arts and culture : In The News

Many young latino readers are noticing a dearth of diverse protagonists in available books. The New York Times visits a Philadelphia-area school to examine this issue.

At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, a school where three-quarters of the students are Latino, Kimberly Blake, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she struggles to find books about Latino children that are “about normal, everyday people.” The few that are available tend to focus on stereotypes of migrant workers or on special holidays. “Our students look the way they look every single day of the year,” Ms. Blake said, “not just on Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Day.”

Original source: The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal highlights the Rosenbach Library & Museum, an amazing private collection of books and manuscripts located on a gorgeous, out-of-the-way street near Rittenhouse Square. Gems include the manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses, early editions of Chaucer and a huge collection Maurice Sendak's paintings, illustrations and editions (including original drawings of Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen).

To handle scholarly materials, the Rosenbach requires not the usual white gloves demanded by other libraries but a good old-fashioned hand-washing (latex can do more damage to delicate paper than clean, oil-free hands). I couldn't resist asking to see and touch one piece that stopped my heart and brought tears to my professorial eyes. It was the manuscript whose purchase got A.S.W. Rosenbach started on the final, and greatest, chapter of his buying career. In London in 1885 Sotheby's had sold at auction the manuscripts of six letters of John Keats. Oscar Wilde, enraged by the salacious intermingling of art and commerce, wrote a protest sonnet. Thirty-five years later, at Manhattan's Anderson Galleries, Rosenbach bought the poet's penultimate letter to Fanny Brawne, his fiancée, dated July 5, 1820, before his departure for Italy, where he died of tuberculosis seven months later. The great poet was also a typical, temperamental 24-year-old young man who, finding his girlfriend flirting with his roommate, wrote to her with envy, jealousy, rage and sadness, "I will resent my heart having been made a football."
Original Source: The Wall Street Journal
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An iconic mural of artist Dox Thrash, located in western North Philadelphia, was recently destroyed. The Atlantic Cities investigates.

The Thrash mural, located on the side of an abandoned house at 2442 Cecil B. Moore Avenue, depicted the artist working in his studio in a style mirroring his own beloved carborundum process. Eric Okdeh and Calvin Jones painted it in 2001 to coincide with a Thrash exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Later, it became part of MAP's public tour of 47 murals that “uniquely capture the rich African American experience in Philadelphia,” featuring a podcast narrated by none other than ?uestlove. So why did it mysteriously disappear?

Original Source: The Atlantic Cities
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As Flying Kite detailed back in late November, Avenue of the Arts, Inc. (AAI) partnered with the Pennsylvania Horicultural Society (PHS) to launch a "New Vision for South Broad Street" competition. The goal was to continue the thoroughfare's original purpose as an arts and entertainment district but with a modern take. Ten architectural and landscape firms submitted ideas, and four were chosen as finalists. Now the list has been narrowed once again.

A judging panel, overseen by Avenue of the Arts, Inc. (AAI) Chairman Dianne Semingson, has chosen Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and Jonathan Alderson Landscape Architects, Inc., to participate in Phase II of the “New Vision for South Broad Street” Request for Proposal (RFP) project. The two teams, selected from four finalists (the other two were LRSLA Studio and Cairone & Kaupp, Inc.) are charged with pushing forward a program to reinvigorate South Broad Street from City Hall to Washington Avenue.

The two firms will present refined proposals in early 2013 and one winner will be selected.

Original Source: PlanPhilly
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Business Insider takes a self-guided tour of Philadelphia's Mural Mile and walks away impressed. Their slideshow offers a great run-down of some of the city's most visible public art pieces.

The program has grown into a thriving network of muralists, youth, local businesses, and Philadelphia residents all seeking to add more beauty to the City of Brotherly Love. More than 3,000 murals have now been painted all around the city, and many more are in progress. We've heard some incredible praise for the program, so we decided to go see it in person. We took the self-guided walking tour of Mural Mile in the Center City neighborhood, and thought it was astounding.

Original Source: Business Insider
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Silver Linings Playbook, the Philly-centric new film that puts Eagles fans front-and-center, continues to garner nationwide praise. The movie is based on a novel Matthew Quick, a former Haddonfield Memorial High teacher. Grantland reserves special praise for the movie's perspective on sports fandom.

The ways in which Pat, in his pitiable mix of out-of-control rage and deranged optimism, is a product of his struggling underdog city and the maddening football franchise that it hosts will probably be obvious to most readers of this site and lost on a solid percentage of non-sports fans who go see the movie. You have to know Philly, know the Eagles to really get it, how each of these characters is simultaneously badly scarred and up for more punishment. Silver Linings Playbook is a few different movies at once, but one of those movies is about the complicated interplay between a city's sports teams and a city's citizens, the way that over time the two start resembling one another.

Original source: Grantland
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A century after his death, Philadelphia's Frank Furness is remembered in a series of events, including this exhibition at The Athenaeum. The architect continues to earn praise for his ambitious, idiosyncratic style.

By the time he died in 1912, at age 72, structural exhibitionism was passé, even vulgar, and Furness was something of a laughingstock. Only in the 1960s was he rediscovered by young architects disgruntled with modernism, for whom he was a guilty pleasure, a kind of joyous architectural Falstaff to fling against the solemnity of the Bauhaus. Robert Venturi did much to make Furness respectable again, praising the "array of violent forces within a rigid frame" that characterized his work.

Face & Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness runs Nov. 30 through Jan. 11 at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Click here for details and a complete calendar of Furness 2012 events.

Original source: The Wall Street Journal
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