The second Fabric Workshop and Museum show to spotlight recent residencies, "New American Voices II" easily justifies its name. It does not, however, point to new American directions. The four featured artists — Jim Drain, Jiha Moon, Robert Pruitt and Bill Smith — are intellectually and visually engaging and original within the spectrum of current art-world explorations. But it's not a revolution. Rather, these artists represent a contemporary quartet that builds squarely on the past.

Moon has lived in South Korea, Iowa and now Atlanta, Ga. She layers and embeds visual cultural clichés — both popular and traditional — in delicious wall-mounted work. Commercial embroidery appliqués, anime, fabric from Moon's mother's wedding dress, brush painting and hand embroidery are elements of these autobiographical and historical narratives. Moon's layered surfaces (as in Botan Garden, pictured) make an experiential statement about shifting perspectives and the accretion of a visual vocabulary throughout a person's life.

Like Moon, each "new voice" mines a personal vein of identifiable imagery. Drain suggests mid-20th-century domestic interiors with suspended clusters of upside-down glass and metal table lamps, looking a little like Jorge Pardo's lighting for FWM's old location. Perhaps influenced by Yinka Shonibare, Pruitt utilizes American display conventions of family photographs as an index to his sculptural masks and clothing, augmented with startling firearms covered in gold or African-inspired beading.

The recognition that science is fashion-driven fascinates many artists today. Smith's "Magnetically stabilized, air-driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum" pieces merge modern electronics with ornate Frankensteinian science. His computers and floating emu eggs — "Ouija-ish," as FWM employee Joe Lacina describes them — select images in a random and arcane process.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

New American Voices II | Through mid-April, Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch St., 215-561-8888, fabricworkshop.org

A poor workman blames his tools, but sometimes a good artist deliberately chooses a tool that's misused or unpredictable. Painter John Zinsser brilliantly uses a trowel — not a brush or palette knife — to different stylistic, but equally abstract, ends. For him, an unconventional process becomes an elaborate, sophisticated practice. Zinsser's self-created technique is old-fashioned in its commitment to the physicality of art-making, valuing the hand at least as much as the head. On the other hand, the Modernist reinvention of skills intrinsic to Western painting and rejecting centuries of earlier tradition is hardly new.

Sometimes Zinsser trowels on paint like mortar, so thick it curls up into low relief. In works like the red-on-black Dream Systems, the trowel drips and drizzles creamy paint calligraphically and gently compresses it to develop capillary feathering. The edges of the rectangular trowel are reiteratively recorded as a grid. On occasion, it suggests the grid printed on East Asian writing paper — each unit meant to orient a single character. Drops, flows and squiggles in Zinsser's painting communicate the intentionality of writing even when the message is a cryptic as a dream.

This single tool, the trowel, has multiple personalities in Zinsser's hands. Often in these paintings from the last five years, he uses silver metallic pigments. Some pieces offer strong contrasts; others occasion soft, ductile interactions, but there are always two colors only. These are precisely recorded: Memory Trace [2010, silver/mixed cobalt violet gray, enamel and oil on canvas]. The first named is the field or ground color and the second, the expressive, nonrepresentational figure or image. In a few pieces — Geometry and Ego is one — the foreground pigment covers so much of the canvas that one might be tempted to call it monochrome, but there's always an exposed edge, the visible evidence of what came first.

Zinsser's commitment to lush, well-orchestrated accidents reminds us of nature. His use of engineered pigments, silvers, rust primer and alkyds keeps us in the artifice of civilization.

In both rooms of the gallery, owners Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling have intermingled the paintings for which Zinsser is well-known with a ...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2011/01/27/jenny-drumgoole http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2011/01/27/jenny-drumgoole

Jenny Drumgoole's work has become increasingly bizarre, humorous and unsettling — a feminist Borat meets David Lynch. (Full disclosure: I was acquainted with Drumgoole before she began her 2006 M.F.A. at Yale, where she entered as a photographer and emerged a video artist.)

In her latest piece, Drumgoole integrates autobiographical documentary with fantasy and animation. The installation tells the story of Drumgoole's participation in a recipe contest sponsored by Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Paula Deen.

Contestants were asked to tape themselves using cream cheese in original recipes. To inspire them, Deen posted a series of online "Tips from the Team," which Drumgoole follows artfully. As possible "garnishments" for a "Sweet and Savory Cream Cheese Mould," she suggests "some ribbons, some straws, some flowers and cat toys. Give yourself more options than not."

Drumgoole explores the relationship between a private individual and the artifice of a public personality like Deen, though the core of her work in this and other projects is a conflicted relationship with food: a dance between longing and repulsion. When does sustenance become self-destructive self-indulgence? As the artist's animated cream-cheese head says, "It's your worst nightmare — you're battling your primitive self which has a lot more cunning and power than you could ever have imagined." To which Drumgoole replies, "It's delicious!"

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Jenny Drumgoole: Real Woman of Philadelphia | Jan. 29-March 15, Levy Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, 2000 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-965-4027, thegalleriesatmoore.org

The two groups of work on view this month at Locks Gallery are typical — in different ways — of the post-holiday season. Most pieces in "Alterations" (pictured), a group digital media show on the main floor, curated by visual artist Peter Campus, are too undomesticated for ordinary homes. Institutions may be interested, but few individuals would consider buying these pieces. Upstairs, more people will find things they'd love to own, but the mixed bag of visually attractive landscape-related paintings is not conceptually tight. It doesn't even have a real title.

Campus, a septuagenarian who has influenced generations of video and digital artists, occupies the physical and conceptual center of his group show. The videos he presents here are beautiful recent archetypal landscapes composed of ever-shifting, blurred but squared-off elements in resonant dark colors. It's impossible not to respond to them.

In contrast, an earnest installation of digital prints by Nayda Collazo-Llorens, "Aposiopesis," is only moderately engaging. The word refers to fragmentary or interrupted speech, generally construed to reflect an overexcited emotional state. But any sense of urgency is lacking. In a room populated by lively, active images, these smallish prints come across as an intellectual exercise.

In the case of Kathleen Graves, the manipulation of a specific vocabulary of static imagery (reclining child, butterfly, flower) into diverse scattered compositions suggests a narrative. Graves' real point may be that repeated images arbitrarily morph into linguistic codes. We expect them to tell a story, so we make one up.

Not with a whimper but a bang is Jason Varone's pairing of a simplistic wall painting — a meandering pictogram of a river — with monochrome low-tech video that includes text. The subject seems to be illegal border-crossing in Arizona. Bizarrely, the installation has acquired unanticipated narrative context and energy from the recent shootings in Tucson.

Beryl Korot's 10-minute text-based Florence (Nightingale) digital video is the most compelling work apart from Campus'. Korot uses Nightingale's own words to build a poetic sense of aspiration, dedication and honor that is not precisely dependent on logic, narrative imag...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/12/23/susan-fenton-work-from-ballinglen http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/12/23/susan-fenton-work-from-ballinglen

The Irish seacoast was a good choice for Susan Fenton's residency. That misty vastness; those stark, looming rocks; the pearly light: All are in harmony with the moody stillness that surrounds her typically static, theatrically clad female subjects. This time, Fenton took her pictures in the studio, but replaced her favorite models with pieces of litter, chunks of the traveling trash that washed ashore in the North Sea. The photographs are elegant and awkward. The detritus manifests an amusing gaucherie when hand-patinaed with a colorful, grubby haze. The series succeeds as a commentary on the immortal garbage of the past, but the peachy freshness of flesh that dominates Fenton's figure pieces is missed.

Another group of earlier photos presents a provocative, almost baroque contrast to the Irish still lifes. The "Nocturne" series records the almost clichéd objects that tend to gather in an artist's studio: bottles, jars, drapery. Soft gradations of light and shade are the result of long exposures, recording the passage of the full moon over arrangements that might be suitable for a drawing class. The generic, predictable quality is, oddly, part of their charm. This work, like the North Sea series, reflects Fenton's feeling for geometric compositions.

Nostalgia is the dominant mood of these paintings. Here it's accompanied by a soupçon of foreboding, like a brooding cello in the background.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Through Jan. 8, Schmidt Dean Gallery, 1710 Sansom St., 215-569-9433, schmidtdean.com

"Surface Politics" is a piece of installation art in the form of a group art exhibit. At Salon Joose, curator Theodore A. Harris combined the work of nine highly respected African-American artists with his own, adding elements like yellow "caution" tape much like he interlayers images from art history, news and advertising into his collages. "For me," says Harris, "this show is like John Coltrane improvising on 'These Are a Few of My Favorite Things.'"

Although the show might feel like a single work, the materials and mediums range from video to painting to sculpture, and individual concepts are equally disparate. Two minimal Quentin Morris "6-foot circle" black paintings are the first thing visitors will see. Their uncompromising humanistic object-ness, allied with a sense of the infinite, seems fresh even though — or maybe because — Morris has been exploring it for four decades.

Harris' addition of two small ship models and coins referencing the slave trade undermines the impact of 13 22-inch-tall crosses by sculptor David Stephens that run along one wall. A video documents the action in which the crosses were burned in Fairmount Park as a response to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling legalizing cross-burning.

Sophisticated and ominous, Tanya Murphy Dodd's dreamlike mixed-media painting Embracing Light is inescapably about race and history. In contrast, the sensuous, abstract surfaces of Jared Wood's unfinished black wood diptychs may well have a socio-political aspect, but it's understated. LeRoy Johnson's layered cube wrapped in wire resonates with the struggle and tenacity of life in Philadelphia.

Joan Huckstep's video documentation, Ancestral Women, anchors the show. Choreographed by Huckstep (also a dancer in the performance) and projected in a separate darkened space, it is a testament to the survival of the spirit.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Surface Politics: Looking Beneath Aesthetics and Formalism | Through Dec. 3, Salon Joose, 601 N. Third St., 4joose.blogspot.com

The element of real time adds to the resonance of these experiences. The most melodramatic one centers on a noose suspended at around the height of the viewer's head. The ominous vignette induces an authentic, if momentary, frisson of atavistic panic — at least in those who've watched too many reruns of The Twilight Zone.

In 1964, Pop Art gallerist Leo Castelli invited Pistoletto to immigrate to the U.S. and join Castelli's New York stable, where his mirror works would be super-marketable. According to Pistoletto, his response was to shun the U.S. for more than 15 years. His ultimate reply in the mid-1960s was a heterogeneous group of minimal, impersonal sculptures. Recognizable as a house or a generic photograph of Jasper Johns or a table with a pyramid on it, they remain stolidly uncommunicative. Pistoletto calls them "Minus Objects." I call them boring, but also must acknowledge that they were a necessary cleansing response to the powerful personal vision of the mirror paintings.

In a reaction against corporate manipulation of society and in sympathy for the working class, Pistoletto joined the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s. This specifically Italian movement turned to common, non-elite, even cast-off materials in art-making. It rejected the detached irony of Pop and was profoundly anti-hierarchical. Perhaps Pistoletto's best-known work in this vein is a wall composed of bricks wrapped in colorful rags.

Two huge, irregular, mirrored tables represent the Mediterranean...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/10/28/re-view http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/10/28/re-view

The abstract paintings of Diane Pieri and Doris Staffel may not look a bit alike, but they are compatible and companionable in adjacent spaces at Rosenfeld Gallery.

Staffel’s series “New Work on Paper” consists of small, squarish paintings, 8 or 9 inches to a side. Intimate in scale, their boldness reaches across the room with swelling and contracting shapes of black, white, chalky blue, emerald and lipstick red. The artist, 89, continues to practice painting as a vital engagement with contrasting expressive elements. Her personal interpretation of the lessons of Modernist teachers like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko merges seamlessly into her practice of Tibetan Buddhism and its search for the resolution of polarities. It isn’t a quiet conversation — brash, stylish, self-consciously casual, it feels more like the painted equivalent of cocktail-party repartee in which witty ripostes mask something more piercing and profound.

Ethereal and luxurious, Pieri’s “Waterfall Journeys” beckons viewers into pale, segmented spaces. Lines and markings are thin, flexible and deft as an Indian miniature. There are allusions to gardens, architecture and textiles; to traditional patterns, both those made by people and which appear in nature. Confetti-like scatterings of circular elements are as ephemeral as bubbles in a stream. Contrasting large flowers and leaves have an endearing awkwardness. Pieri continues to use areas of gold leaf as another color. Adding a second precious metal for the first time, she integrates delicate drawings in silverpoint. In this technique, used by da Vinci and Rembrandt, a silver stylus is drawn like a pencil across a coarse ground. Initially pale and shiny, the tracks of silver soon begin to tarnish and darken. In a counterpoint to painting’s characteristic illusion of capturing onrushing moments of time, silverpoint consciously surrenders. It acknowledges that we are embedded in time. What we see tod...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/10/14/depth-of-field http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/10/14/depth-of-field

When you glimpse one of James Brantley's paintings out of the corner of your eye, it feels like a window opening onto a dramatic expanse of sky above rooftops, a vastness of light and space that draws you toward it. Brantley's first solo museum show, now at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, consists of nine architectural landscape paintings in one gallery and four in another. In most of them, a distant unbroken horizon separates towering sky from a simplified vista of receding rooftops. The relationship of sky and Earth is a dialogue between celestial, eternal, self-generating nature and the rickety, logic-bound human world — one that is, of course, part of the larger wholeness.

The placement of the horizon in his paintings, Brantley says, is "purely arbitrary. It can be high or low but never in the middle." He creates powerful spatial illusions within this simple Rothko-like formula. The stacked contrasting masses of color relate to one another across that distant divide. Brantley contrasts sharp color transitions in the lower register with "the soft bleeding of color into color" in the sky. "Color makes magic," he says, enumerating pigments — cerulean, ultramarine — as a cook might savor the names of favorite seasonings.

A lifelong Philadelphian, Brantley trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. As a student, he painted landscapes en plein air and still believes that "painting from nature is a way we can relate to our world." He draws inspiration from earlier urban landscape painters like Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, who patiently distilled perceived color and light into their work, but he's done many subjects. A self-portrait, "Brother James," will be in PAFA's upcoming fall exhibition "Narcissus in the Studio."

Brantley understands that the landscape format is universally comprehensible. "It is really abo...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/09/23/plain-beauty-desert-jewels-philadelphia-museum-of-art http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/09/23/plain-beauty-desert-jewels-philadelphia-museum-of-art Shows in two adjacent galleries at the PMA's Perelman Building please the eye and refresh the psyche in utterly opposing styles. What do they have in common? You don't need to know or study or ponder anything to enjoy them. The unorthodox double feature is perfect.

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Images of Bohnchang Koo's oversize photographs of white Korean pots in "Plain Beauty" may elicit bland comments, but seeing them in person is a much more satisfying experience. This is the last weekend to see the monochromatic pictures that transcend nearby examples of real Joseon dynasty porcelain. The clarity of Koo's work will surely remind some of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes. Their luminosity suggests Johannes Vermeer's interiors or Claude Monet's late water lilies. But no doubt central to the photographer's vision are centuries of ink paintings on rice paper. One wall contains six photos of full-bodied moon jars, experienced as a single work. It's a celebration of surfaces and light that caresses all it touches.

As Koo's show is, indeed, plain beauty, the North African jewelry next door, "Desert Jewels," is profoundly, magnificently fancy. Overflowing abundance is the message of large, lavish necklaces, amulets and diadems that juxtapose semiprecious stones of every shade from bright coral and amber to piercing blue and soft green. Tassel-like wool fibers and polished beads contrast with intricate metal techniques from casting, incising and piercing to wrapped wire to cloisonné enameling. These virtuoso displays leave diamonds in the unimaginative dust. (Admirers of the huge, flamboyant earrings may be relieved to learn that many were designed to be suspended not from earlobes but from the hair.)

More than symbols of wealth, these objects are wealth — both solid and intangible.

(...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/09/09/mark-bennion-alex-roskin-wexler-gallery http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/09/09/mark-bennion-alex-roskin-wexler-gallery An almost Jungian sense of time and archetypal consciousness links Mark Bennion's paintings and Alex Roskin's sculptural furniture in adjacent spaces at Wexler Gallery. That, and a commitment to the exploration of a singular formal process, seemingly guides each artist's conceptual journey.

The lighting in the gallery is as even and bright as one would expect, but memory recasts Bennion's abstract paintings in a dark setting, illuminated only by firelight or chinks of starlight. A longtime practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, Bennion uses a self-invented, almost ritualized fresco-related process to construct his paintings. Beginning with a surface of plaster incised with sgraffito markings, he moves through prescribed stages, including crushing the plaster-covered paper before gluing the crackled sheet to wood. Sanding produces a textured, faintly gestural surface that is stained in alternately additive and subtractive processes.

The resulting layered and abraded painting suggests human markings on primordial walls. There's a sense of immediacy and accumulated time; Bennion describes one of his goals in the words of sculptor Isamu Noguchi: "ancient innocence."

Noguchi's furniture might well be an influence on Alex Roskin's graceful, simple, non-functional furniture forms. "Tusk" works, such as a rocking chair, emphasize paired rosewood or oak tusk shapes mounted in brilliantly polished bronze. In "Skeletal" pieces, the curved wooden elements suggest ribs joined to a metal spine.

The curved tusks, in particular, have a historical resonance, stretching back to mastodon tusks through the bull imagery of Crete to the ritual African use and Western collection of trophy elephant tusks. The showy non-functionality of Roskin's tusk objects underlines an opposing reality: Tusks have always been collected as elite or power objects. Now they are relics of human vanity.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Mark Bennion & Alex Roskin | Through Oct. 3...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/26/sites-for-sore-eyes http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/26/sites-for-sore-eyes Seeking out an interesting show to review when many businesses are on August holiday, I found myself exploring the websites of about 20 local galleries and museums. Some are attractive and welcoming, but more than you would expect are, simply, disorganized and off-putting. Many sites provide content that reflects and expands on what you would find if you visited the gallery; others, not so. And then there are a few so beguiling, you might visit just for fun.

On the Internet I want facts up front: Where is the gallery? What will I see when I get there? Tipped off by a friend, I found the site for ArtJaz Gallery (artjaz.com), a small Old City art space, to be among the most user-friendly. Address, hours, current show and gallery artists are right there: attractive and legible on page one.

Another winner is West Philly's Institute of Contemporary Art (icaphila.org). The address and current shows are on the home page; ICA puts additional useful information on a page invitingly called "Visit." Businesslike Locks Gallery (locksgallery.com) in Washington Square runs its letterhead-like address along the bottom of the opening page.

The physical Philadelphia Museum of Art (philamuseum.org) is a scattered metropolis of buildings and collections. Its complexity is unhappily mirrored in a dauntingly fussy home page dense with show blurbs and no addresses in sight. Even "Visiting" doesn't deliver. You have to doggedly click through to a third page not listed on the main menu to find addresses, hours and admission information.

In addition to the basics, commercial and independent venues usually provide descriptions and images of work by gallery artists. Locks neighbor Bridgette Mayer (bridgettemayergallery.com) is one of the most professional and personable in this regard. On its home page, black-and-white thumbnail portraits of artists lead to in...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/12/divergence-five-views-of-photography-sande-webster http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/12/divergence-five-views-of-photography-sande-webster

It's now dead simple to make technically excellent pictures with only a so-so camera and a computer. Taking this technological paradigm shift into account, "Divergence" at Sande Webster presents a few personal directions in photography.

Two among the quintet of photographers are showing work reminiscent of mid-20th-century painting. Mitchell (who uses one name only) makes expansive prints in which soft focus color areas are bounded by the edges of the paper and a few blurry lines. Mark Rothko is an obvious point of reference; Mitchell's colors — soft turquoise sky blues, faded reds — are like refreshing sun-washed island breezes.

Printmaker Gregg Krantz likes to work in what he calls "suites." There's one such cluster in this show; hard-edged but not harsh, occasionally symmetrical, these pictures include sharply focused architectural details like a flower and rhythmic, pleasingly angular zigzags.

Well-known in Philadelphia for her figurative sculpture, including the iconic gold Face Fragment at 3500 Chestnut St., Arlene Love is pursuing a long-term project of black-and-white street photography, "Walking Distance." With the exception of an image of a young woman in fishnet stockings standing with a policeman (pictured, detail), the images on her personal website are superior to the ones in "Divergence."

Another member of the Philly old guard, Ron Tarver is showing large, ethereal black-and-whites of spring flowers like daffodils or crocus blossoms. The best of the pallid auras seem tenuous, almost fetal, artifacts or memories of an unborn spring.

Inspired by digital fragmentation, Phil Stein assembles sharply focused, colorful urban scenes into low-relief collages. He occasionally alters the texture of sections with a Plexiglas veneer; the effect is jumpy, cacophonous almost, but also evolving and energizing — undeniably and excitingly urban.

(

Back in 2007 when Luella Tripp learned that Siano, her last gallery, had to close because the Siano design group was giving up its lease, she immediately began planning an eponymous new space.

LGTripp Gallery is worth the wait. Airy with a vaulted ceiling and large arched windows, it is home to a stable of 14 respected area artists; however, right now the gallery is hosting an invitational summer show (hence the title "RSVP"). The number 14 must have some magic for Tripp — that's how many non-gallery artists she asked to participate in this show.

Painting dominates, but some of the most interesting work in "RSVP" isn't painting. Victoria Pepe describes Infinity Journey Through Infinity as a "virtual video painting." Available only in CD form, it contains programming that causes a picture (in a video or projected format) to continually change colors within a pattern of shapes outlined in black and accompanied by Pep's quiet, chiming analog and digital music. The specifically selected, ever-changing colors in Infinity Journey are not pixilated but, rather, programmed to be the same hue at any size. The combinations are random but, as Pepe says, "not haphazard" and will rarely repeat. The picture itself consists of many quirky geometric shapes ordered around a fat horizontal lightning-bolt shape that unifies the composition. It's as if the center has magnetically pulled all the other shapes to itself and locked them in place. Infinity Journey is easy to appreciate, even companionable. Pepe sees it as potentially meditative.

As a CD it may be perceived as less unique than, say, a print, but it is a limited edition (the artist does not say how many she will make). It would be especially effective if presented in a darkened room — a truly artful night light.

Tripp loves abstraction, seductive surfaces and smoothly resolved compositions. John McDaniel's semi-symmetr...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/07/15/icons-of-costume-hollywoods-golden-era-and-beyond-james-a-michener-art-museum http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/07/15/icons-of-costume-hollywoods-golden-era-and-beyond-james-a-michener-art-museum

The star of the Michener's summer exhibit is one of the best-known costumes in film history: the elaborate outfit Scarlett O'Hara wears to visit Rhett Butler in a Yankee jail in 1939's Gone with the Wind. Designed in real life by Walter Plunkett, it's fictionally confected by Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) and Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) from antebellum velvet portieres. Today, the velvet is a little faded, but with its heavy tasseled cording, it's still an impressive, slightly bizarre and monumental achievement in costuming.

Oversize black-and-white film stills provide backdrops to outfits displayed on mannequins. The glossy feathers dominating Marlene Dietrich's svelte black ensemble from Shanghai Express (1932) are a perfect foil for her cool, calculating face. Together, photograph and object illustrate that extra dimension a skilled actor brings to a costume — and, equally, the way a great costume can frame a moment in time.

Designs for movies set in the historic past tell us more about the time the costume was made. The man's court coat and vest from Barry Lyndon, for example, helped Milena Canonero and Ulla-Britt Sšderlund win a 1975 Oscar for Best Costumes, but it's subtly different from real 18th-century clothing. Nowadays we can easily recognize the influence of 1960s fashion on the colorful patterning and the cut of the cuffs. 

Legendary artists and actors, like Greta Garbo, Edith Head and Ingrid Bergman (pictured), are represented, and every item in the show teaches us something about film or fashion. Unfortunately, there are so few men's costumes that it might have been better to leave them out altogether.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

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The folk-related, lighthearted fabric designs of mid-20th-century master Alexander Girard are an influence on Kate Abercrombie, now completing an M.F.A. at the University of Texas at Austin. Perhaps the artist's experience working at the Fabric Workshop further enabled her tweaks and transgressions on the grid and her smart subversion of decorative motifs. She appropriates the Victorian belief that an environment saturated with visual stimulation is more harmonious and relaxing than a stark, minimal one.

Abercrombie's wallpaper of repeat digitized images (pictured) recalls Impressionist painting, partly through color harmony, but mostly through the broken, color — recording an image that's undecipherable because we are too close. A paper-covered panel is completed with the superimposition of two gouache paintings: one in yellow-greens and one in blues.

Abercrombie likes gouache, an opaque water-based paint, because "it is systematic and can't be reworked." Nature is a touchstone. Art historian Oleg Grabar's important work on Islamic art, which is generally nonrepresentational with the exception of plants, may have contributed to her choice of accretion and decoration over narrative.

A trio of related gouaches is based on a friend's collection of ex-votos. Another piece is based on a collection of dolls. "I'm not really a collector, but I like seeing the relationship between the works in a collection," Abercrombie says. References to the body are encrypted, no doubt, but not recognizable in the finished work.

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"Be brave, be competitive and be yourselves. Show the world your art," Sarah Jessica Parker exhorts 14 mostly young and attractive artists early in the première episode of Bravo's latest reality show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

The subject is novel, but it's otherwise a predictable and effective formula packed with pretensions, clichés and suspense, as well as some pretty good — and some really bad — artworks.

The show's judges are recognized experts in criticism, collecting and commerce (one is an NYC gallery owner; another, a senior art critic for New York Magazine), and the contestants all seem to already have a degree of midlevel success at their chosen art specialties. Writer and curator Trong Nguyen, for example, has been reviewed in The New York Times, and painter Jaclyn Santos was a studio assistant to Jeff Koons.

One of the two youngest competitors has a Philadelphia connection. Abdi Farah, 23, is a UPenn grad (check out his cartoons from The Daily Pennsylvanian at abdiart.com) and a recent employee of the Mural Arts Program. It looks like he may do well on Work of Art.

The grand prize is a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a publicity coup for both museum and artist. On the other hand, considering the expenses involved in making art, the top money prize of $100,000 is surprisingly unimpressive.

Yesterday's challenge: Make a portrait of a fellow contestant. In 13 hours. Early in the show, brusque Nao Bustamante coolly announced her willingness to critique her peers and abrasively solidified her status with them by making good on that promise. Nevertheless, Nao's process diagram of her subject (Miles Mendenhall, who has obsessive compulsive disorder) was more substantive than the judges recognized when they placed her in the bottom three.

It's no wonder maps are like a siren song to artists. Like the centuries of cartography that came before, even Google Earth is a seductive invitation to get lost: Maps are infinitely fascinating and infinitely frustrating. Four well-known artists' provocative and visually delightful considerations of maps as subject, process and material can be found at the Gershman Y's Borowsky Gallery.

Maps typically show us where something is — but they can also show when. Most of Leila Daw's maps (pictured) are about earlier versions of a landscape. The small-square format of her painted Map Icons and her use of "precious" materials like glitter emphasize the symbolic intention of these iconic records of a time and place. Some paintings in this series celebrate Peruvian geoglyphs on the high plains of Nasca; the purpose of these ancient artifacts has been lost. Even the technique of making the remarkably accurate lines, which themselves can seem like mapping superimposed on the Earth's surface, is disputed. Similar Map Icons by Daw relate to Australian Aborigines and other non-industrial cultures.

Daw also presents a large map, Northeast Seas Exploration, about European travel and the conventions of historical European maps. Map-makers traditionally emphasize the value of their work by ornamenting them with coats of arms, sea serpents or mythic monsters of foreign climes. In her exhibition essay, curator Miriam Seidel points out, "Maps do not simply convey factual information in a neutral way; they tell us about underlying assumptions, blind spots and agendas." The most common distortion of modern maps is occasioned by the perfectly reasonable decision to represent the map-maker's (or his client's) home area at the map's center. This placement changes the apparent size of neighboring locations. They are altered by trapezoidal distortions of latitude and longitude.

Accuracy or...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/05/13/pretty-women http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/05/13/pretty-women

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As a child, Iqbal Hussain knew how his mother and sister earned a living. Earlier generations of women had been courtesans of Pakistan's Maharaja of Patiala, but political upheaval reduced them to common sex workers. As a result, the artist — recognized as one of his native country's premier painters — takes as his main theme prostitutes and entertainers of the ancient red-light district in Lahore where he grew up. Though not explicitly sexual, the voluptuous female silhouettes have a timeless resonance so obvious that they might be clichés if they weren't more personal.

At first glance, Hussain's paintings are not particularly challenging to American eyes. But from a more insightful viewpoint, the girls and women he depicts become more poignant, more individual. Kohl-rimmed eyes are stoic and filled with pathos. Small, graceful gestures of the hands suggest an inner elegance and sensitivity unnoticed in a crass world of commerce.

Hussain's solo show at Twelve Gates Gallery also includes his delicate calligraphic landscapes of the Ravi River. He will be in Philadelphia this Saturday at 7 p.m. to sign copies of The Painter of Imprisoned Souls, a biographical consideration of his work by noted art critic Marjorie Hussain.

With artists like Hussain, Twelve Gates brings something new and significant to Philadelphia. Gallery director Aisha Khan and her husband, Atif Sheikh, moved here from New Jersey, choosing Philadelphia as a city in particular need of contemporary South Asian art. "We changed everything in our lives to open this gallery," says Khan, who envisions the year-old Twelve Gates as more than a showcase for artists of the Indian an...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/22/womens-work-sande-webster-gallery http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/22/womens-work-sande-webster-gallery

The title of the show at Sande Webster is what initially caught my interest. What does "Women's Work" as an exhibition topic mean, exactly?

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It turns out the show is not concept-driven. It was organized by Philadelphia artist John McDaniel, who works curatorially for Webster, and by gallery director Gregg Krantz with some input from associate director Philippe Jean, who joked that he'd contributed about 2 percent to the planning of the show. The installation in Webster's main gallery presents a lot of high-quality art by 11 mostly mid-career or senior women, but there's no perceptible message. The title is a straightforward description of what's in the show.

There may not be a group theme, but each artist has an impressive individual presence. Work by women and men is the subject of Marta Sanchez's prints (pictured). Shown with the originals on a facing wall, they recall the great generation of Mexican muralists like José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Sanchez's Workers on the Track is an almost nostalgic invocation of a past century's once powerful but now defanged revolutionary politics. In the borders of the print, Sanchez writes of the railroad workers, "They are and always will be the salt of the earth."