops, performances and art, in places all across the city, and will manifest itself in a big installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Perelman Building this fall. Starting with a series of conversations with regular Philadelphians, the Dutch artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk, made connections and reached out to more and more people, in what sounds like a revolutionary movement to empower people and make their lives better.