Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

The Center for Immersive Media (CIM) at University of the Arts recently produced 360-degree documentation of the Carrie Mae Weems installation, Resist Covid Take 6!—currently on view throughout UArts’ Center City campus—that not only captures the artist’s work but also offers an immersive snapshot of the sights and sounds of Philadelphia amidst the ongoing pandemic.

Each of the components of Weems’ project brings awareness to the disproportionate, deadly impact of COVID-19 on Black, Latinx and Native American communities. This public campaign also emphasizes essential preventative steps including social distancing guidelines, evidenced by the allusion in the project’s title to the recommendation that people stay six feet apart. The works are intentionally installed on the exteriors of various venues where they can be safely viewed by the public. 

To date, Resist Covid Take 6! has been hosted in a number of cities across the U.S., including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Nashville, New York and Savannah. UArts is the exclusive presenter of this project in Philadelphia, generously supported by the Jessica Hamilton Hardy Visiting Artist Fund. The locations of the specific installations that comprise the Philadelphia iteration—which include elements such as large-format posters, video PSAs, posters and window banners—are indicated on an interactive map that CIM Director Alan Price created utilizing a combination of HTML5, JavaScript, and Google Maps API.

^{Click here to engage with the Resist Covid Take 6 interactive map and 360 virtual experience.}

The map hosts panoramic video clips created at five installation sites using an Insta360 Pro VR camera. The camera creates a full, equirectangular projection image, stitched together from six integrated wide-angle lenses. The videos are compatible with many virtual reality (VR) viewers, including the Google Cardboard viewer, which allows anyone to utilize an Android or IOS device to experience this content in an even more dynamic way. 

The video clips, including one documenting the installation at the Art Alliance, show passersby encountering the project as they journey through the city. The soundtrack of cars and buses rushing by paired with individuals engaging in routine activities like dog walking are not unexpected scenes to encounter in a typical city on a sunny afternoon; however, the appearance of masks worn by the majority of those on the streets serves as an indicator of the impact of the virus on everyday life.

According to Price, “The primary goal of documenting Resist Covid Take 6! with immersive media technology is to capture the experience of being there, in the public spaces in which each of the works are installed.” Regarding how this work ties into the larger mission of CIM, Price explains, “The Center for Immersive Media is a resource and creative research proving ground where anyone at UArts may discover ways that virtual and mixed reality, performance motion-capture and human-computer interaction can augment or facilitate the work that they do. This documentation project is just one example of potentially unique ways to document public works.”

CIM’s VR documentation is a fitting accompaniment to Resist Covid Take 6!. This way of interacting with the installations reinforces Weems’ message by making the project—and by extension, the city—accessible in a safe yet engaging way that brings new dimension to the virtual viewing experience. 

Immerse yourself in the Resist Covid Take 6! 360-degree experience.

Sid Sachs, chief curator and director of exhibitions at University of the Arts, contributed an essay to the recently published exhibition catalog accompanying She-Bam Pow POP Wizz! Les Amazones du POP, currently on view at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Nice (MAMAC) in France. 

Spanning the period from 1961 to 1973, the exhibition primarily highlights the efforts of European and North American artists. The included works illustrate the influence of heroines—from characters like Barbarella to artists such as Evelyne Axell—on the history of Pop Art. Though this movement has been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the globe, this presentation is notable for its emphasis on the role of female practitioners who harnessed stereotypical portrayals of women, popular in the media of the time, in order to defy them. 

Sachs, whose curatorial vision is regularly on display at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, is well-versed in this subject matter. His expertise was previously demonstrated through the exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968, which debuted at University of the Arts in 2010 and later traveled nationally to venues including the Brooklyn Museum. Seductive Subversion was a landmark effort in expanding the critical understanding of Pop Art and was the first exhibit to examine the role of women in Pop Art. Hyperallergic cited the show as an “important and revelatory exhibition” which “amplified what many people suspected for a long time: men weren’t the only ones to make Pop Art.” The exhibit received the AICA Award as Best Thematic Museum Exhibition nationally that year, and in November 2019, Artnews cited it as the seventh most influential show of the past decade. 

When Sachs first learned of plans for She-Bam Pow POP Wizz!—from an artist included in his 2010 exhibition who was also selected for the exhibition in Nice—he reached out to MAMAC director Hélène Guenin and Geraldine Gourbe, the museum’s guest curator at the time. He explains, “I was curious about who else they might be including in the exhibit, because since Seductive Subversion, the Pop canon had been substantially revised.” This sparked a correspondence during which Sachs provided key information about certain artists, galleries and estates and was invited to contribute to the catalog. 

The essay Sachs’ provided, titled “Extended Thoughts on Women and Pop Art,” deepens the understanding of the contributions made by women Pop artists, as well as the often-unexplored subversive and political implications of the movement. This work builds on content he previously wrote for Seductive Subversion and marks the first time his writing on this subject has been translated into French. Revisiting this topic, Sachs reflected on the impact of his previous work, saying “When I researched and presented Seductive Subversion, no one had ever done any work in this area. It was new territory. Every major Pop Art exhibit since that time has included women.” The current show at MAMAC, on view until Mar. 28, 2021, can be seen as a supplement to this pioneering effort.
 

Read more about She-Bam Pow POP Wizz! Les Amazones du POP

Learn more about Sid Sachs’ work at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

Read more about Resist Covid Take 6! in Forbes.

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

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:

The Inquirer

The Broadstreet Review

The Architects' Newspaper.

The Artblog

The Dream Dance catalog is now available for purchase!

Purchase Now!

Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller is a catalog released in conjunction with the artist's first major monographic exhibition at Lightbox Film Center and the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in Philadelphia. With an immensely diverse body of creative work in film, video, and visual art, Ed Emshwiller is perhaps one of the most significant yet under-recognized artists of the latter half of the 20th century. Emshwiller's career spanned abstract expressionist painting, commercial illustration, film, video and computer art, and collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and composers. Highlighting his visual and fine art background, this catalog includes early paintings, notes, film stills, sketches, ephemera, and many early science fiction cover paintings. Including artwork by Robert Beatty, Dream Dance is a full scale investigation of Emshwiller's legacy, presenting his multidisciplinary oeuvre to a new generation of audiences. 

Published by Anthology Editions
USD: $30

Lightbox Film Center presents Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller, the first major monographic exhibition of the artist’s groundbreaking work. Emshwiller’s career spanned abstract expressionist painting, commercial illustration, film, video and computer art, and collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and composers. The project includes the preservation of two of Emshwiller’s earliest films, Chromatic (1959) and Lifelines (1960), which will be screened at Lightbox along with 19 of his other films—some of which have never been publicly presented in Philadelphia—as well as notable films by other filmmakers for which he served as cinematographer.

A concurrent exhibition at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery highlights Emshwiller’s visual and fine art background, including video works, early paintings, notes, sketches, ephemera, and many early science fiction book cover paintings.

A comprehensive full-color catalog featuring Emshwiller’s artwork with cover art by Robert Beatty is available for purchase through the UArts online store as well as on Anthology Editions’ website. 

Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major installation of work by Julian Hoeber.

Born in Philadelphia, Hoeber studied art history at Tufts and studio practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Hoeber's intelligent and eclectic work reflects his education and concerns. His is a paradoxical practice that literally encompasses perception; both that of the viewer and the artist. Hoeber's objects mimic and are real things in the world such as tables, cabinets and architecture. His canvases reveal both their recto and verso, become concrete objects set into and deconstructing the gallery's white cube walls. Conceptualization, design, making and art history merge.

As such, Hoeber has no signature style; he is adept and utilizes trompe l'oeil representation as much as more synthetic concrete practices to develop space. Objects and studies are often phenomenologically a kilter, shifted, elevated, transitional. Paintings show evidence of facture and process, chromatic gradations and entropic sequences. Along the way Hoeber drops references as diverse as Frederich Fröbel, Felix Klein, Nikolaus Pevsner, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman and André Kertész.

Hoeber has had seventeen one-person group exhibits since 2006 and participated in over sixty group exhibits worldwide. His works are included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, and Nasher Museum and Sculpture Garden, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, Florida; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Western Bridge, Seattle, Washington; the Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens Greece; and the Rosenbaum Collection & Friends, Paris, France.

 Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings and studies by Jonathan Lasker.

Lasker's canvases involve an exchange between expressionist forms and flat grounds, dealing with the tension between deep space and the concrete reality of gestures. Starting with small studies, Lasker enlarges his motifs freehand, so that small marker gestures, for example, become flatter graffiti-like passages and more expressionist marks swell and coalesce into impasto reliefs. By replicating gestures verbatim, the authenticity of the original signs is questioned and put into play, resulting with a simulation of expression. His color sensibility seems almost Pop––he often uses a palette of almost artificial mint greens, baby blues and caustic pinks. This synthetic painting, neither completely figurative nor absolutely abstract, generates a new meta vocabulary for the twenty-first century.

Lasker has had over seventy one-person exhibits since 1981 and participated in over three hundred group exhibits worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, PS1, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Rooseum in Malmo, Sweden; Venice Biennale, and Documenta IX, Kassel, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany. He has had retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Bielefield, Germany; the Stedelijk, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland; the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.

Lasker's works are in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn, Washington DC; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, Japan; Mudam, Luxembourg; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

This is his first major viewing in Philadelphia since his ICA exhibit in 1992. He previously was showcased in Sid Sachs' exhibits Pop Abstraction (1998) at the PAFA and Transcendent & Unrepentant (2002) at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is proud to present The Dangerous One, an exhibition of new drawings, paper collage and sculpture by Mark Thomas Gibson.

This is Mark Thomas Gibson’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia, where he has recently relocated his studio practice from New Haven, CT. Dark humor is necessary at a time like this: it helps us to remember that all is not lost! In his drawings, Gibson shines a high-key light on the grim and gritty social realities of contemporary America with a biting humor. His work depicts sweeping narratives of a dystopic America, and implicates every viewer as a potential character in this narrative. He therefore reminds us that everything is at stake and that we are all in this together. Gibson’s work is bristling with the energy of immediacy, using a largely-unedited drawing method that allows for improvisation, humor, the comic and grotesque. In his hands, the comic is used for its powers of transformation.

Gibson feels that this moment in American history can be a cleansing, a re-orientation back to empathy and love, but that this process requires a kind of reckoning, a purge of negative spirits flowing around us in the everyday. The Dangerous One lays bare a cycle of American history that feeds directly into the contemporary: dark times in the creation of America, a nation’s failure to acknowledge its own fear-based hatred, and a contemporary moment where the nations of the world retreat into themselves and attempt to force out invaders in a continued refusal of acknowledgement. Gibson’s drawings remind us that we must collectively acknowledge the fears used to stoke the flames of our country’s history, and the pressing need to continue to grow energetically in order to move beyond our collective history. As he says: “We see around us the Rooster coming home to Roost; the dawn is near. So, smile.” In Gibson's work, the smile can be dark because it reflects an inevitable future: we have to get down to get up.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings and drawings by Tal R.

Born Tal Rosenzweig in 1967 in Tel Aviv, Tal R was raised in Denmark where he continues to live in Copenhagen. Exhibiting internationally since 1992, his works are in an eclectic style which he refers to as kolbojnik – a Yiddish word for leftovers. You can see Tal R combining and recombining motifs from European masters such as Munch and styles like Expressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, and even Surrealism. These sources all contribute to Tal R's rich hybrid works which are blended into unique narratives. Ironically, for all their subjectivity, he often starts from photographs. Recycled through his mind eye, these images become dreamlike, imaginative, and innovative. There are precedents to this style––the Cobra artists for example––but also sophistication in his line and color sensibilities which rival Matisse and Kitaj.

Tal R has had over twenty one-person and participated in over sixty group exhibits worldwide. His most recent solo exhibitions include Cheim and Read, New York; Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebæk, Denmark; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark; Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm, Sweden; Kusthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany; Institut für Modern Künst, Nürnberg,Germany; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; Camden Arts Centre, London, England; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paolo, Brazil; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel among others. Tal R's works were recently shown this past summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. Tal R previously taught at the Kunstakadmie Dusseldorf.

This is his first exhibit in Philadelphia.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings by Anne Neukamp.

Neukamp's work uses icons derived from our vernacular environment, the image bank of the consumer society: our mental archive of animation characters, heraldic details, letters from the media and advertising pictograms. She creates a personal identity by the repeated use of these identifiable signs coupled with an idiosyncratic palette. A grey pebbled ground reads spatially like snow on a computer screen. The hand icon is ironically emblematic as these work-intensive constructed images do not retain the malerisch or painterly passages of traditional painting. These are not "hands;" they are flat cartoonish shapes of hand symbols. Her airbrushed passages generate ripples in space, yet there are also flat black and white columnar illusions like Leger kiosks. Neukamp recombines and cracks the codes of representation, shifting and destabilizing meaning. Serenely surreal and strikingly rigorous, her mechanical images are quite familiar and yet uncanny, removed, distant. These are fragmentary paintings for the age of the internet: pictorial, falsely spatial, simulated, intelligent.

Neukamp (born 1976 in Düsseldorf, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She has had over twenty solo shows and participated in over sixty group exhibits worldwide, including: Marlborough Contemporary, New York (US); Greta Meert, Brussels (BE); Lisa Cooley, New York (US); Jr Projects, Toronto (CA); Gregor Podnar, Berlin; Kunstverein Oldenburg (DE); Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (DE); KunstWerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (US); and Galerie des Galeries, Galerie Lafayettes, Paris (FR). She is the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and she resided in this context at the ISCP (International Curatorial and Studio Program) in New York (US). She was nominated for the Jean-François Prat prize in 2016, Paris (FR). This is her first exhibit in Philadelphia.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.