Philadelphia Art Alliance
In an effort to help maintain the health and safety of our community, our galleries remain temporarily closed to the public.
Visit our outdoor exhibition, Resist Covid–Take 6! now on view in front of the Art Alliance and at other locations across our campus.
Conceived by Carrie Mae Weems and Pierre Loving, Resist Covid Take 6! aims to create an artist-driven public awareness campaign to educate and enlighten Black, Latinx and Native American communities about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives.
UArts is the exclusive presenter of Weems’ project in Philadelphia, where billboards, creative messaging and public art has been installed around Center City to highlight the virus’ staggering death toll. Phase 1 of the project at UArts is generously supported by the Jessica Hamilton Hardy Visiting Artist Fund.
Engage your students with this social impact project by artist Carrie Mae Weems through lesson plans and teaching resources. Develop a social impact campaign and create supporting materials like a cover story, poster design and hand fan. High school students may even use their poster design as a portfolio piece.
Conceived by Carrie Mae Weems and Pierre Loving, Resist Covid Take 6! is an artist-driven public awareness campaign that aims to educate and enlighten Black, Brown, Latinx and Native American communities about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives. UArts is the exclusive presenter of Weems’ project in Philadelphia.
The much-anticipated Invisible City catalog its here!
Purchase Now
Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde is the first book to examine Philadelphia's cultural impact from the 1950s to the Bicentennial. As an interdisciplinary exploration, Invisible City highlights Philadelphia's unique contributions to visual, literary, and musical culture featuring significant architects, photographers, sculptors, designers, craftsmen, writers, musicians, painters and conceptual artists.
The vernacular avant-garde reflects the everyday. From Duchamp's ready-mades to the aesthetics of Main Street, from American Bandstand to Andy Warhol's inaugural museum exhibit, from Robert Smithson's earthwork to Robert Venturi's Guild House, Philadelphia was a city of firsts. As a gritty postindustrial metropolis built of brick and Wissahickon schist, it was central to the concepts of postmodernism through insights on the social landscape, urban graffiti and underground theater. The city produced the earliest Pop Art exhibitions, influential popular music, the country’s premier rock music magazine, substantial art schools, progressive curators and the Institute of Contemporary Art.
These ideas are thoroughly illuminated in nine essays by Rachel Churner, Jennie Hirsh, Sid Sachs, John Szwed, and Anne Wilke Tucker, augmented with interviews and writings by Willoughby Sharp, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Robert Venturi, and Progressive Architecture. Beautifully designed by Studio LHOOQ, this 304-page catalog is illustrated with 210 images and published by The University of the Arts with funding by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, January 21–April 4, 2020
Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
Published by:
University of the Arts
320 S Broad St
Philadelphia, PA 19102
© University of the Arts, all rights reserved
Edited by Sheryl Conkelton
Designed by Mỹ Linh Triệu Nguyễn, Studio LHOOQ
Printed by Point B Solutions, Minneapolis with Longo, Bolzano
USD: $40
Conceived by Carrie Mae Weems and Pierre Loving, Resist Covid Take 6! aims to create an artist-driven public awareness campaign to educate and enlighten Black, Latinx and Native American communities about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives. This awareness campaign will use creative measures and projects to emphasize preventative steps that must be taken to ensure these community members’ safety and reinforce the absolute necessity of social distancing.
UArts is the exclusive presenter of Weems’ project in Philadelphia, where billboards, creative messaging and public art will be installed around Center City to highlight the virus’ staggering death toll. Phase 1 of the project at UArts is generously supported by the Jessica Hamilton Hardy Visiting Artist Fund.
University of the Arts is actively seeking Philadelphia-area partners to expand the scope of Resist Covid Take 6! in Phase 2. To learn more about partnership opportunities, contact Shelton Walker, chief of staff and associate VP for strategic initiatives, at shwalker@uarts.edu.
In conjunction with University of the Arts’ exhibition Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde curated by Sid Sachs with Jennie Hirsh, Alex Da Corte and Kate Watson-Wallace will reinvent Kaprow's Chicken in the same location it was originally performed, now known as the Gershman Hall of University of the Arts.
Chicken variously dramatizes, commodifies and deconstructs the trope of the chicken. In 1962, the work was staged on ad-hoc wooden stands and booths with “pitchmen” plucking real chicken feathers, live chickens being vacuumed, people behaving like chickens, records with chicken sounds and so on. In 2020, Chicken no longer promises the "new vocabulary" it once did. Rather, Da Corte will stage a progressive, animal-friendly reconsideration of what the “avant-carnival” originally considered itself to be.
Chicken will feature Kristel Baldoz, Melanie Cotton, Danielle Currica, Julia Eichten, Jessica Emmanuel, Ya-Ya Fairley, Ann-Marie Gover, Imma, Andrew Smith, Kim Thompson, and Wilmer Wilson along with Kate Watson-Wallace and Alex Da Corte; with music composed by Marco Buccelli and Xenia Rubinos, performed with Sunny Ali and Karna Ray.
Chicken features a newly commissioned text by Rosalyn Drexler.
Read the reviews:
Surface Magazine
Interview Magazine
Thinking Dance
Support for the Invisible City Symposium and Chicken has been provided by the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation. Support for the research, development and presentation of Invisible City has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Image credit: Photo by Wang Shui, Courtesy of the artist, University of the Arts and Sadie Coles HQ
Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde highlights Philadelphia’s significant contributions to visual, literary, and musical culture between 1956 and 1976. An interdisciplinary exploration that is centered at University of the Arts, Invisible City features key works by the period’s major architects, photographers, sculptors, designers, painters and conceptual artists. The exhibition is organized by University of the Arts and curated by Sid Sachs, chief curator and director of exhibitions at University of the Arts with Jennie Hirsh, assistant curator, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at MICA. Support for the research, development, and presentation of Invisible City has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Read the reviews:
Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde highlighted Philadelphia’s significant contributions to visual, literary, and musical culture between 1956 and 1976. An interdisciplinary exploration that was centered at University of the Arts, Invisible City features key works by the period’s major architects, photographers, sculptors, designers, painters and conceptual artists. The exhibition was organized by University of the Arts and curated by Sid Sachs, chief curator and director of exhibitions at University of the Arts with Jennie Hirsh, assistant curator, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at MICA. Support for the research, development, and presentation of Invisible City has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
For questions or concerns, email rwg@uarts.edu or call 215–717–6480.
Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Leading century-old cultural institutions to join together, creating Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts
The boards of trustees of the University of the Arts and Philadelphia Art Alliance announced that the two century-old institutions will join together. The vote of both boards was unanimous.
Under the agreement, the Art Alliance will become part of the University of the Arts, renamed Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, under the executive leadership of UArts President David Yager and the governance of the university's Board of Trustees. The documents to begin the state approval process for mergers of nonprofit organizations were filed on September 8, 2017. That review is expected to take several months.
"This coming together of two of Philadelphia's most historic and innovative arts institutions offers a rare opportunity," said Yager, "to preserve and celebrate that extraordinary history while creating a future that envisions even more exciting possibilities across a wide range of art forms. Bringing together these exceptional educational and exhibition components opens up a myriad of new creative doors."
"We are thrilled that the Art Alliance will continue to be an active part of the future of Philadelphia's cultural life as a result of this merger with the University of the Arts," said Carole Shanis, chairperson and president emerita of the Art Alliance. "The Art Alliance has been a multi-disciplinary art center, guided by artists, since it was founded in 1915. While, over the last 10 years, our focus has been on contemporary craft and design, we welcome the new resources and broader perspective that will come with this partnership. We are confident that UArts will find creative ways to work with us to expand audiences and programs at the Wetherill Mansion, while furthering its own comprehensive educational mission."
The merging of the two historic organizations—the university celebrated its 140th anniversary this past year and the Art Alliance its 102nd—brings together institutions that have presented or developed some of the most influential and well-known artists of the past century. The two organizations, located just six blocks apart in Center City, are landmarks of their respective Philadelphia neighborhoods.
The University of the Arts' iconic Hamilton Hall, built in 1826, is the oldest existing building on South Broad Street. UArts is one of the only universities in the country solely dedicated to educating students in the visual and performing arts, design and writing.
Since 1915, the Art Alliance has hosted art exhibits, theater and music workshops, poetry readings and recitals by renowned artists, in the historic 1906 Wetherill Mansion on Rittenhouse Square.
UArts' alumni include renowned celebrity and fashion photographer Irving Penn, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Judith Jamison, and children's book authors Stan and Jan Berenstain, among many others. Since 1915, the Art Alliance has hosted exhibitions by artists such as Mary Cassatt, Andrew Wyeth and Man Ray, readings by e.e. cummings and Dorothy Parker, and performances by Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.
"At a time when the arts are challenged as never before, this integration offers a wonderful opportunity to develop visionary new arts and educational programming for the Philadelphia region, now and into the future," said UArts Board of Trustees Chairman Jeffrey Lutsky.
What was to become the Philadelphia College of Art (and eventually the University of the Arts), the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, was founded in 1876 by Philadelphia civic leaders, in response to the growing interest in art and design stirred by the country's Centennial Exposition, and as a means to develop world-class artisans and designers in post-Industrial Revolution America. Concurrently, UArts' other predecessor institution, the Philadelphia Musical Academy (which eventually became the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts), opened its doors. Visual arts, performing arts and design joined together a little over a century later, with university status being granted in 1987 as the University of the Arts.
The Philadelphia Art Alliance, the oldest multidisciplinary arts center in the United States for visual, literary and performing arts, was established by philanthropist Christine Wetherill Stevenson in 1915 with the goal of uniting the arts by presenting music, theater, painting and sculpture in a single venue. In 1926, it moved from its temporary quarters on Walnut Street into. Stevenson's family home on Rittenhouse Square. Since its inception, it has been a national pioneer in bringing contemporary artists—many now considered icons—to the public. In its early days, the Art Alliance welcomed them when most museums and other venues chose not to present contemporary works.
Once the integration is approved by the Commonwealth, the university plans to make interior enhancements over the course of the next few years.
Mission
The University of the Arts is committed to inspiring, educating and preparing innovative artists and creative leaders for the arts of the twenty-first century.
Uniting two century-long legacies, the Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts is a center that advances the work of makers, performers and practitioners. With a deep rooted understanding of the arts as interrelated allies, we seek new perspectives and generate experiences that investigate experimental impulses. Our fluid approach to the arts reflects our learning environment and cultivates inventiveness, originality and imaginative expression.
Vision
International in breadth and diverse in discipline, the center’s programming provides exposure to the unusual, the unexpected, and the provocative, stimulating critical dialog, In a historic venue, our community will continue to reconsider established notions of making and performing and to explore issues indicative of our time.
History
In 2018, the celebrated Philadelphia Art Alliance merged with University of the Arts, uniting two century-old institutions as the Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts.
Founded by playwright Christine Wetherill Stevenson in 1915 and located in the former Wetherill Mansion on Rittenhouse Square, the Philadelphia Art Alliance is considered one of the first multidisciplinary art spaces in the U.S. Its remarkable legacy included presenting the work of visionary writers, composers, dancers, musicians, sculptors and architects from Igor Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein to Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller and Diego Rivera among many other dazzling luminaries.
The Future
University of the Arts is in the midst of envisioning and developing the next chapter of the Art Alliance as a multidisciplinary, contemporary arts forum in the heart of Philadelphia. Following its incredible history, the Art Alliance will once again be animated by leading visionaries of our time and aims to serve as a lively social hub–a living room for the arts in Philadelphia.
An exciting renovation is currently underway to update and restore the intimate gallery, performance and convening spaces of the Wetherill Mansion, which was originally designed by architect Charles Klauder and built in 1906.
Visitor Information
Temporarily closed
For any inquiries please contact us:
251 S 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215-545-4302
artalliance@uarts.edu
Team
Shelton Walker, University Chief of Staff & Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives
shwalker@uarts.edu
Sid Sachs, Director of Exhibitions & Head Curator
ssachs@uarts.edu
Caitlin Perkins, Director of Engagement, University Centers
cperkins@uarts.edu
Michael Ciervo, Director of Exhibitions Management & Head Preparator
mciervo@uarts.edu
Mary Kay Kaminski, Program Manager
mkaminski@uarts.edu
Art Alliance Writers' Workshop
The Art Alliance Writers' Workshop is for emerging writers who work in fiction, non-fiction, and/or poetry. Participants improve their writing while working with an accomplished cohort over a year of intensive courses. Upon completion of coursework, students earn a certificate in Creative Writing.