In The News

Knight Cities Challenge finalists announced, including 20 from Philadelphia

The Knight Foundation Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The Knight Cities Challenge has announced its finalists, including a healthy list from Philadelphia.

How do you choose 126 good ideas for cities from the more than 7,000 proposals submitted to the first Knight Cities Challenge?
It wasn’t easy. But, as of today, we’ve asked 126 happy finalists to submit final applications in three weeks with more details about their ideas.

It’s an exciting time for them but also for us at Knight Foundation. It is a privilege to meet so many people who are passionate about their communities and who are working to make them better. Soon, we’ll have plans and budgets and bios that we and our reviewers will pore over to make the even tougher decision about which applicants become Knight Cities Challenge winners...

We identified the biggest category of finalists as projects that sought to bring public life back to public spaces with almost 24 percent of the total. That was followed by supporting a changing urban economy, 20 percent; promoting a robust civic life, 17 percent; building connections between diverse communities, 11 percent; changing the stories communities tell about themselves, 11 percent; reimagining civic assets, such as libraries, parks, trails and school grounds, 10 percent; and retaining talent, 7 percent. Seeing these themes emerge, we are so excited to learn more about what the challenge finalists are planning...

In three weeks the final applications will be in, and we will announce the winners, who will receive a share of $5 million, before April 1.

Source: The Knight Foundation
Check out the complete list here.

Paul Strand retrospective at Philadelphia Museum of Art earns praise

The New York Times Tuesday, November 04, 2014

A retrospective of the work of modernist photographer Paul Strand wows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Drawing on the Philadelphia museum’s sizable Paul Strand Collection (most of it acquired since 2010), the show of some 250 prints takes in the full sweep of his career and some three-quarters of the 20th century. It includes film excerpts and a generous sampling of his photo books, projects that feed back into the early photographs and reveal longstanding interests in duration and narrative.

Bringing modernism down to earth, Strand branched out from Manhattan’s parks and skyscrapers to Maine forests, Mexican churches and small villages in Italy and New England. The immense but well-paced show makes room for mentors and influences beyond Stieglitz, among them the fin de siècle Parisian photographer Eugène Atget, the Italian neo-realist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and the American social documentarian Lewis Hine (one of Strand’s teachers at the Ethical Culture School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan).

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

Spanish dancer �ngel Corella makes Pennsylvania Ballet debut

The New York Times Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Ángel Corella makes his much anticipated debut as artistic director at the Pennsylvania Ballet. The New York Times headed south to Philadelphia to check it out.

In July, the star Spanish dancer Ángel Corella — a principal for many years with American Ballet Theater — was appointed artistic director of Pennsylvania Ballet. On Oct. 16, the company began to perform under his direction, at its main home, the Philadelphia Academy of Musichere, one of America’s most beautiful opera houses; posters have been hanging in downtown Philadelphia with a picture of his face (lightly bearded) to advertise the opening program, “Press Play: The Directorial Debut of Angel Corella.” I attended the Saturday matinee...

Pennsylvania Ballet was founded in 1963 (its first artistic director, Barbara Weisberger, was in Saturday’s audience), and has one of the longest records for performing Balanchine outside New York. (It first danced “Allegro Brillante,” this program’s opener, in 1965.) There were some last-minute cast changes on Saturday, and yet the ballet most affected by substitutions, Mr. Ratmansky’s “Jeu de Cartes” (which joined the Pennsylvania repertory three years ago) was, with “Allegro,” ebullient, with dancers seizing its many opportunities with enthusiasm and glee. Beatrice Jona Affron, the company’s music director and conductor, produced especially fine orchestral playing; there were also excellent contributions from the pianist Martha Koeneman.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

In East Kensington, an artist-enlivened empty lot is set for development

Hidden City Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Since 2010, the Little Berlin artist collective has been activating a vacant lot in East Kensington. Now the land has been sold to a developer. It's the urban-gentrification-circle-of-life!

When the arts collective Little Berlin arrived in the neighborhood in 2010 they started hosting events on the site informally at first, before seeking permission from Hirsh, who had purchased the lot in 2008, to develop it as a performance venue and community space. The Little Berlin website describes the agreement with Hirsh as a “partnership.”

The artists took the idea seriously and have been relentless in bringing life to the parcel. A few weeks ago, a Dodge Caravan that had been driven from Ohio was set up with two film projectors replacing the headlights, shining a film on an adjoining wall...

The neighborhood’s vintage housing and soaring former factories have lately become an asset, attractive to developers and young, prospective tenants. The artists are in part responsible.

“There are a lot of houses being built and houses being refurbished too that have been empty for a long time,” says Erickson. While he has only belonged to Little Berlin for two years, the change to the gentrifying neighborhood in just that time became obvious.

“It’s hard to wrap my head around it,” he says, “that in one way we’re making it nicer for people already living there and in other way making it easier for real estate developers to come in and buy property.”

Original source: Hidden City
Read the complete story here.

T Magazine details 'Year in the Life of the War on Drugs'

T Magazine Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The New York Times' T Magazine publishes a "photo diary" about beloved Philly band War on Drugs.

"Lost in the Dream," the third album from the Philadelphia band the War on Drugs, has been one of the year’s most celebrated indie-rock releases, drawing near-universal acclaim for its sophisticated synthesis of classic American folk and rock influences as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Sonic Youth. The band’s frontman, Adam Granduciel, is also a longtime photography enthusiast. "In high school, I was head of the lab," he says. "I dumped a whole five-gallon bucket of D-76 on my head once. It ruined all my clothes."

Granduciel is rarely without one of his three cameras: a Polaroid, loaded with 600 film purchased from the Impossible Project; a Holga he’s had for nearly a decade; and a Rollei 35 he found at a camera shop in Brighton, England. Over the past year, in the run-up to and the wake of the March release of “Lost in the Dream,” the band has traveled the world, and Granduciel has documented the sights its members have seen — from giraffes on a Dutch safari to Portuguese palm trees to his own 82-year-old father on his first trip to Europe.

Original source: T Magazine
Check it out here.

Want a 'Lord of the Rings'-style map of Philadelphia?

The A.V. Club Tuesday, October 14, 2014

PA resident Stentor Danielson creates super-cool maps of major American cities -- including Philadelphia -- in the style of fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien.

In addition to his de riguer Etsy store, a seeming must for endeavors of this nature, Danielson also maintains a densely-illustrated Tumblr called Mapsburgh, where he showcases his own work as well as that of other fantasy-minded artists and creators of odd, impractical things. There, brave travelers will get some brief, telling glimpses into the mapmaker’s creative process, which seems to exist at the nexus of fandom and fetishism. A specifically-cited source of inspiration for Danielson, for instance, is this map of Middle Earth from the Ballatine paperback edition of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings.

A faculty member at Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock University, Danielson works with pen and ink and, on occasion, cut paper to create his otherworldly "cartographic art" of quite-worldly places like Boston and Washington, D.C. The artist, who describes his work as "delicate" (read: alarmingly fragile), also takes requests.

Original source: The A.V. Club
Read the complete story here; and click here for Danielson's Etsy store.

Diner en Blanc lures 3,500 diners to Broad Street

Philadelphia Business Journal Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The pop-up dinner, a global phenomenon, was a big hit last week in Philly.

An estimated 3,500 people attended this year’s Dîner en Blanc on Thursday, gathering en masse (and en blanc) on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts.

After a year of planning, anticipation and speculation (and a little help from Project Runway winner Dom Streater), the secret location of the pop-up soiree was finally revealed: Broad Street between Chestnut and Pine streets.

Since the event has a French theme, the Avenue of the Arts was a natural choice, given its Parisian-inspired architecture, from City Hall to the lampposts on Avenue of the Arts...

“Philadelphia isn’t that big of a city, but we’re so busy that we tend not to stray outside of our own neighborhoods or where we work,” Philly native Streater said. “It’s nice to have that surprise, and just not even knowing where it’s going to be — you show up and experience new surroundings and see a part of the city you never saw before, which is helpful.”

Original source: Philadelphia Business Journal
Read the complete story and check out video here.

Funeral for a Home earns national press

The Atlantic's CityLab Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Funeral for a Home, a project Flying Kite has covered extensively in the past, earned some national praise for its mission to memorialize a demolished home in Mantua. The Atlantic's CityLab attended and snapped some pictures.

The voices of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church choir echoed off the buildings on Saturday along the 3700 block of West Philadelphia’s Melon Street.

Their usual pulpit sits around the corner at 37th and Wallace. But this past weekend, they sang at the funeral of an unusual neighbor: a small, dilapidated rowhouse at 3711 Melon, torn down that night.

As the choir sang the gospel hymn, the words seemed fitting – “Precious memories, how they linger.” Soon, memories would be all that’s left of the two-story home, a narrow rowhouse that long ago lost its partners.

Original source: The Atlantic's CityLab
Read the complete story here.

Local artists team up on new opera

The New York Times Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Local visual artist Christopher Cairns and composer Michael Hersch collaborate on a new opera.

The visual artist Christopher Cairns’s sprawling studio near Philadelphia is filled with installations that include piles of skulls and forlorn figures slumped despairingly in chairs. Sculptures that evoke the victims of Pompeii are strewn across the floor near the white wall, which is made of crumbling bricks and shards of glass and will be replicated in the sets for “On the Threshold of Winter,” Michael Hersch’s new opera. Mr. Cairns’s eerie art seems an aptly somber pairing for the dark-hued monodrama, which will receive its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, Mr. Hersch’s birthday, with Tito Muñoz conducting the ensemble Nunc.

“I hope the audience feels some kind of connection,” Mr. Hersch said, “and that a potentially unfamiliar musical framework doesn’t obscure the human drama the music attempts to serve.”

Mr. Hersch, 42, weathered several traumas before composing the opera. In 2009, his friend Mary O’Reilly — a historian he met in 2001 in Berlin — died at the age of 45 from ovarian cancer. And in 2007, he received his own cancer diagnosis. “It seemed so implausible in light of our relationship,” he said. “I found the whole thing like a bad joke, and I told her."

He is now healthy, “but there is always that fear that hangs around and over you and never goes away,” he said.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

The Atlantic's CityLab also highlights Mural Arts' Amtrak installation

The Atlantic Cities Tuesday, May 20, 2014

With support from Mural Arts, Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse has tackled seven sites between 30th Street Station and North Philadelphia Station.

Using the train as a central vehicle, psychylustro is meant to be seen in motion.

This stretch of track into downtown sees 34,000 riders every day, including travelers heading to and from New York on Amtrak plus commuters on two lines of SEPTA Regional Rail and one New Jersey Transit line with service to Atlantic City.*

The installation, curator Liz Thomas says, is intended "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurdle through every day." The moving trains allowed Grosse to play with a wider number of variables: the viewer's perspective will change based on which direction they're traveling, how fast the train is going, and which track the train is using. The goal, Thomas says, is to create "a beautiful disruption into a daily routine."

The installation also asks travelers to think more critically about the history of this stretch of Philadelphia, which includes sections of downtown and huge swathes of formerly industrial neighborhoods. The sites include the sides of an occupied office building, an old railroad trestle, and an abandoned warehouse, which once housed a textile factory but now has trees growing up through its collapsed roof. The brilliant colors -- vibrant whites and oranges on that warehouse side -- draw attention to these contrasting pieces of Philadelphia's past.

Original source: The Atlantic's CityLab
Read the complete story here.

'America's first queer jazz festival' coming to the City of Brotherly Love

The New York Times Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Philadelphia will host Outbeat, the country's first "queer jazz festival."

OutBeat, a four-day event that organizers are describing as the first jazz festival with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender focus (its subtitle is America’s First Queer Jazz Festival), will be staged in Philadelphia from Sept. 18 to 21. The festival, which was announced by its sponsor, the William Way LGBT Community Center, at a news conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, will include panel discussions and receptions as well as performances at several clubs and halls around the city.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

Redefining 'elevator music' as a community booster

The Atlantic Cities Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Inspired by the development of Muzak, Artist Yowei Shaw, a freelance public radio reporter and producer, has been working on "elevator music" that actually improves the community.

Shaw has been grappling with questions of engaging listeners in public spaces as part of her residency with the Philadelphia-based Asian Arts Initiative's Social Practice Lab. Muzak's social engineering history, she says, gave her an idea: "What if we could make our own kind of elevator music, but do it with pro-social intentions, to promote community?"

And so her project, Really Good Elevator Music, was born. Shaw asked six local musicians from Philly's Chinatown North/Callowhill neighborhood to produce tracks that would help "foster community" in the area. The result is the 13 track album of "really good elevator music," which is playing in the elevators of the nearby, mixed-use Wolf Building for the month of March.

Original source: The Atlantic Cities
Read the complete story here.

'Michael Snow: Photo-Centric' debuts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The New York Times Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting a survey of photographer Michael Snow's work.

But Mr. Snow is a bit of a polymath; he also paints, sculpts, performs as a jazz pianist and assembles photo installations that are as rigorously structural as his films but are also, surprisingly, quite playful. He hasn’t had a museum show of his photography since 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art gave him a small “Projects” exhibition. “Michael Snow: Photo-Centric” gives us a long overdue look at his work in the medium — starting with projects from the 1960s that overlap with film and performance and continuing to supersize staged color prints that reflect photo trends of the early 2000s.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

Opera Philadelphia commissions work based on saxophonist Charlie Parker

The New York Times Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Opera Philadelphia has commissioned Daniel Schnyder to create a chamber opera about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.

The opera, “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” is set on the day Parker died — March 12, 1955 — but takes place in his imagination as he is dying. The tenor Lawrence Brownlee will play Parker; Angela Brown, the soprano, will portray his mother, Addie, and Will Liverman, the baritone, will play Dizzy Gillespie, a frequent collaborator. Casting has not been announced for the other roles, which will include Parker’s patron, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Corrado Rovaris, the company’s music director, who suggested Mr. Schnyder for the commission, is scheduled to conduct the premiere.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

Philly photographer paints portrait of Rust Belt town in 'Homesteading'

New York Times' Lens blog Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Noted local photographer Zoe Strauss -- of "Under I-95" fame -- has a new project, 'Homesteading,' that examines life in a post-steel mill town.

“Homesteading” combines landscapes, street photography and formal studio portraits to explore over generations the history of those who built Andrew Carnegie’s wealth, the ways their fates were intertwined and the current lives of Homestead’s residents. After a year of research, she found it daunting to blend themes of globalization, a mythic past and the trauma of that past in a mundane 21st-century community. She actually felt she had reached the limits of what she could do with photography. So, she did what she always does when overwhelmed: Let strangers show her the way...

Ms. Strauss is not your typical Magnum photographer — she describes herself as a lesbian anarchist from Philadelphia and is unfailingly humble. She is interested as much by theory as by photographic practice, and she loves and is influenced by science fiction, art theory and epic poetry.

Original source: New York Times' Lens blog
Read the complete story here.

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