Pennsylvania Art Shows- “How We Stay Free” at Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Photographers / Photography, Politics
Jun 262026
 

Protesting injustice is a powerful way for individuals to come together to create change. In the exhibition How We Stay Free at Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image, photos by Mike Arrison, Harvey Finkle, Joe Piette, and Sunny Singh vividly capture past protests that have taken place in Philadelphia over the years, reminding visitors of the power of community.

From the gallery about the exhibition:

Following the widely publicized murders of George Floyd and other Black citizens by police, an unprecedented wave of public outcry swept the nation. Despite the pervasive uncertainty and restrictions imposed by the global COVID-19 pandemic, Philadelphians organized and sustained mass protests, taking to the streets to emphatically demand racial justice, police accountability, and structural reform. Later that same year, the tragic shooting death of Walter Wallace Jr. by police officers in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Cobbs Creek further underscored these systemic issues. His family had called 911 seeking assistance for a mental health crisis, only for the encounter to escalate fatally, tragically illustrating the severe gaps in the community’s support and emergency response systems.

Inspired by the energy generated from these events, West Philadelphia residents Fajr Muhammad and Christopher Rogers published How We Stay Free: Notes On A Black Uprising. This project is not merely a book but a dynamic, living archive of community resistance, featuring powerful, multi-modal contributions from a diverse coalition of artists, writers, poets, and scholars who were active participants in the struggle. This exhibition, which shares the same title, serves as an essential visual and experiential archive. It documents the work initiated by the authors, alongside the tireless efforts of local organizations, grassroots collectives, and community-based activists. Philadelphia’s legacy of civil disobedience is both deep and enduring, stretching from the national Black Lives Matter protests to localized calls for Palestinian liberation and the No Arena fight against a proposed sports complex in the historic Chinatown neighborhood.

The visceral imagery and compelling narratives presented on the gallery walls emphasize a crucial point, a collective and sustained response is necessary to ensure meaningful and lasting progress is achieved. This philosophical approach—that change requires unity and shared purpose—serves as the foundational connective tissue binding both the publication and the exhibition. Spanning several decades of resistance and activism, the collection functions as a series of time capsules. These suspended moments deliberately position the artist not as detached photojournalists, but as participant-observers—marching alongside a broad and diverse coalition of revolutionaries united by the inalienable right of all people to be truly free.

This show closes 6/27/26.

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Hyland Mather and Shaun Kardinal at Paradigm in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 252026
 

Shaun Kardinal “I II”, Woven paper ephemera and artist’s tape

Sculptures by Hyland Mather from the “Modus Volito” series

Framed images of work by Hyland Mather and Shaun Kardinal (sculptures by Hyland Mather on the left)

Sculptures by Hyland Mather

Discarded objects are transformed into new creations in works by Hyland Mather and Shaun Kardinal, currently on view in the two person exhibition, Form / Field, at Paradigm Gallery.

From the gallery:

This exhibition presents work from two distinct practices that converge through a shared sensitivity to line, structure, and process. Mather and Kardinal each explore how form emerges through accumulation, repetition, and material response, approaches that move between precision and drift, construction and discovery.

For his third major presentation with Paradigm Gallery, Mather presents works from several ongoing series, including Linea Pictura paintings, suspended “gravity works” (Onus Suspenda), and sculptural and assemblage-based works such as Modus Volito and Novus Inventa. Spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, the work explores line, structure, and found materials through processes of gathering, repetition, and thoughtful intervention. Across these works, line operates as both drawing and structure, with string extending into space, holding weight, or tracing paths across painted surfaces, allowing form to emerge through tension, balance, and material response.

In his debut Paradigm collection, Kardinal presents his woven paper quilts created from cut and punctured ephemera, along with a series of embroidered book pages and painted postcards, creating new forms from the smallest gestures. Kardinal’s work builds from repeating parts, embroidered marks, and modular systems that gather into larger compositions. These works often embrace landscape at a distance, horizons, city grids, or atmospheric depth, while remaining grounded in pattern and accumulation. Form, in this context, is built incrementally from repeated elements. In both practices, thread-like fiber elements and linear systems act as connective tissue, binding parts into larger wholes, or tracing form across space and surface. The “field” operates here as both a physical and conceptual space: a landscape, a surface of construction, and an invisible network of forces. Across both practices, it is within this field that form takes shape, held in a state of partnership between control and chance, repetition and variation, presence and possibility.

This exhibition closes 6/28/26.

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.

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Macy West at Pink Noise Projects in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia
May 302026
 

The paintings pictured above are from Philly-based artist Macy West‘s exhibition 4:5, currently on view at Pink Noise Projects in Philadelphia until 5/31/26.

Her statement about the work from the gallery:

4:5 is a new collection of paintings considering the shorthand, diagramming, and notation that accompanies notetaking and sorting of information. I’m fascinated with perception, how we move through the world with physical bodies, how our bodies mediate our experience, and how we develop additional mediators, symbols, and signals to communicate with each other. Developed within the aesthetic parameters of the notebook, each painting relies on the repetition of form and mark. The grid, the crop, and the mask are recurring compositional strategies which reference ideation, speculation, and learning. The paintings are only 10 x 12.5 inches each, maintaining my preferred 4:5 ratio at the scale of the page.

These works respond to my own need to work through information in my studio, to prepare again and again, to edit, revise, measure, scale up, scale down, transpose, translate, cut, paste, and rotate as I try to make sense of experience: perpetual motion, the passage of time, the constant stream of images, the torrent of news, and the influx of sensory information more generally. For 4:5, many of the paintings begin with a screenprint which, like a notebook, contains and sequences the content, the image on the canvas. The structure is a primary assumption accepted to receive the meaning, which excludes as much as it organizes. My perpetual impulse toward change prevents me from flattening ideas into a single image.

The paintings reference the need for a key or an interpreter when engaging with the generated abstractions.Their meaning exists in their impenetrability, their sense of organization without understanding. They are fragmented in a way that reminds us of breakdown in communication, and the limits of human knowledge. What does it mean to know part of something? How much knowledge is required for understanding? When does position fail to provide context, but instead dilute meaning?

Artist Birthdays- Mary Cassatt

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia
May 222026
 

Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt was born today, May 22nd, in 1844. The oil painting above, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879, can be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection.

From the museum about the work:

Cassatt created a series of theater scenes in the late 1870s, displaying an interest in city nightlife shared by many of the Impressionists. This work, showing a woman (often said to be her sister Lydia) seated in front of a mirror with the balconies of the Paris Opéra House reflected behind her, demonstrates the influence of Cassatt’s friend Edgar Degas, particularly in the attention paid to the effects of artificial lighting on flesh tones. This painting was shown in Paris at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, where it was singled out for much praise.

Artist Birthdays- Salvador Dalí

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia
May 112026
 

Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí was born today, May 11th, in 1904. The painting above, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), from 1936, is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘s permanent collection. It was also included in their recent exhibition, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100.

From the museum’s website about the work-

Salvador Dalí painted this allegory of self-inflicted carnage while living in Paris in early 1936, on the eve of the devastating civil war in his Spanish homeland between Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalist forces and the elected Republic. The painting flaunts its flair for gruesome detail. A grimacing colossus towers over a sunbaked Spanish landscape and deliriously rips itself apart. Limbs are switched around and turned upside down, and the body’s trunk is missing entirely. A limp phallic shape draped over the truncated hip is a striking example of Dalí’s soft forms, implicitly referring to putrefaction and death. The scattered beans of the title exemplify the bizarre incongruities of scale to conjure the workings of an unconscious mind. Dalí interpreted the Spanish conflict in psychoanalytic terms, and he included an homage to Sigmund Freud, the initiator of psychoanalysis whose work inspired him to embrace such nightmarish visions, by including a tiny portrait of Freud inspecting the gnarled hand at lower left.

 

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Writers
Apr 252026
 

Cy Twombly “Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles”, 1978

Cy Twombly “Fifty Days at Iliam”, 1978, oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Achaeans in Battle”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire that Consumes All before It”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Eternal Night”, 1978

Cy Twombly was born today, April 25th, in 1928. One of his most famous works is Fifty Days at Iliam, his visual interpretation of Homer’s poem the Iliad. This “painting in ten parts” is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and images of each of the individual works can be found on the museum’s website.

About Fifty Days at lliam from the museum-

The pinnacle of Twombly’s lifelong preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology, Fifty Days at lliam is the artist’s rendition of the last fifty days of the Trojan War. The monumental series fuses elements of Homer’s epic poem The lliad, probably written before 700 BCE, and Alexander Pope’s translation of that poem from the 1700s.

The artist purposefully misspells the name of the besieged Trojan city as lliam, instead of the Latin llium or the Greek Ilion. The letter “a” stands as a symbol for the Greek warrior Achilles, whose rage sparked by the death of his friend Patroclus propels the end of the decade-long conflict.

Partaking in a long artistic tradition of depicting war, Twombly addresses themes of heroism and aggression, comradeship and revenge, jubilant victory and the mourning of the dead. The ten canvases can be encountered sequentially or experienced as an all-encompassing panorama that gives the sensation of witnessing the battle firsthand.

Twombly’s signature style combines the poignant gestures of abstraction with poetic allusions to classicism. Relocating from the United States to Italy in the 1950s proved decisive for Twombly’s art, which uses raw mark-making to allude to the myths of antiquity.

For a look at Twombly’s life and career, the 2018 documentary Cy Dear, is well worth a watch. The film begins with a discussion of Fifty Days at lliam, which was on view as part of a 2017 retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. It also includes interviews with several of his friends and colleagues– including former assistants, his son Alessandro, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and photographer Sally Mann.

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Noah Davis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 162026
 

Noah Davis, “The Conductor”, 2014, Oil on canvas

A collection of photographs, notes, documents, and a video (not pictured) are located on a wall at the beginning of the exhibition

Currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the retrospective Noah Davis presents a collection of works from the artist’s short but impressive career.

From the museum about the show-

Noah Davis (born in 1983) drew inspiration from every corner of life: photographs dug out of bins in flea markets, books on Egyptian mythology, daytime television, history paintings, early internet blogs. He used these sources to populate his work with a cast of anonymous figures who rest and play and dance and read and swim in scenes that tug between the fictional and the imaginary, the ordinary and the fantastical.

Even as a high school student, Davis had a painting studio, a space near his family home in Seattle that his parents had rented in the hope that he would kindly stop ruining the carpets. He studied film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York City before assembling his own motley education among fellow artists in Los Angeles. He slid fluidly between painting styles to present a breadth of Black life, feeling keenly a responsibility to represent the people around him. In 2012, Davis and his wife Karon cofounded the Underground Museum, in the historically Black and Latinx Los Angeles neighborhood of Arlington Heights. There they transformed three storefronts into a cultural center that was free and open to all.

This exhibition, the first museum retrospective of Davis’s work, highlights his relentless creativity from 2007 until his untimely death in 2015, and his devotion to all aspects of a person’s encounter with art. As he put it simply: “Painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate.”

Below are a few selections-

“Isis”, 2009, Oil and acrylic on linen

Artist Karon Davis, Noah’s wife, discussed Isis on the audio tour provided for Hammer Museum’s version of the exhibition.

Below is an excerpt from the transcript-

…Isis is based on a photo Noah took the day I unfurled two large fans, each with cheesy images of an Egyptian king and queen printed on their surface, and painted them yellow with house paint. I threw on my sister’s Naja’s old gold dance leotard from the 80s with sequins lining the hems and tassels that hung off my butt and sparkled like tinsel.

Noah said, “Stand there. You are Isis.” Using the fans as wings, I raised my arms and opened them. He snapped the pic and quickly retreated to paint. Egypt has always held a special place in my heart. When Noah and I met, I was studying ancient myths and history. I had just left my production job in Hollywood and was exploring film projects. Black Wall Street, Black Cowboys, Stepin Fetchit, The Frogs, Egyptian mythology, and so on.

Noah joined me on these journeys through history, and our home became a portal where imaginations could run wild. We exchanged stories, dreams, and techniques of making art. He painted and we lost ourselves in the magical time.

You can see both of us in this painting. Noah’s reflection is behind me in the window of our home. This painting holds so much for me. It is our past, and it is my present, and future in both painting and in life. I am Isis, and Noah is Osiris.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, Isis assembles all the scattered parts of Osiris in order to cast a spell to make him whole again, so he can live forever as a god. Noah is my Osiris. He will live forever through his work. My assignment is gathering these parts of my love and protecting them..

“Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque”, 2014, Oil on canvas

From the museum about the paintings above-

These works were inspired by Pueblo del Rio, a housing project designed in part by Paul Williams in 1941 for Black defense workers in Los Angeles. The projects were built along the concept of a “garden city,” with shared lawns and outdoor spaces designed to promote community, but they quickly degenerated into one of the most impoverished and dangerous areas in the city. In quiet resistance to this reality, Davis reimagined Pueblo del Rio as a place of harmony and accord, where ballet dancers arabesque and a trumpeter plays.

The exhibition also includes Davis’s Imitation of Wealth, pictured below, where he recreated famous works of art.

“Imitation of Wealth” -Davis’s versions of sculptures by Dan Flavin and Marcel Duchamp along with a real On Kawara painting

From the museum-

Davis’s father left him a small inheritance, specifically for fostering community and joy. Davis and Karon rented three storefronts in the Arlington Heights section of Los Angeles, and started devoting themselves to what would become known as the Underground Museum (UM) – an art space, free and open to all — made possible by his father’s legacy. Davis’s paintings of this time reveal a man deeply invested in the question of what he felt had been missing all these years: spaces for “the people around me” to feel recognized and to congregate. The exhibition The Missing Link opened at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles in February 2013.

Davis persuaded his gallery to throw the opening dinner at the UM, which became the museum’s unofficial opening. He served frogs’ legs and champagne, and guests were able to enjoy new sculptures by Karon, as well as their first jointly curated show: Imitation of Wealth. When no museums would lend, Davis decided he would simply make do himself: “What if we just use what we have — like these ugly-ass lights.” The building’s LED strip lights were turned into an imitation Dan Flavin sculpture, while a $70 vacuum cleaner from Craigslist became a knockoff Jeff Koons. The exhibition became a kind of elegy to the bootleg, the title alluding to Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, in which the young Black protagonist passes as white.

The museum included one work from their own collection, On Kawara‘s 3. JUNI 2001, in this recreation, with an interesting coincidence-

When he started bootlegging his own artworks, he made a fake On Kawara painting with the date of Oct. 7, 1957, to mark his father, Keven Davis’s, birthday. To honor his original spirit and ambition, we are lending this authentic On Kawara from our collection to join his “imitations” — it’s a special coincidence that the date is Noah Davis’s own birthday. The year 2001 was when he moved to New York to become an artist; a moment that led to everything else in this exhibition.

This exhibition closes 4/26/26.

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Aitor Lajarin-Encina at Pentimenti in Philadelphia

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia
Mar 312026
 

“Neighbors”, acrylic on canvas, 2025

“Neighbors” (detail)

“Neighbors” (detail)

“Bird and Fish”, acrylic on canvas, 2025

The paintings in Aitor Lajarin-Encina‘s exhibition Flora, Fauna, and Furniture at Pentimenti gallery in Philadelphia contain tiny elements that tell bigger stories. The longer you look, the more your interpretation may change.

From the gallery-

Aitor Lajarin-Encina’s paintings engage in dialogue with global histories of painting and popular image-making traditions, drawing from sources as varied as Baroque art, Constructivism, satirical cartoons, and video games. They function as visual poems, inviting viewers into moments of existential suspense that spark philosophical reflections on life and relationships between people, objects, and the environment.

At first glance, Aitor’s playful, cartoony, oneiric acrylic-on-canvas paintings appear figurative and tightly composed, relying heavily on narrative tension and visual appeal. They unfold as dreamlike tableaux populated by recurring iconographic elements: human figures, horses, celestial bodies, domestic furniture and objects, clothing, parks, cityscapes, plants, and everyday items. Beneath this apparently flat appearance, the surface opens into multiple layers rich with texture—drips, splatters, bumps, and accidents—carefully constructed and physically present in his work.

Lajarin-Encina approaches art as an immediate and intuitive experience, emphasizing its poetic intensity and emotional resonance rather than hidden or symbolic meanings. At the same time, the work offers a critique of a world designed by humans to be “user-friendly,” while simultaneously estranging people from the natural mysteries and wonders of the world.

This exhibition closes 4/4/26.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries