Artblog Radio

In Jonathan Lyndon Chase's paintings, faces go from cartoony (masks, he says) to realistic.  The subject is the body, the black male body, the black queer body.  Jonathan, who got his MFA from PAFA in 2016, is soft-spoken but intense.  Easy to talk with and direct in his answers, no BS. Four of his works are in the current Fleisher-Ollman exhibit, up to Jan. 28. Among other things in this conversation, Jonathan talks about his materials. His works are filled with materials-brio.

Sherman Fleming is a performance artist, who began performing in the 1970s after being introduced to "Happenings." In graduate school he created a character, "RODFORCE," that he performed as. He tells A.M. Weaver about the difficulty of finding performance role models since there were few black male performers. His art is public, and about issues of race and masculinity and is intentionally provocative.

Lanré, who is Yoruba, works with recycled materials and his art communicates a message about our fragile globe being overwhelmed by waste. His sculptures are labor intensive, and here in Philadelphia he worked with North Philadelphia community members in "sewing circles" to fabricate the individual components (he refers to them as "bricks" to build a skyscraper) that will go into his big new sculpture, which debuts on Friday. The piece is a memorial to loss, which is experienced in a personal way by all.

After a nine-month residency at the SPACES program at the Village of Arts and Humanities, two international artists, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, who is from Ghana, and Olanrewaju (Lanré) Tejuoso, who is from Nigeria, are preparing for their projects' culminating exhibition and Open Mic session, this Friday, Dec. 9, 6PM - 10 PM.

Michelle Marcuse flirted with sculpture-making for a long while, but only when she started channeling her memories of childhood in suburban Capetown, South Africa, did she find her 3D voice. Marcuse, who along with her partner, Henry Bermudez, runs House Gallery also found her materials -- recycled cardboard, glue -- and aesthetic that is primal and playful, combining both pieces of her childhood experience.

The art activist group We Are Watching was organized by Amanda Silberling and her friends at the University of Pennsylvania, where they are undergraduates. Propelled to action by an email sent by a fraternity to incoming Penn freshmen girls to come to a party and be ready to, basically, put out, Silberling and her colleagues blanketed the campus with flyers outing the fraternity for its crass invitation, with its implied embrace of rape culture.

Will Owen is an artist working primarily with design, interactive media, sound...and FOOD! He's a Little Berlin member who I met in 2014 for a show he curated at that space. He's a bit of a nomad, living between Philadelphia and New York, where he is an artist in residence at Flux Factory in Queens. So it's kind of no surprise that some of his curating involves transit, especially subways (he did an audio piece for the Copenhagen subway system) and buses (he's curated exhibitions on the Chinatown buses between New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore).

Irish artist Elaine Byrne makes work that uses Dante, James Joyce and other heady source material for her works with political and social commentary on contemporary issues. In one case she is calling out an Irish bank scandal, using Dante's Purgatorio and a pilgrimage location in Ireland called St. Patrick's Purgatory; in another she's raising issues about anti-Semitism in the context of Joyce's Cyclops section of Ulysses. The videos are captivating, and give so very much to chew over. Elaine's Irish accent is part of the treat of this 38-minutes long podcast.

Artist, Pew Fellow, and 2016 Guggenheim Grantee Eileen Neff makes photographs and prints them large, small, framed or unframed, and, recently, shaped–like her photo of a leaf is shaped like a leaf, which appeared in her 2015 solo show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, which represents her.

Before arriving at PAFA, Jodi Throckmorton was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wichita State University. Prior to that, she lived in the new media mecca of Silicon Valley, where she was Associate Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art for eight years. Now at PAFA, Throckmorton is bringing her considerable energy and wide-ranging interest in contemporary art to integrating edgy contemporary art with PAFA's traditional strong suits of figuration and realism.