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Opened JUNE 24 (Colorado): Buffalo Soldiers: reVision, permanent exhibition examining the complex legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers in the American West, and highlighting ethnic, gender, and racial identities in the landscape of the southern Colorado borderlands. Featuring works by eight artists from across the United States: Chip Thomas (lead artist); Esther Belin; Mahogany L. Browne; Rosie Carter; Gaia; André Leon Gray; Theodore A. Harris; and Tom Judd. Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center, 29477 Highway 159, Fort Garland, Colorado.
EXHIBITIONS EXTENDED: Originally scheduled through Oct. 8: Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, a collaborative, multivenue exhibition, is presented by The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) through March 3, 2024; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) through Dec. 31, 2023. Commissioned new works examine the timely question: “Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy?”
Installations by 20 celebrated artists explore themes of equality, free speech, and other tenets of democracy. For information on the exhibition, events and programs, visit RisingSunPhilly.org. AAMP: 701 Arch Street; and PAFA: 118-128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia. PAFA's exhibit includes works from its permanent collection; among them, "Vetoed Dreams" by PASC participant Theodore A. Harris. PASC's Emily Schilling reviewed Rising Sun for Artblog. |
Books and Essays
Essay: "Ballet Mécanique and Interwar Avant-Garde Cinema" by Sean Smalley, Library Technical Assistant II at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Posted Feb. 7, 2023, Smalley's study of a 16-mm print in the archives at NYPL's Library for Performing Arts, the Dadaist film Ballet Mécanique, is a fascinating look at an avant-garde film made in 1924 by Fernand Léger with George Antheil and Dudley Murphy.
![]() ’Pataphysics Unrolled (2022, Penn State University Press), edited by Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor, explores pataphysics' "presence through modernism, postmodernism, and into contemporary experimental practices, capturing the imaginations of writers, artists, thinkers, and musicians," writes Price in her introduction.
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PASC recommends Matt Madden's EX LIBRIS by Uncivilized Books. The reviews are glowing:
Ed Park's review in The New York Times calls Madden “the stunt-man philosopher of American comics” and describes Ex Libris as a work with “virtuoso books-within-bookishness” in which “insider wit abounds.” Read The New York Times review here. Publisher’s Weekly selected Ex Libris as the only graphic novel on its 2021 Top 20 Independent Publishers list, calling it an “endlessly inventive work” that “is a metafictional master class in comics.” "A mind-bending journey through an wide array of genres and states of consciousness," says PASC's John Heon, reviewing it here. |
SPRING 2024: PASC Symposium, “Avant-Green, Radical by Nature: Environmentalism, Ecology, and the Natural World in Avant-Garde Art and Thought,” hybrid event in Philadelphia and online. For more about the topic, click here.
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![]() Every Saturday from May 2020 through October 2021, host Tina Brock (above) and producers Erica Hoelscher and Bob Schmidt brought us "Into the Absurd," online conversations with fascinating Philadelphians. They cheered our weary quarantines, gathering a wonderful collection of insights into many artistic lives. Click image for the episode archive.
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OCCASIONAL: Online series, Into the Absurd: A Virtually Existential Dinner Conversation. Hosted by Tina Brock and produced by Erica Hoelscher and Bob Schmidt, The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC), these hour-long conversations took place every Saturday during the first year of the pandemic. The show will return occasionally, and the recorded archive serves as an inspiring glimpse into the lives and work of many Philadelphians--"interesting, funny and wickedly bright conversationalists whose work you've come to know and appreciate," says the IRC. "A dream for years has been to round up favorite creators and artists from the IRC and the broader community at the dinner table. And so, Into the Absurd, a Virtually Existential Dinner Party was born. ... We'll gather with a guest for the better part of an hour to explore what it means to live and to think about art in a brave new world -- how our thinking and actions are changing in our community and in neighborhoods and the country."
New episodes will be announced; in the meantime, dip into the archive on Youtube. It's a Philadelphia-centric delight. |
2024: "The New Electric Ballroom" by Enda Walsh, directed by Peggy Mecham and brought to us by The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC), Philadelphia's theater company with the mission to "bring good nothingness to life."
The IRC's Tina Brock and Peggy Mecham discuss "The New Electric Ballroom" in a 24-minute video recorded for PASC's online symposium, Dec. 4, 2020; click here to view it on YouTube. |