Philadelphia Art Alliance

In an effort to help maintain the health and safety of our community, we have canceled all remaining public events for Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Avant-garde and temporarily closed our galleries. 

This includes: 

March 19: Modern and Contemporary American Craft: Jennie Hirsh in Conversation with Helen Williams Drutt English

March 26: Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde Panel Discussion: Women of the Avant-garde

March 28: Modern Architecture Walking Tour with William Whitaker, Curator of Penn's Architectural Archives

April 2: An Evening of Poetry with Professor Daisy Fried and 'Invisible City' Poetry Award Winners

For questions or concerns, email rwg@uarts.edu or call 215–717–6480.

Presented by the University of the Arts Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde will highlight and explore Philadelphia’s significant contributions to visual culture in the 1950s through the 1970s in an exhibition, a publication and performances. 

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Art Alliance Invisible City  Exhibition Visiting Hours
Tuesday–Friday: 12 p.m.–5 p.m.
Closed Monday, Saturday and Sunday

Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

In an effort to help maintain the health and safety of our community, and in order to support the nationwide effort to contain the spread of Covid-19, the Art Alliance is temporarily closed. All scheduled public programs and events taking place at Art Alliance have been canceled until further notice.

Site Effects is an exhibition curated by Katja Toporski and Anja Eichler that will explore jewelry in Europe and the United States. If jewelry is considered a form of communication, do people speak the same language on either side of the Atlantic?

Metalsmith Gary Griffin, when regarding the works in the International Jewelry Exhibition 1900 – 1980 at the ‘Künstlerhaus’ in Vienna, observed: ‘The European work appeared far more minimal than the American. It represented a design distillation process, which resulted in a reductivist aesthetic.’

Griffins was speaking to the jewelry of the last century. But what about the current moment? In Site Effects, a series of questions is posed: have the differences between jewelry created in Europe and the US been blurred in the era of globalization or do they still exist? If there are differences, are they solely aesthetic or are they conceptual as well? And what role does knowing an artist's name and location play in the perception of a work and the potential for cultural stereotyping? Does the Atlantic still exist as a dividing line? Or has this been replaced by a more individualized approach?

Site Effects will feature the works of 12 artists from the United States and 12 from Europe. Each artists will produce two pieces of work: one of their own conception and one in response to a prompt from a partnering artist from across the Atlantic, whose identity they will not know at the time of the jewelry creation. The exhibition seeks to engage with audiences’ preconceived notions of geography and nationality when reflecting on art and to consider what role, if any, the dividing line of the Atlantic plays on the style and substance of these pieces.

The Art Alliance at the University of the Arts will be the United States venue for Site Effects; the European venue is the Bavarian Society of Applied Arts in Munich, Germany, which hosted the exhibition from Mid-January to the end of February 2020. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

The Art Alliance Writers’ Workshop is a place where emerging writers can hone their craft alongside talented faculty; earlier this year, poets participated in the workshop’s first poetry contest. The prize was awarded to Naz Bowman ’20 (Creative Writing) and Thea Brown, with Jaymie Hommel ’20 (Creative Writing) selected as an honorable mention.

The award celebrates the work of C.K. Williams this year and is presented in conjunction with Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, which highlights the Philadelphia avante-garde scene from the 1950s through the ’70s. In the call for submission, poets were asked to gather inspiration from the exhibition or Williams’ writings, including his 1968 book of poetry A Day for Anne Frank.

We reached out to the poets about some of their other sources of inspiration. Brown’s winning submission is part of a larger manuscript called Loner Forensics, which she calls an “urban surrealist Spoon River Anthology that’s engaged with grief, utopia, institutional violence and love,” referring to Edgar Lee Masters’ 1914 work. Other influences for Brown included “Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, interactive fiction computer games from the late ’80s and parallel universes.”

For Bowman, music was a major influence on their work. “The way that lyrics in songs, even more so than lyric poetry, can create tiny holes into places without taking up much space, is something that I try to emulate,” they said. Bowman explained that the poem they submitted “was an attempt at taking the way music approximates things and turning [it] into a scroll or tab of thoughts throughout a day.” 

In addition to a $100 prize and publication in an upcoming issue of Horsethief magazine, the prizewinners were given the opportunity to collaborate with Book Arts and Printmaking MFA students Sarah Moody and Sara Moose-Torres to design original letterpress broadsides of their poems. The broadsides will be displayed at The Art Alliance in early April.