Phlog

(Nancy Hellebrand’s EVERYBODYBEAUTIFUL is currently showing at the Print Center through July 20, 2024.) Body-shaming, ageism and youth-centric advertising may pervade the zeitgeist, but Nancy Hellebrand rejects these biases in her work on view at the Print Center.  Her nuanced, warm-toned photogravures on paper and plaster are delicate and, frankly, precious in contrast to the stark realism she presents of sagging breasts, stretch marks and (mostly) flabby or obese flesh. All of her subjects here are women.  The pictures are sensitive and not the least exploitative.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is they aren’t affecting either.  It isn’t a question of trying to shed our prejudices, especially among those of us who are her subjects’ contemporaries; after all, we, too, have looked in the mirror more than a few times!!  The let down is that we have seen images like these before, by photographers and painters, and Hillebrand doesn’t show us anything new....

What follows is not a "review" of the massive Jasper Johns retrospective divided between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, nor is it an essay or formal critical evaluation.  While walking through the Philadelphia portion of the retrospective, I made notes on my cellphone with an eye toward later writing something formal. I never wrote the formal piece. Instead, months passed as I let the experience percolate.  I had gone to the exhibition a doubter, suspect of Johns' reputation and largely unmoved by the random works I'd seen over the years.  I left the show a believer.  The exhibition accomplished what I always hoped would happen when going to a retrospective, an opportunity to deepen my understanding, confirm my preconceptions or, as was the case in this instance, to completely alter my perceptions. Here are some of those notes: The sheer size of the exhibition overwhelmed me at first.  Could there really be a companion show of entirely di...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently debuted portions of the $233 million renovations designed by Frank Gehry, and, no, they do not feature flamboyant waves of glistening titanium or swirling gestures of wood.  Indeed, many people who expected such histrionics from the famous architect of the Guggenheim Bilbao were disappointed by the understatements that greeted them. I wasn't. What Gehry has achieved is a soothing, fluid integration of the new and practical with the old and classical.  The only nod towards flamboyance, the staircase in the new Williams Forum, is something of a disappointment.  Featured in every article and press release about the new spaces, it appears to be a tacked on afterthought leading to or from what is ultimately intended as performance space.  While it awaits performers, however, the forum's daily function is nothing short of an extravagant waste of space.  Eschewing supports beneath it, the staircase bobs and weaves as it descends....

If the Philadelphia Museum of Art wishes to lower its standards to appeal to broader audiences, Philadelphia Assembled  (currently running at the Perelman Building through December 17, 2017) is literally the ticket. In our politicized age museum administrators and donors feel enormous pressure to reach out to their surrounding communities, embrace and underwrite art and artists they have traditionally shunned and engage previously disenfranchised audiences in terms to which they can relate. Locally, the headlong rush into community outreach began in earnest with the Zoe Strauss retrospective of a few years ago, continued more recently with the “Wild” exhibition that just completed its run and currently reaches its apogee in “Philadelphia Assembled”, an exuberant, muddled assemblage of folk art, fine art, indigenous commerce, ethnic memory, community activism and polemic. One cannot help suspect these efforts may boost the Museum’s attendance bottom line in the short te...

Wild: Michael Nichols (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 17, 2017) is an exemplary show for a major art museum in the 21st Century;  “exemplary” but not very satisfying. Nichols, a renowned photographer of wildlife as well as a zealous advocate of habitat and species preservation, is also one brave dude.  He ventures into the most remote, forbidding and dangerous environments throughout the world.  He is also an admired technical innovator whose experiments and inventions have made possible images previously impossible to realize. What he is not is an important artist.  But that isn’t the point the Philadelphia Museum of Art really wants to make though it tries to have it both ways. Mounting a huge exhibition of oversized prints of wildlife and habitats seeks to draw a broader audience than do the usual sanctified works of, say, Impressionism or 17th Century Holland.  Think of this exhibition as part of the PMA’s new outreach prog...

“Tours” of the new Mormon Temple in Philadelphia are now being offered to the public free of charge until the official dedication in September.  Lasting about an hour, they are preceded by a 10 minute inspirational film that sets the mood for presentations to follow. “Tour” isn’t exactly the proper term here.  Yes, we were guided through the new space while our hosts, different ones in each room, and others stationed in every stairwell and corridor, briefly explained what each part was used for.  The main thrust of their talk, however, was concerned with devotion, baptism, the afterlife, the joys of belonging to the Temple and personal anecdotes about their faith.  I’ll limit myself here to the building itself. The overall impression is of an immaculate, pristine space in which nary a paint roller brush stroke, crooked line or imperfect miter appears,  All surfaces, be they granite or drywall, are perfect. Not a single seam wavers.  Switch plate c...