Arts and Culture : In The News

Keith L. Sachs, the former chief executive of Saxco International, and his wife, Katherine are giving a major gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from their contemporary collection.

The couple are also major buyers of contemporary art, working closely with museum curators to amass a top-flight collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures from the 1950s to the present. This week, the museum announced that it had been promised a lion’s share of the Sachs holdings. Included in the gift are 97 works by contemporary masters like Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Gerhard Richter, worth nearly $70 million, according to auction house experts asked for their assessment. Timothy Rub, the museum’s director, said it was one of the most important gifts of contemporary art in the institution’s 138-year history.

Original source: The New York Times
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Philadelphia gets props for its proclivity for hands-on activities -- many of them available to tourists.

Philadelphia's diverse neighborhoods have been the bastion of artisans and craftspeople since their very beginnings. In the early 1700s, immigrants sought their fortunes in the one colony that didn't require a tithe to the Church -- Pennsylvania. By 1740, Philadelphia was the largest city in the colonies -- an engine of industry. One German observer wrote in 1754: "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans and hell for officials and preachers." This "paradise for artisans" has gone through a rebirth in recent years, revitalizing Philadelphia's flagging neighborhoods and bringing a distinctive creative energy to each.

The recording artist (and notable Canadian) Drake has committed to funding the construction of a recording studio at Strawberry Mansion High.

The rapper and singer said that after watching a Diane Sawyer special about the school which ran last May, he wanted to help: "by the end of it I was so heavily affected that at the end I started questioning like major aspects of my life."

Original source: Curbed Philly
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Rock to the Future, a local nonprofit after-school music program for underprivileged children, was recently profiled in the New York Times as part of a trend piece on "giving cirles."

[Rock to the Future] received start-up financing of $15,000 in 2010 from Women for Social Innovation, a nonprofit philanthropic "giving circle" with a membership of around 20 women, providing seed money to social innovators seeking to help women, girls and families in the Greater Philadelphia area. Such giving circles are on the rise. Members pool their money to make grants to local nonprofit groups, realizing that one hefty contribution can have an immediate influence in a community. Rock to the Future, for example, has expanded to 35 after-school students from 13. It expects to work with 300 students this year via additional weekends, summer workshops and a pilot mobile unit, with an operating budget of $204,980.

Original source: The New York Times
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GQ details "Philly's awakening," describing the city as a hotbed of killer food, top-flight beers and accessible culture. Highlights include The Foodery, Modo Mio and Johnny Brenda's.

Philly has a rep as the capital of eighth-grade field trips and binge-drinking b-school bros doing their best Situation impressions, but this place has bigger ambitions if you know where to look. You'll find all the buzzy trappings of Brooklyn --pitch-perfect menswear shops in Old City, straight-shooting restaurants and microbrew-soaked nightlife in Northern Liberties --without all the Brooklyn smugness. Here's how to navigate the new Philly revolution.

Original source: GQ
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The New York Times takes a look at "Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis," a group show disguised as a single-star vehicle.

The exhibition includes numerous mediums: painting but also film, stage design, posters and several forms of printed matter. Orchestrated around “The City,” Léger’s great clangorous mural-size ode to the metropolis of 1919, it situates his art among that of about 40 of his contemporaries. They include like-minded painters, sculptors, writers, graphic designers, filmmakers and architects who were often friends and with whom he collaborated on all sorts of projects outside of painting.

In the end, only about a third of the 180 items on view are actually by Léger (1881-1955). But even as the show quietly subverts the convention of the monographic exhibition, his work almost never gets lost — it is formally too robust, or as he might have put it, too viscerally plastic. An added benefit throughout is that the show is studded with unfamiliar works, both by him and by others from home and abroad.

Original source: The New York Times
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The New York Times' travel section shines a light on the "creative renaissance" in Fishtown, with a focus on ever-evolving Frankford Avenue. They highlight five businesses, including Bottle Bar East, Adorn and The Parlour.

The southwest end of Frankford Avenue is becoming an artisanal avenue, with design shops, a small publishing press, restaurants and coffeehouses moving in to this former manufacturing district. Neighborhood pride is palpable; graceful metal sculptures line one stretch of sidewalk, and a wooden sign in a community garden reads "Welcome to Fishtown: Stop and smell the roses." First Fridays, the free open gallery nights along Frankford Avenue, are also drawing newcomers.

Original source: The New York Times
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A new film detailing the Move bombing debacle -- and the surrounding circumstances that existed in 1985 in Philadelphia -- garners high praise. The New York Times gave the documentary a starred review.

Like an extended flashback or a prolonged bad dream, the film draws us into the story of Move, a separatist black organization and commune led by John Africa, which entered a cycle of belligerent resistance to authority, and suppression by the police, in the mid-1970s. Part of the achievement of the film’s director, Jason Osder, and its editor, Nels Bangerter, lies in orchestrating dual gripping dramas in constant dialogue, using footage from before, during and after the standoff.

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

The Atlantic Cities highlighted the local blog Streets Dept and their images of the abandoned Spring Garden subway station. The space is now covered with street art. Check out the amazing pictures. 

Philadelphia spent time, money and effort transforming downtown into a hub for culture and the arts, complete with stunning institutions. All those assets require upkeep -- hence the city's next challenge.

Thanks to the arts, Philadelphia feels different today. But now that the building boom of new facilities is over, the question is whether the city and its benefactors can muster the support to become savior to the arts.

With operating costs up and philanthropy and ticket sales failing to keep pace, stress cracks are appearing in institutions all over town. Some groups, saddled with debt payments, are adjusting offerings to become more commercial. Others have declared bankruptcy or are contemplating it.

Original source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
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Harry S. Truman High School in Levittown has one of the country's strongest drama programs. It was the subject of a lengthy profile in the New York Times.

[Drama director Lou] Volpe is one of those people who create astonishing success in the most unlikely of settings. Generations of his students heard him say, “If all we had was a bare stage with one light bulb, we could still do theater.” And the thing is, they believed him.

As the community was going to pieces, Volpe built Truman’s drama program into one of the best in America, and the school itself into something like a de facto high school for the performing arts. He and his assistant director, a student of his in the early ’90s, taught nothing but theater — three levels of it, plus musical theater. A third teacher, also a former student, taught theater to ninth graders....

Even though he didn’t speak in the idiom of the movement, much of what I observed in Volpe’s theater program could fit comfortably within the muscular language of education reform — with its emphasis on problem solving, standards, "racing to the top" and accountability. Theater is part of the "arts," an airy term, but the time his students spent with him was actually the least theoretical part of their day. With each production, they set an incredibly high goal and went about building something.

Original source: The New York Times
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Members of the Philadelphia Orchestra are among the 95 musicians chosen for a national All-Star Orchestra. The group's performances will be televised weekly on PBS.

Even skeptics will concede that this project offers an amazing roster of accomplished musicians from America’s leading orchestras, including many renowned principal players. About half of the musicians come from New York organizations, including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Orpheus, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and New York City Opera. The out-of-town ensembles represented include the San Francisco Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and more.

For the players, as several explained in an article in The New York Times last year, this experience was something like a camp reunion, where old friends from conservatory days reconnected and caught up. In the introduction to the first program, Robert Cafaro, a Philadelphia Orchestra cellist, clearly speaks for many players when he says: "I had no idea it would be quite this good. This is probably the highest-level orchestra I’ve ever played with."

Original source: The New York Times
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The Atlantic Cities chatted with Nic Esposito, urban farmer and founder of The Head & The Hand Press.

A small publisher and writers' workspace, The Head & the Hand Press, has just published Rust Belt Rising Almanac, a literary quarterly showcasing snapshots and essays on life in industrial American cities (including, of course, Philadelphia). The volume invites "Courteous Readers" to read about escapes, remains, and models of growth, and is at turns cheeky and earnest, with such section titles as "On Reverse Pioneering," "On the Anatomy of Coal-Fired Power Plant," and "On the Collective and the Communal."

Original Source: The Atlantic Cities
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David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the showrunners behind Game of Thrones on HBO, have written an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia based on novella 'Flowers for Algernon." Sign us up. The episode was shot on-location in Philadelphia -- a small change from Benioff and Weiss' normal shooting sites in Northern Ireland, Iceland and Croatia.

No matter what the title of the show promises, the skies over this location shoot for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” had offered only thunderstorms broken up by occasional periods of mugginess. Maybe that was typical weather for this recent summer morning, or maybe it was the influence of the authors of the scene about to be filmed, who were thousands of miles away, busy with their regularly foreboding duties...

In one of their few outside writing assignments, Mr. Weiss and Mr. Benioff wanted to split sides in the figurative sense, not requiring broadswords or battle-axes. They pursued “It’s Always Sunny” not only because they were fans of the show and its creator, Mr. McElhenney, but also because its humor and fast-paced half-hour format would challenge them.

Original source: The New York Times
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Vice interviews Gabe Angemi, a street photographer, skateboarder and firefighter in Camden.

Recently Camden removed its police force. Can that city, once known as the ‘City Invincible’ ever possibly recover?

Walt Whitman coined that term: “In a dream I saw a city invincible...” Who knows, man. I’d love to see it prosper, that’s what brings me to work, to try and help make that happen. The place has great energy and great people. What happened to the Camden Police is both a travesty and an injustice, but that’s a whole other interview. My answer is yes it can and will recover, but it needs help. It needs people and positivity. The stigma attached to it is perpetuated by people who never spent any time there.

Original source: Vice
Read the complete interview and check out some of Angemi's photographs here.