Soil Kitchen

Yesterday evening I attended the opening reception for Soil Kitchen, a temporary public art project organized by the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy. The collective Futurefarmers—unanimously selected by a panel including Carlos Basualdo, Joshua Mosley, and Winifred Lutz—provided the artistic vision, drawing upon Don Quixote, whose statue stands across the street from its location at 2nd Street and Girard Avenue. They appropriated the windmill, but as a positive model for sustainability and clean energy, rather than the imaginary enemy of a knight-errant. It is tempting to invoke the namesake quixotic moniker, but the project provides a model for community engagement necessary for transforming a dream and an ideal of sustainable living into a practicable reality.



The concept is simple and anyone can participate: bring in a soil sample for analysis and receive a bowl of soup in return, made from fresh, local, and organic ingredients. Empowered with the knowledge about the health and quality of their soil, participants can then take the leap to growing their own vegetables, which can become the ingredients for their own sustainable food.





Visit Soil Kitchen before it closes on April 6!

Looking for Brazil in Chelsea

This month, Chelsea is ripe with Brazilian art!



At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Contente, Laura Lima, Maria Nepomuceno, and Thiago Rocha Pitta, five artists from A Gentil Carioca gallery in Rio de Janeiro (which I had the pleasure to visit and wrote about here) are part of a terrific group show.



Also at Tanya Bonakdar, gallery-represented Sandra Cinto is showing new works and a site-specific installation.



Since last August, P.S. 11 has been home to a public mural by Os Gêmeos.



And 1500 Gallery, a relative newcomer to the neighborhood, specializes in Brazilian photography. Vale a visita!

Michelangelo Pistoletto - Takin' It To The Streets

One striking thing I have learned since I began graduate school last year is how many people are averse to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions of comparable size and scope. There are as many reasons as there are individuals, not limited to: the price of admission makes the museum inaccessible; the museum is neither representative of nor welcoming to people of color; the leadership of the museum does not prioritize serving the locals of its community, catering disproportionately to out-of-towners; or that the museum, its largest donors, and heaviest users are just plain elitist. Learning about these points of view so different from my own was an eye-opening experience. Even though I continue to be a lover of PMA and its programming, I have come to understand how the museum sits atop its hill, letting people come to it, rather than reaching out to the community to engage people where they are in an open and unimposing manner.



I state all of this to emphasize how important it is for the PMA to run programs like the recent reenactment of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Walking Sculpture (Scultura da Passeggio). We departed from the museum with an already sizable crowd, operating under the idea that, as we rolled the giant newspaper ball through the city, more folks would join our group. While there is no empirical way of measuring whether or not this actually happened, I do think that it worked. Based on my observation, the size of our group stayed consistent; though I know that some who started out from the museum did not complete the journey, I also witnessed new participants enter the fold along the way.









The planned itinerary took us down the Schuylkill River Trail, up to Chestnut Street, over to Rittenhouse Square, then down Locust Street and up South Broad Street to City Hall, before finally cutting through JFK Plaza to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with a small detour at the Rodin Museum, and ending back at PMA. Here lies a problem: the journey was more of a touristic flyby of fashionable and picturesque spots, not a truly inclusive route through residential areas. Did we reach anyone not already sympathetic to the museum and its modus operandi? Would it have been truer to the spirit of Pistoletto’s original work to hijack the ball and roll it through anywhere but Center City?













If it appears that I am being overly critical, I will conclude with this thought: what we all experienced that day was sheer, unadulterated fun. For the greater part of the trek, children were happily pushing the ball through the streets and you can hear their joyous laughter throughout the video. The artist himself was light and airy, dancing to music and playfully interacting with the children. Even the PMA senior staff members who made the trip seemed less than their usual austere selves. And when else would you see Gerry Lenfest out and about, rubbing shoulders with the man on the street?

The need for programs such as this one is great; institutions of gravitas and artists of renown have a mandate to provide them.

Road Trip - Storm King Art Center

This summer I had the opportunity to visit Storm King Art Center, a destination that I had wanted to go to see for many years. It is a place that I had passed by dozens of times when driving back and forth to Connecticut. Adding to my yearning, one can catch a glimpse of the sculpture-laden South Fields of Storm King from the New York Thruway. They beckoned to me just as the Sirens sang to Odysseus; each time I would ask myself when I would make the time to pause for a stopover. I wonder how many others ponder the same question. And so, I carved out a few hours for a visit, but really an entire day would have been better to traverse the vast acreage and take in all of the art.











Storm King Art Center as a whole feels like sacred ground where particular types of sculpture from the mid-twentieth century have been enshrined for eternity. It simultaneously has the air of an alternate dimension that exists out of time and place. When I crept along the gravel path in the car up to the guard post to purchase a ticket, seeing the giant steel structures dead ahead, I knew that I was about to enter into another world. The specter of artists like Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman, Isamu Noguchi and Mark Di Suvero loom large over the landscape, literally and in spirit. Like the remains of titans or giants from a lost epoch, their hulking art still commands the rolling topography. But the art has been continually refreshed with new additions.

Initially, I did not give much thought to the specific placement of sculptures: I was caught up in exploration of the site, filled with anticipation that the summiting of each hill revealed new discoveries in the distance. Bit by bit, I became more attentive to the installation of the art and the interplay of specific pieces. In the immediate presence of a massive construction, one can easily be oblivious of other things that might exist in the periphery. For the best long view of what Storm King is all about, one must gaze out in all directions from the vantage point of Museum Hill, where the main building is located. It was here, looking over the same South Fields visible from the freeway, that I appreciated how the angularity of Mark di Suvero’s work punctuated the open land, contrasting with the trees and framed by the horizon line. I was also attuned to perspective and vanishing point in the way I might consciously think about them only when faced with a very intentionally rendered Renaissance painting. There is something extraordinary about having the opportunity to look first from extremely far away, then advancing to close inspection.















Quite unlike installations by the same artists in an urban setting, where the art is hemmed in and often dominated by surrounding architecture, the undeveloped land offers a context in which the artist’s creation is the undisputed focal point. In the precious and few open areas throughout a city, public sculpture is most successful when it manipulates and makes people aware of the way they use said spaces. But they are too often invisible to a desensitized populace: fading into the background can be a real danger. To illustrate, I think of works by Alexander Calder and Alexander Liberman that I regularly walk past on Penn campus, and the drastic difference in the way I experienced work by the same artists at Storm King.





















Am I spending a disproportionate amount of time discussing the behemoths? Equally excellent works of mid- to smaller scale are clustered in and around the museum building. A favorite of mine was Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s LUBA. So new was the piece that its intoxicating perfume of charred cedar added a deeper level sensory enjoyment. It would have been perfectly appropriate to offer one of Louise Bourgeois’ giant spiders on the park grounds; instead visitors get the unexpected treat of a stone-cylinder miniature landscape reminiscent of the basalt columns at Giant’s Causeway.













There was the brainy comparison of having a Louise Nevelson at the front of the museum, matched at the building’s direct opposite end by a more recent work from Chakaia Booker, arguably a descendant of the same assemblage values. I delighted in the wonderful trickery of Alyson Shotz’s Mirror Fence, was perplexed by the rambling and twisty bamboo space-frame construction by Stephen Talasnik, and felt oddly entranced by John Bisbee’s squiggly spheroids.





















Unfortunately, I ran out of time on my visit, just barely scratching the surface. But I will return.