Pennsylvania Murals- Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s “Start From Here” in Philadelphia

 Art, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Public Art, Street Art
Jun 172026
 

Isaac Tin Wei Lin created Start From Here in 2015 for Mural Arts Philadelphia.

From the Mural Arts website about the work:

Start From Here is a deconstruction and distillation of Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s previous abstract work which used calligraphic brush marks in single colors. In this piece similar marks were layered in different colors creating a chaotic tapestry. The layered marks are then presented individually like Lego pieces laid out before assembly, allowing them to be seen as parts of a whole.

Start From Here is a reference to operational and instructional manuals for building something. The colors of the marks were chosen based on color theory, what looked good to the artist and national flags. The title plays into the idea of newness and beginnings, while the use of colors of national flags speaks to the idea that (unless you are Native American) we all come from somewhere else as immigrants or refugees, and as the artist’s parents did, are here to start a new life.

You can also find his work on Instagram.

Artist Birthdays- John Baldessari

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Cleveland, Collage, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking
Jun 172026
 

John Baldessari, “One and Three Persons (with Two Contexts-One Chaotic)”, 1994-2012, 14-color screenprint

California artist John Baldessari was born today, June 17, in 1931.  The print above was part of The Cleveland Museum of Art‘s 2024 exhibition, New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper.

From the museum about this work:

John Baldessari often incorporated appropriated (or “found”) imagery into his artwork, such as the photographs of architecture and rubble appearing in this print. He juxtaposed these elements with outlined figures in a typically obtuse manner to suggest a narrative or simply a feeling with strange or even ominous undertones. The artist’s interest in the formal qualities of art, such as dimensionality, highlighted by his use of the irregularly shaped sheet of paper, white cut-outs, and silhouettes, adds to the sense of suggestion and uncertainty in the print.

Duane Michals (1932-2026)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Jun 122026
 

Duane Michals, “The Spirit Leaves The Body”, 1968, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

 

“Magritte with Easel”, 1965, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

“A Letter From My Father”, 1975, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

Innovative photographer Duane Michals passed away on Tuesday, 6/9/26, at the age of 94. He was famous for both his portraits of famous artists and celebrities, and for more personal work that often included his writing on the prints, something not done at the time.

He continuously worked up until his death, even shooting the campaign, What are Dreams, for Bottega Veneta last year. Featuring actor Jacob Elordi, it includes a short film along with a photo series, both based on a poem by Michals.

Jacob Elordi and Duane Michals in Bottega Veneta’s “What Are Dreams” campaign, photographed by Duane Michals in 2025. Photo courtesy of Bottega Veneta (image via Artnet)

His 2019 exhibition, Illusions of the Photographer at The Morgan Library and Museum included The Spirit Leaves the Body, and A Letter From My Father (pictured above), along with a few handwritten notes in his distinctive style, like the one below on death. Many of his photographs reflected an interest in mortality, but there was also a lighthearted aspect to many others.

For more on the artist, also check out this 2022 interview in Aperture magazine. In it he talks about his work, his partner of over 50 years (architect Fred Gorrée), his dreams, the importance of curiosity, and more. He also had a fun Instagram worth taking a look through.

 

Pennsylvania Art Shows- “MOUTHFUL” at Vox Populi in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 112026
 

Mona Gazala, “Place and Power”, Broken concrete slab, paint, 2024

Closing this weekend, MOUTHFUL, a group exhibition at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, features a unique mix of works exploring aspects of language.

From the gallery about the exhibition:

MOUTHFUL brings together artists working with, around, through, against, beneath, within, alongside language. Featuring over 15 artists engaging a diverse set of techniques and media, the exhibition situates key archival pieces beside new and contemporary works: flags, impossible shots, concrete slabs, worksheets, disco on repeat, and many holes.

MOUTHFUL unearths echoes, rhymes, and dissonances across the past 50 years of cultural production. How and why do artists continue to turn to language as material? How and why do writers continue to turn towards visual practices to investigate language?  What sound does meaning make? What shapes do our mouths take? Curated by Vox Populi’s director, Blanche Brown, MOUTHFUL picks up these familiar questions and shakes them out: see what falls though May 1- June 14th 2026

Featuring: Robert Carey, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, China Rain Chung, Logan Cryer, Catia Colagioia, Jordan Deal, Lucia Garzón, Mona Gazala, Rachel Hsu, Tan Lin, M Slater, Lea Devon Sorrentino, Cecilia Vicuña, Eva Wu, Connie Yu, Janet Zweig

Janet Zweig, “Mind Over Matter”, 1993, Computer, printer, paper, rock, rope, pulleys, basket

From the label for Janet Zweig‘s Mind Over Matter, pictured above:

The computer was fed three sentences:

I think therefore I am – Descartes

I what I am – Popeye

I think I can – The Little Engine That Could

It randomly generates sentences from the parts. Text slowly lifts rock.

Rachel Hsu, “Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月)”, Inkjet prints on kozo, two from series

Pictured are two prints from Rachel Hsu‘s Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月), a series that was on two walls of the gallery. Click on the image to enlarge.

Written on the information card beside the work:

Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月), a long-form poem, investigates yearning and migration through language and translation. Taking the form of a Chinese language-learning workbook, the poem reveals the emotional and physical exertion that speaking a second language and cultural assimilation requires.

Logan Cryer, “How I Understand It All”, 2021-2026, Retired family basketball backboard

The words on the tape read: “If I turn around and speak by showing the back of my head, I am honestly telling you how I understand it all”.

 

Pennsylvania Art Shows- “Some American Dreams” at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 102026
 

Donald Lipski, “Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue #37”, 1990, White wool gabardine, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Rose B. Simpson, “Tonantzin”, 2022, Linen, cotton, clay, and thread, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum

(L to R) Rev. Howard Finster, “George Washington Meets Martha Custis, 1984, Pigment on cotton t-shirt; James Luna, “High Tech War Shirt”, 1997-98, Smoked hide, nylon setting, silk suiting, horse hair, metal, shell buttons, bead work with watches and necklace (shell, thermometer, and plastic toys); Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap Of Birds, “Who Owns History”, 1992, Pigment on cotton t-shirt (all works made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum)

S.A. Bachman, “Are You Telling Yourself A Little White Lie?”, 1988, Edition of 5, Halftone photographic silkscreen pigment on nylon, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Pictured are just a few of the many excellent artworks currently on view in Some American Dreams at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Exploring the concept of America and the American dream, all the works were created by an impressive list of artists who were Artists in Residence at the museum over the past four decades.

From the museum and curator Hilde Nelson:

In her 1986 essay “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams,” poet June Jordan calls for a multiplicity of American dreams rather than a singular paradigm. For Jordan, those in pursuit of these dreams include:

the white people the black people the female people the lonely people the terrorized people the elderly people the young people the visionary people the unemployed people the regular ordinary omnipresent people who crave grace and variety and surprise and safety and one new day after another.

On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, this presentation of works from The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s collection explores the complexity of American-ness through lenses of history, memory, and mythology. Made by past Artists in Residence in collaboration with the FWM Studio, the projects reimagine symbols of nationhood and belonging, critique ongoing legacies of inequity, and offer expanded visions of kinship and community.

The works on view represent four decades of making at FWM. They meditate on themes including indigeneity and race, alternative origin stories, landscape and the environment, the construction of historical narrative, memory and resistance, and images of cultural affiliation. Sections of the exhibition invite additional voices, drawing their titles from a chorus of American poets, songwriters, essayists, abolitionists, and historians.

The artists featured in Some American Dreams break down borders and categorical distinctions to propose a polyphony of American dreams shaped by hybridity, friction, and affinity. They ask: what if America is not one project, but many? And how might these Americas be affirmed, resisted or remade, in Jordan’s words, to envision “one new day after another?”

This exhibition closes 6/14/26.

Delaware Art Shows- Lucia Riffel at The Delaware Contemporary

 Animation, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Installation Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Jun 052026
 

Lucia Riffel‘s current installation, a red sun has water in its eye, at The Delaware Contemporary, explores elements of magical thinking, our relationship to nature, and the desire to leave some mark of ourselves in the world. In the darkened room, looped 3D animations play above small handmade sculptures, and on the floor a video is surrounded by a circle of hand prints in dirt, reminiscent of those left behind on cave walls.

About the exhibition from Riffel’s website:

I started seeing raccoons in July. They would tap on my windows at night and tap inside my walls in the morning. Watching me, sleeping in the room next to me, warmed from the waters I showered in through the thin barrier of the tub. I don’t know what they wanted or what they were trying to tell me, but they wanted to tell me something so badly. I loved them, I feared them, they consumed my thoughts for months. I am both terrified and comforted by how thin the membrane between my life and theirs is. After all, we are both just creatures trying to live.

I am interested in the marks we leave on the world and the marks the world leaves on us. Our existence feels so small, layered between an authoritative takeover and ever-growing climate devastation. But I contradict myself, because I find small things to be some of the most magical. We anthropomorphize, we think the raccoons are trying to tell us something (and maybe they are!), we see ourselves in everything, we find meaning in everything. We leave our little marks anywhere we can to signal to the others that we are here, beneath it all. Despite the horrors, we do persist. I often think about someday someone or something seeing our small, mundane, markings of life and knowing “we were here, we were here.”

I made these tiny bits of ephemera to serve as relics of time spent processing, in communion with bits of nature as it exists now, and moments tucked away at the dawn of whatever comes next.

And from The Delaware Contemporary’s website:

“My work leads one to the place between their mind and screen, space and time, thought and feeling, and into the everyday sublime. I create time loops and capsules – distilling the fleeting and immaterial through installations, animations, and horticulture. Themes of pattern and repetition coalesce both in-screen and in real life, allowing one to look through the mirror of the screen and enter a meditative headspace beyond as well as within. Processing cyclical existence, digital ephemerality, and environmental anxiety, my practice utilizes experiential stimuli to awaken interiority – leaving one in a suspended metaphysical twilight zone.​”

This exhibition is on view until 8/30/26.

 

Ohio Murals- Lizzi Arronhalt’s Mural in Canton

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Canton, Canton, Ohio Art Shows, Ohio Street Art, Painting / Painters, Public Art, Street Art
Jun 042026
 

Ohio artist and muralist Lizzi Aronhalt created this mural in 2023. It is located on the Arts in Stark building in downtown Canton.

Elsewhere, an exhibition of her landscape and cityscape paintings, is currently on view at Cyrus Custom Framing and Art Gallery in Canton until 6/30/26.

You can also find her work on Instagram.

Pennsylvania Murals- David Guinn’s “Garden of Delight” in Philadelphia

 Art, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Public Art, Street Art
Jun 022026
 

Overlooking the Sartain Street Community Garden, David Guinn‘s mural Garden of Delight was created in 2010 for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program.

About the mural from Mural Arts Philadelphia’s website:

On the left side of the mural, rendered in line drawings, are three vignettes from the immediate neighborhood. Two trees in the center lean into each other, symbolic of an embrace. The garden spills out from the space between them. This is to symbolize the spirit of community gardens and the people who work together to nurture these gardens. Guinn created the mural with transparent colors, to simulate the feel of a watercolor painting. The bottom extends the actual garden’s space up onto the wall and vice versa.

You can also find Guinn’s work on his Instagram.

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