A Viewer's Guide to Contemporary Art

Published in The Bulletin's Winter Culture Guide at the end of November 2007. The Culture Guide was not published online, so I can't link to the article and I'm providing the full text here. The text below is my unedited version -- The publisher had removed descriptions of several of the artworks because he didn't like the artwork, which, as you will see, underscores the need for just this sort of article...

A Viewer's Guide to Contemporary Art
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Conversations about contemporary art, even with other art-writers, frequently return to some expression of, “I don’t get it,” “I don’t know what to say about it,” or worse, “I don’t like it.” In honor of so many confused and disgruntled contemporary art viewers, I hereby embark on a mission to help it all make a little more sense. Here is a brief “Viewers’ Guide to Contemporary Art,” or something of the sort. Using real-life examples from current Philadelphia exhibitions, I pulled out a few prominent themes and concepts that often play a role in contemporary art. Naturally, not all artwork deals with the same themes, and these themes certainly do not represent all art. However, many artists enter the artistic dialogue through one of these points, and so understanding contemporary art requires paying attention to the following diverse elements.

Materiality and Found Objects
In much contemporary art, the materials used are at least as important as whatever image or product ends up being displayed. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp declared that a graffitied urinal was art and so launched the idea of “ready-mades,” a precursor to today’s found-object art. Subsequent art movements continued explorations of everyday objects and common materials, bringing in everything from historic handicrafts to mass-produced household items to massive industrial materials. For many artists, untraditional or re-used materials carry with them meaning from their previous lives or original purposes, and so add conceptual complexity to visual arts. In the current show at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, artist Merrill Wagner re-purposes scraps of steel discarded by a plumbing company to construct pseudo-minimalist, color field paintings with rust-preventive glazes and paints. By using the steel as she finds it, Wagner creates pieces with irregular edges and gentle oxidation, so the natural properties of the steel become central to appreciating the artwork. The heaviness inherent in the steel balances the delicate irregularities of the surface, and looming entropy contradicts the steel’s seeming permanence. Conceptually, using an industrial material provides an important contrast to her fascination with farm topography and sky-scapes. The material raises questions of the relationship between nature and machines, between that which is under human control (e.g., a tractor) and that which refuses human control (e.g., rust). In other pieces, Wagner explores another type of materiality by painting bands of solid colors using different brands’ versions of the same pigment. The paint itself, with its commercially produced variations, IS the artwork, while the image of the three or four stripes of color becomes secondary. In this way, paint, although purchased at a store, becomes a kind of found object as the artist avoids manipulating the paint and instead enhances its inherent properties.

Narrative and Voyeurism
Although some artists focus on materiality to the exclusion of representation or narrative, other contemporary artists continue to revamp story-telling genres, often with a voyeuristic slant in which the viewer is allowed access to a private or personal story. Modern culture’s enthusiasm for sharing someone else’s first-person experience, whether it be in the form of reality TV, blogging, or graphic news reporting, worms its way into artwork. Rob Matthews’ current show “Knoxville Girl” at Gallery Joe presents the details of a true crime – the murder of a young Tennessee woman – through the medium of exquisite pencil drawings. The scenes unfold chronologically around the room as the four characters (introduced through individual mug-shot-like portraits) carry out their violent scheme. Although the basics of the story could be gleaned from any newspaper article, the drawings provide a level of personal interaction and involvement as the viewer becomes a witness – perhaps even an accomplice – to the crime. Simultaneously, the gracefully rendered drawings seem to soften the violence through a comedy of exaggerated gestures and expressions, ending with a subtle moral and a final curtain call. Each drawing contributes a vital aspect of the whole story, so the individually framed works actually become one large artwork and the meta-narrative overrides the particular scenarios.

Repetition and Mass Production
The advent of mass produced consumer goods led to a corresponding artistic interest in reproduction and excessive repetition. Andy Warhol, for example, pictorialized the grocery store line-up of Campbell’s soup cans and repetitively reproduced images of pop culture icons. Many contemporary artists continue this study of reruns and visual homogeneity by creating serial artworks or repeating nearly identical forms. At Lineage Gallery, several of the artists in “Independent Residents” rely heavily on repetition and consumer imagery. Aiko Nakagawa combines religious and contemporary iconography in her “Kitty” series, imposing a Hello Kitty head over a Sacred Heart of Jesus torso and replacing the face with poker suits and her name, “Aiko.” Nakagawa repeats the quasi-self-portrait four times on separate canvases, invoking the obsessive reproduction common to animated figures, religious icons, and playing cards. Like two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity, this implied mass production of a mass production paves the way for continued distortion and dilution of popular imagery.

Viewer Participation and Site Specificity
Deconstructionist criticism of the 1960s examined literature and artwork in light of underlying frameworks and assumptions that were often overlooked or unspoken. In contemporary art, artists stopped thinking about artwork in the vacuum of white gallery walls and began overtly considering the implicit role of the viewer and of the surrounding space. The very structure of an exhibition became grounds for art-making. Now, artists love to involve the viewer, whether through passive voyeurism or direct participation, and many contemporary artists factor an active audience into the nature of their artwork. For example, in order to fully experience the sound art on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s (ICA) “Ensemble” exhibition, viewers must lift lids and turn cranks and strike objects with mallets. Although some pieces produce sound on their own through various kinetic and electrical impulses, viewers become part of the artwork itself by giving life and movement and noise to otherwise inanimate sound-makers. Similarly, many contemporary artists consider the surrounding space to be an essential element of an artwork, creating work that transforms an entire space and that cannot exist in the same way in any other location. The current ramp project at ICA provides an example, as architectural drawings applied directly to the walls and windows perfectly fit the contours of the ramp between the first and second floors. The perspectival lines and floral accents cause ordinary white walls take on depth and character. Although elements of the artwork could be recreated elsewhere, new environmental factors would necessarily change the structure and feeling of the piece.

Your Turn
The next time you walk into a gallery of unfamiliar or incomprehensible artwork, try applying some of these themes to see if the pieces start falling into place. Understanding contemporary art isn’t impossible, after all, but is rooted in a context of art history and cultural considerations that requires a deeper look.

Window Installations at the Fabric Workshop

Published by The Bulletin on November 20, 2007.

Eye-Catching Exhibits Draw Viewers Inside
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

It’s a good day when a stroll down an ordinary city street, en route to a run-of-the-mill meeting or appointment, brings you in contact with something that catches the corner of your eye and engages your vision. The Fabric Workshop and Museum currently offers two street-side installations that promise to make a walk past the windows worthwhile.

“Storefront,” a collaborative installation by Mark Bradford and Juan Carlos Avendaño, applies static cling photographs of a construction site to the existing storefront windows. Instead of looking into a display case, the viewer looks through a barren building with only wooden beams in place. An unfinished roof reveals a vibrant blue sky. Although the photography itself is lovely, the interaction of the construction images with the physical structure of the building provides the most compelling aspect. The real building appears old, worn, with crackling paint on the elegantly carved woodwork and a scratched up door, clearly a remnant from the glory days of Philadelphia’s downtown. Yet the photography starkly implies newness, regeneration, urban development in the guise of an indistinct framework of ordinary beams. The building within a building seems to expand out of its window casings and create a new horizon, at the same time that the upper stories cap the blue sky and confine the images within a narrow field of view. Interior and exterior, image and object flip back and forth, blurring the boundaries between what is constructed and what is portrayed.

Mark Fox’s “Dust” explores a similar twist on the relationship between object and image. Object becomes image becomes object again as he meticulously draws household items on paper with black ink, then cuts out the drawings and displays them en masse several inches in front of the gallery wall. The assortment of items looks like a child’s toy box dumped onto the floor of an already cluttered room, with everything from furniture to tools to art supplies to musical instruments to figurines and a host of random things in between. There’s no particular order to the chaotic mass, and the juxtaposition of unusual objects (a Mr. Peanut figurine floats next to an antique camera which in turn shares space with a cactus and a kitchen knife) makes for an amusing image. The backside of each object is bright green or yellow, casting colored shadows onto the wall behind. This, combined with the flat homogeneity of color, weightlessness of the paper and disproportionate scale of the drawings, produces a dreamlike world, where everyday objects that should lie complacently on a table mysteriously float toward the ceiling as jumbled silhouettes of their actual selves. Unlike many art exhibits, the bulk of the work hovers above the viewer’s head, further monumentalizing and abstracting these otherwise insignificant objects. Although you can see a good portion of the installation from the street, it continues inside the gallery and a quick step through the door allows you to experience the entire piece.

Also on display at the Fabric Workshop and Museum are selections from the permanent collection, including textile-works by prominent artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Claus Oldenburg and Kiki Smith.

Rebecca Rothfus at Pentimenti

Published by The Bulletin on November 8, 2007.

Pencil-And-Gouach Exhibit At Pentimenti Contrasts The Natural With The Constructed
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

If you only have time for a brief art ramble this week, be sure to stop by Pentimenti Gallery and take a look at Rebecca Rothfus’ drawings in the Project Room. The seven pencil-and-gouache landscapes in “Towers” pull together contrasting elements of human construction and natural landforms, balancing delicate details with flat colors and a blank-paper wash of sky. They exist comfortably as individual pieces, but in the close proximity in the small Project Room, they meld into a distorted urban landscape of radio towers and indistinguishable vistas.

Each drawing features at least one exquisitely rendered tower of the radio/electrical/telephone variety. Ms. Rothfus pencils in meticulous beams, bars, cables, lights and satellite dishes. Jutting up into an empty sky, the towers stand as monuments to the whole of modern communications, venerable signal-carriers that make possible the pervasive technology on which North American life thrives. In these landscapes, they stand alone, dominating an otherwise detail-less scene.

Using the matte colors of gouache, Ms. Rothfus outlines the faintest hint of background, positioning the towers as the only “real” elements amongst flattened trees and windowless buildings. Although the shapes suggest forested hillsides or protruding branches, the bland puce color immediately abstracts the form, removing it from human experience. Brick red cubes squat on the horizon, buildings without character or context. Flat slate blue bands traverse the edges of the drawings as roads or rivers. In this aggressively geometrized nature, the familiar geometry of the human-constructed towers appears graceful, gentle, and yet somehow out-of-place.

These drawings are both landscapes and not-landscapes. They present horizon and distance, but do so wholly in support of the individual towers, making the drawings feel more like portraits of important dignitaries. Ms. Rothfus constructs a strange world where usually overlooked infrastructure holds a central position, while oft-admired natural or architectural landscapes vanish. Optimism and romanticism give way to a blatant realism as the structures that support fast-paced human lifestyles appear to hold more meaning, more importance than the environment in which humans actually live. Perhaps in Rebecca Rothfus’ work, the familiar pillars of urban dwelling and suburban sprawl receive the recognition that they really deserve.

If you have a little more time for browsing, look around at Pentimenti’s other current show, “From a Thousand Pages.” This assortment of works by three artists is similarly cognizant of contemporary life and innovative in its treatment of paper (hence the show’s title). Glenn Fischer collages oval cutouts from books and magazines into stream-of-consciousness images with layers of surreal relationships. From a distance, the pieces look like abstract explorations of color and space, but closer examination reveals a dream-like, non-sequential narrative of obscured images. Matt Haffner continues Lichtenstein’s tradition of dramatic comic book figures with his own film noir narrative and richly textured imagery. Recurring characters and a monochromatic color palette give the feeling of looking at a splice of black-and-white film. Nate Moore organizes colorful origami jets into rigid formations with underlying grids, simultaneously suggesting military squadrons, handicrafts, and the formal explorations of modern art. Both “From a Thousand Pages” and “Towers” are worth a good long look, if you can squeeze it in.

©The Evening Bulletin 2007

Book Art at Fleisher Art Memorial

Published by The Bulletin on October 16, 2007.

Textbook Perfect: 'Anatomy Of The Book' At Fleisher Art Memorial
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Words and images saturate our society. From newspapers, novels, and blogs to advertisements, artwork, and films, we organize our communications into verbal and visual mediums. What happens, then, when the two forms intersect? When text becomes image; when image occupies the structure of a book?

“Anatomy of the Book,” a book arts show currently on display at the Fleisher Art Memorial’s Suzanne Fleisher and Ralph Joel Roberts Gallery, considers this melding of text and image. Four local book artists, Carol Barton, Hedi Kyle, Tom Leonard, and Mary Phelan, present an assortment of works – both art books and illustrations – that covers traditional bookmaking, printmaking, and drawing techniques while also exploring uniquely creative interpretations of the book form.

Carol Barton’s “Alphabetica Synthetica” begins with a standard definition of “synthetic” and then continues with an alphabetical listing of absurd vocabulary related to artificiality. A is for “Alterations, Animations, Acetate Assimilations,” with the culturally cunning list continuing all the way through to “Y2K” and “Zooplastic Zombies.” Each spread contains a pop-up square of the letters represented, giving the impression of wooden building blocks emerging out of the crevices. Printed on pastel-colored accordion-fold pages, this bizarre primer combines the crisp appearance of a child’s learn-to-read book with an obscure text that clearly requires adult recognition and humor.

Another playful book, Mary Phelan’s “Exquisite Horse, a Printer’s Corpse” creates fantastical animals by pairing a page showing a hypothetical back-half of an animal with another page showing an equally unexpected front-half. The example on display matches the back-side of a horse – skeleton showing through transparent skin, tail created out of text – with a front-side diagram of a man inside a huge clown puppet. Although subsequent pages are not visible, the format suggests transition, changeability, as pages could potentially be rearranged to construct myriad organisms.

Many of the pieces distort traditional assumptions about books by cutting out parts of pages or adding protruding elements, requiring a three-dimensional “reading.” Hedi Kyle’s “CFBL Fold” provides physical examples of various paper-folding techniques, inserting the samples among the printed pages. She uses very little text, relying instead on the real-life demonstrations of the actual folded paper in this pseudo-instruction manual. Carol Barton’s “Tunnel Map” takes a series of round maps, positions them parallel to each other, cuts holes through the centers, and inserts drawings of familiar landforms – ocean waves, grassy hills, rocky mountains. For the full effect, the viewer must peer through the holes to view the overlapping layers of landscapes. The round, unmoving pages and three-dimensionality expand typical definitions of “book” while maintaining the distinct pagination and sense of information-sharing common to ordinary reading.

Not just books, the exhibition also showcases vibrant flora and fauna illustrations by Tom Leonard and exploratory photographs and drawings by Mary Phelan. These two-dimensional works isolate critical elements of bookmaking, while also helping position the books in their broader context of the visual arts.

Unfortunately (and somewhat understandably), nothing can be touched, so the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book remains elusive. Entire pages stay hidden, and any sense of narrative or continuity or discovery disappears in the immobility of the pages. If only book arts shows could find a display option that functions somewhere between a library and a gallery, allowing for increased viewer interaction with this necessarily tangible art form. Although your eyes will enjoy the text-image feast, your fingers might twitch in anticipation of turning to the next page.

©The Evening Bulletin 2007

Polly Apfelbaum at Locks Gallery

Published by The Bulletin on October 9, 2007.

'Big Love' At Locks Gallery
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Imagine a field of wildflowers viewed from above. Now flatten the flowers into solid, bold colors of varying sizes, eliminate all background elements, rearrange them into circular patterns, print them on enormous sheets of paper, and hang them on a wall – you’ll have something similar to Polly Apfelbaum’s current show Big Love at Locks Gallery in Old City. It’s dazzlingly vibrant, decoratively detailed, and, well, flowery.

As excited as I was that Apfelbaum’s work was back in town, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that this artist who I know best for intricate, large-scale floor pieces has returned to plain-old hang-it-on-a-wall artwork. The Abington native’s last show in Philadelphia, in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art, featured a number of “fallen paintings” – sprawling two-dimensional compositions of hand-dyed, individually cut-out scraps of fabric, arranged in circles and crystalline forms on the floor. They enveloped the space, interacting with the architecture and the viewer’s own movement to appear in a constant state of flux and pulsation. With inspiration as unexpected as Dalmatians and the Powerpuff Girls, the pieces conveyed a lively sense of humor and pop culture affinities.

The current show at Locks Gallery retains the pop culture and a touch of humor, but loses some of the dynamism by reverting to a standard vertical art-viewing format. Instead of the transitory effervescence of the floor pieces, these new wall pieces dominate and demand attention. Most of the pieces are over six-feet square; all are woodblock monoprints on handmade paper. Using variations on a flower shape (some look more like clouds, some like childish daisies, and some like long-tentacled anemones), Apfelbaum reprints the shapes in a range of sizes and colors, never touching, never overlapping. The plain white of the paper serves as the ground, holding together all of the carefully organized forms; the imprinted edges of the woodblock add subtle texture and dimensionality. Colors are bold, flat, with myriad manifestations of similar hues, so that no one color becomes dominant or overly familiar.

Apfelbaum’s typical organic geometry arranges the shapes into circular patterns, often containing a central element, details in the four corners, and a contrasting array of shapes filling in the gaps. They bring to mind the meditative qualities of mandalas, the folk art of Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and quilts, and the careful planning of public gardens. The repetition of generic, almost iconic, shapes turns them into pixels or patches or wallpaper patterns, so shapes become structural and cannot be viewed out of the whole context. Although not overt, the playful spirit of the Powerpuff Girls lurks around the corners, infusing the flowery, feminine forms with a snarky energy.

In such bold surroundings, the most beautiful and striking moment ends up also being the most subtle. In “Love Park 16” (2007), the busyness of color and pattern suddenly ends in a wash of white background. Looking closely, however, you see the imprint of white flowers against the white paper, the difference of color so slight that from a distance it becomes imperceptible. The monochromatic continuation of the shapes, combined with the physical imprint of the woodblock, creates an area of pseudo-starkness and nearly invisible detail that runs contrary to every other piece in the room. It’s a powerful moment, worth engaging for a long time; worth walking around the gallery and indulging the vivacity just to return to this one tranquil moment.

Although not Apfelbaum’s most engaging show, Big Love fits comfortably within her oeuvre and continues her creative engagement with large-scale repetition, vibrant color, and distorted femininity. It’s nice to have her back in town.


©The Evening Bulletin 2007

Renoir Landscapes at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin on October 2, 2007.

Revel in Renoir
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

If you had asked me last week about the art of 19th-century French painter Pierre-August Renoir, I would immediately have thought of picnics and dances, rosy-cheeked children and voluptuous nudes. However, after seeing Renoir: Landscapes, an exhibition currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I now have a sense of the broader scope of his work and his life-long attachment to impressionistic landscapes. It is exactly what the curators hoped would happen.

Renoir once commented, “Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” And indeed, his landscapes present a lovely, tranquil world, a carefully cultivated wash of color and light where misery and rain clouds seem impossible. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution’s rise of a middle class with leisure time and mobility, Renoir captures the vitality of gardens and renovated city streets, making every moment seem idyllic and care-free. His gestural brushstrokes convey the experience of being in a particular setting, manifesting the movement of wind and sea spray and the rustle of leaves as well as the stillness of flowers and sunlight. Associate curator John Zarobell relates Renoir to his contemporary and comrade Claude Monet, suggesting that if Monet was concerned with vision (“only an eye” to use Cezanne’s famous quote), then Renoir was concerned with feeling, able to “give you hay fever” just by looking at his grassy fields.

The curators organized the exhibition into loosely chronological themes, so that each gallery explores a certain aspect of Renoir’s landscape oeuvre. To provide a context, the entry room contains photographs and illustrations from the 19th century, showing concurrent attitudes toward landscapes and landscape painters. At the beginning of Renoir’s career, landscapes remained a lesser art form, usually considered sketches for paintings of historical, classical, or biblical stories. The figure was preeminent; Nature (with a capital N) supported the figure by giving it context and an emotional backdrop. As Renoir and his Impressionist colleagues challenged the conventions of the art academy, they pulled landscapes into a position of prominence and reversed the figure-ground relationship. The first gallery highlights the role of figures in Renoir’s landscapes, with a mix of outdoor portraits where a clearly defined figure dominates (“Woman with a parasol and small child on a sunlit hillside,” 1874) and panoramas where groups of figures meld into the background (“La Grenouillère,” 1869). In these examples, figures remain important but begin to integrate into the surrounding environment. They aren’t telling grand stories, but acting out everyday life with an emphasis on immediate experience.

The next room flips the coin, showing only “pure landscapes,” where figures are incidental or entirely absent. As a newly emerging style, these landscape-only paintings benefited from Renoir’s innovations of capturing movement and physical sensation. The billowing clouds in “The Gust of Wind” (c. 1872) seem to be rushing across the horizon, bending branches and rippling fields of grass. As modern viewers, accustomed to figureless artwork, we may miss the significance of these pieces that departed from the conventions of the time to portray a world unencumbered by human heroism or mythology, a purely “in the moment” existence.

The “Impressionist Landscape” room may feel the most familiar to many visitors, with its compositions combining the natural world with human structures and activities in a burst of light and painterly gesture. “The Skiff (La Yole)” (1875) portrays all of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution through the language of Impressionist painting, showing suburbanites out for a leisurely row past a well-manicured country estate with a train approaching from the background. Renoir painted several of the pieces in this room side-by-side with Monet, and you can observe their mutual exuberance for and exploration of their newfound style. In the next gallery of cityscapes and gardens, you see additional evidence of their friendship in Renoir’s painting “Claude Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil” (c.1873), a self-reflective, nearly deconstructionist look at the experience of landscape painters of the time. Monet stands just outside his urban garden fence, rows of houses in the background, focusing on his personal corner of natural beauty.

Cityscapes and gardens give way to a room devoted to seascapes, as Renoir took his first trips to the coast, and continue with paintings from his travels to Algeria and Italy. Renoir was able to modify his language of choppy brushstrokes and vibrant colors to express his experiences in these foreign locales. In “The Jardin D’Essai, Algiers” (1881), he captures the movement of an alley of palm trees, unfamiliar flora for a Parisian, with an explosion of gold and green lines of paint. Several paintings, again, show his relationships with his contemporaries, and the works created alongside Cezanne and Monet reflect the influence of their styles while remaining unequivocally Renoir-esque.

Even in the last years of his life (shown in the “Coda” room), when rheumatoid arthritis so crippled his body that paintbrushes had to be strapped to the backs of his hands, Renoir had himself carried outside to paint the landscape. He remained committed to observing and rendering the world around him. By focusing on everyday vistas and familiar activities, Renoir and the Impressionists declared that modern life IS history, paving the way for future generations of artists to explore the immediate world around them. The Museum’s exhibit puts that transformation into context, fleshing out the social and cultural implications of landscape painting in the 19th century and creating a very “pretty” world indeed.

Perelman Building at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin on September 28, 2007.

A New Place to Worship Art
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

In its venerable status as collector of all things beautiful, historic, and important in the ongoing development of art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art sits as a temple on a hill, an imposing structure protecting its treasures and inviting reverent visitors to stand in awe. If the PMA is the temple of art, the new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building is, perhaps, the seminary – devoted to study, conservation, and intimate viewer experience.

The behind-the-scenes quarters of the Perelman Building, off-limits to visitors, house state-of-the-art conservation spaces, a necessary expansion for maintaining the museum’s ever-growing collection. Several study centers (such as the Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs) offer appointment-only visitations, making possible in-depth research and exploration of the museum’s holdings. Undoubtedly the heart of the museum, these vital operations of conservation and research, although not visible to the general public, deserve such a vibrant new space.

What you CAN see, however, is worth the visit.

The façade stands as a testament to 1920s prosperity, with Art Deco detailing enough to make anyone gape upward as they open the doors. Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance, the company that built the 80-year-old building, clearly wanted its clientele to sense power and prestige, security and solvency. The lobby’s marble floor and ornate ceiling retain those high-life qualities, the passage of time infusing the atmosphere with nostalgia and historical appreciation.

Stepping out of the lobby opens up another world. Faced with the problem of reconciling the historical building with the modern expansion of galleries and work spaces, architecture firm Gluckman Mayner created a Skylit Galleria that superbly joins the disparate sections. The original wall stands vertically, rectangularly, with painted window casings and ordinary yellow brick. The new opposing wall slants forward in a distorted mirror-image, all contemporary design and texturized brick, with a row of optically slanting doorways. The skylights overhead, industrial second-floor walkways, and alcoves for sculpture tie together the two walls, so they seem like cousins or not-so-identical twins, each one inextricably linked to the other, each emphasizing the other’s strengths and inherent beauty.

The Galleria’s doorways lead to new gallery spaces showcasing segments of the Museum’s permanent collection, with spaces dedicated to photography, costume and textile, modern design, and sculpture. Each room has been designed to most effectively display its particular oeuvre – the Julien Levy Gallery of photography introduces extra hanging space with the inclusion of additional walls and pillars throughout; the Joan Spain Gallery protects fragile textiles and enhances costumes with dim lighting and dramatic displays against dark grey walls; the Collab Gallery highlights modern design using a variety of display cases and elevated floor pedestals; and the Exhibition Gallery, designed for sculpture, features natural light from two rows of tall windows with the requisite open spaces and white walls of a contemporary gallery.

Unfortunately, each gallery exists in isolation from the others, aggressively compartmentalized so that you cannot move from one gallery to another or visually link artwork in adjoining rooms. In a postmodern era of non-hierarchy and pluralistic association, a gallery system should seamlessly pull viewers through the range of art-making, allowing diverse and even opposing streams of art to co-exist, in much the same way the Skylit Galleria melds different generations of architecture. At the Perelman Building, the theatrical evening gowns might enjoy a conversation with the clever furniture, which might in turn have something to add to discussions of contemporary sculpture, but instead, the gallery structure refuses their interaction. Even at the main PMA building, not exactly a tribute to postmodernity or contemporary architecture, chronological and geographic art designations give way to a fluid floor plan that maximizes aimless wandering and facilitates unexpected visual connections.

In any case, the exhibits themselves are lovely, as you would expect. Early 20th-century photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s lifetime of work ranges from studies of Philadelphia skyscraper construction to family portraits to studio sessions with Georgia O’Keefe. The fashion display includes three Philadelphia designers, James Galanos, Gustave Tassell, and Ralph Rucci, following trends in women’s dresses from the 1950s through today. In the modern design gallery, the expected collection of eclectic furniture sits alongside tea sets, advertisements, and even the sleek design of the brand new iPhone. (You might wonder, as I did initially, whether such a hot commodity belongs in an art museum’s holdings, but Apple has undeniably done some outstanding product design, and it IS a modern design collection.) The sculpture currently in the Exhibition Gallery expresses a range of modern and contemporary sculptural concerns, with Sol LeWitt’s geometry, the organic handiwork of Martin Puryear, a natural installation by Richard Long, and the transitory possibilities of Félix González-Torres. And book-lovers should be sure to wander to the second-floor library to see the selection of rare books on display.

The Perelman Building won’t replace the PMA as the center for the worship of all things art, but it offers a focused space, a specialized environment for observation, research, and conservation. Students and scholars can delve into historical, cultural, and technical explorations, while viewers can enjoy the PMA’s lesser-known collections and revel in the diversity of visual expression.


©The Evening Bulletin 2007