L'école / Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms
Top image: © Jessica Wynne, "David Gabai, Princeton University," 2019 / Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
Aug. 25-Nov. 18, 2023
Opening Reception: Aug. 25, 5-7:30pm
Art Alliance
L'école
To inaugurate the gallery season, the Philadelphia Art Alliance presents a multimedia group exhibition entitled L'école which respectfully, yet irreverently, provides a varied glimpse at academic languages, both visual and verbal. As such, L'école succinctly complements the concurrent exhibition of Dan Levenson’s works on the Art Alliance’s first floor. L'école, as a meta school of art, includes paintings, photographs, drawings and guest artists from across the globe. Included are photographs of graphic material tuned into concrete poetry by Erica Baum, large-scale palimpsests of academic chalkboards by Jessica Wynne, the meticulously drawn literary appropriations by Sharka Hyland and 1980s neon wordplay by Annson Kenney. The deft graphic paintings by Yugoslavian artist Mangelos resonate with calligraphic European avant-garde legacies of artists like Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly and Jannis Kournelis. Each artist shares singular lessons at the graduate level. Not an elementary primer then, L'école requires close study. No one is innocent yet we are all schooled in various ways.
Erica Baum (b. 1961) photographs printed matter, converting it into a kind of concrete poetry. In her various series, she tweaks the order of things, recontextualizes given facts, while making subtle sociological commentaries that reveal the subjectivity of objective systems. She does this by purely visual means; exposing the aged oxidation of dogeared paperback pages, the physical layers of library card catalogs, the printed edges of publications where images are side glanced and the translucency of sewing pattern papers. Codes collapse together and meaning recombines in determinants established by the viewer’s past experiences. Baum received a BA in anthropology from Barnard College in 1984, an MA in applied linguistics from Hunter College in 1988 and an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1994. Her works are in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Aïshti Foundation, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Centre National des Arts Plastiques , Kunstpalast Düsseldorf FRAC Ile de France, FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Hood Museum of Art ,The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MAMCO Genève, Norton Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The SCAD Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of Guelph McClelland & Stewart Art Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Sharka Hyland presents a series of exquisite text drawings coalescing around the theme of “America.” Hers is a readerly project as well as visual. As one peruses the room, broad language references from one drawing extend into another. For example, a passage from Kafka’s Amerika describing the sight of the Statue of Liberty is juxtaposed with a paragraph from Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day depicting a view the Hudson River. As such she employs a reverse ekphrastic process in which written descriptions and poetic allusions are mentally converted to visual data; designing and structuring drawings whose physical construction is as vitally as important as their literary content. These drawing testify to Hyland’s hybrid education. She studied art history and comparative literature in Paris, Prague and Freiburg and received her MFA from Yale University. Her text-based drawings have been exhibited in solo and group shows in the U.S. and abroad, at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, the Galerie Dittmar in Berlin, Germany and at Galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris. She teaches typography, visual communication and visual studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has been a recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy.
Annson Kenney (1944 – 1981) was a Philadelphia-based musical polymath, who wrote, composed and performed in many genres. Kenney first multimedia works were staged at Temple University. He played double bass with Philadelphia’s contemporary music ensemble Relâche and hosted a progressive NPR radio program on music called NOIZE. His installations of language-based neon works and body work, exploring the “complex relation between behavior and language,” were shown at Marian Locks Gallery, PAFA, the Philadelphia College of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and Moore College of Art. In his varied works, Kenney drew from literary theory, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, the Art and Language group, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Michael Snow and others. Although this litany seems academically determined, Kenney’s rebellious wit and humor prevailed in all his works. He was well beloved in the Philadelphia avant-garde community, whose tragic early death cut short his antic legacy.
Mangelos (born Dimitrije Bašičević) (1921 – 1987) was a Yugoslavian artist, curator and art critic whose artistic production included handmade books, sculptures and paintings. His work and research contributed greatly to the development of abstract art in Croatia. Mangelos’s work have been widely shown at Berkeley Art Museum, University of California; Thomas Solomon Gallery; Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; Mitchell-Innes & Nash; Galerie St. Etienne; Carnegie Museum of Art; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum; Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; National Gallery; Estonian Museum of Art, Tate Modern, D’Offay Gallery; Centre for Art and Culture Georges Pompidou; Musee national d'art moderne; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Bremen Museum of Modern Art; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie; Kunsthalle Fridericianum; Venice Biennial; Kroller Müller Museum; Museu Serralves; Fundacio Miro; Museum of Modern Art; and The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. His work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; Tate; Centre Georges Pompidou; Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach; Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea and Moderna galerija. His estate is represented in America by Peter Freeman, NY.
Jessica Wynne received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1999 and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. Her first monograph Do Not Erase (from which the examples in L'école were chosen) documents the blackboard calculations and thought processes of noted mathematicians. By default, these elegant equations supply a beautiful and succinct visual impact. First published by Princeton University Press in 2021, Do Not Erase was subsequently translated and reprinted in Korea, Japan, and Germany. Wynne's photographs have been exhibited at The Morgan Library and Museum, The Triennale di Milano, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, The Armory Show and Art Basel. She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 Prix Pictet nominee, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Scientific American among other publications. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Morgan Library & Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. She is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms
The Philadelphia Art Alliance of the University of the Arts is pleased to present SKZ Monochrome Classrooms, an exhibition of works by the American artist Dan Levenson.
The entire first floor of the Art Alliance will be devoted to an installation representing two classrooms rescued from the ruins of an imaginary art school: The State Art Academy, Zürich (its initials in Swiss-German are SKZ). The exhibition imagines a final group project devoted to the monochrome: the culmination of the school’s curriculum before the students graduate. Levenson has made monochrome paintings which he attributes to these imaginary Swiss art students, signing them on the back with the students’ names. He has also meticulously created the ancient-looking desks, painter’s palettes, easels, storage boxes for paintings and paint-splattered student aprons.
As a conceptual project, a meta-school embedded in a real art university, Levenson subverts our expectations of authenticity within institutions. He invites us to grapple with the contested history of modernism with which his work is thoroughly engaged; his geometric exercises recall various schools—Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Russian Constructivism—while his empty classrooms and artificially aged objects create a sort of alienated modernism, at once evoking the failures of past artistic movements and a longing for a lost utopian spirit. In this work, the rectangle of the canvas represents necessary limits to freedom, and the monochrome represents the desire to transcend those limits.
SKZ Monochrome Classrooms is the continuation of a project that was exhibited in Philadelphia at Vox Populi in 2011, during the height of the Occupy movement. That exhibition, SKZ Monochrome Workshop, was Levenson’s first public exhibition of the SKZ. Since that time, all of Levenson’s work has been related to his imaginary school, a sustained examination of the relationship of art and freedom through the lens of art education. While the previous exhibition took place alongside a social movement attempting to realize the promise of freedom, the current exhibition takes place in a decidedly different political climate. Both exhibitions resonate on a local level, in the city most intimately associated with the American Revolution.
Born in New York, Levenson obtained his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1997. His work has been exhibited at James Fuentes Online, Vielmetter, LAXART, de boer Gallery, Honor Fraser, Charlie James, Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Praz-Delavallade, White Columns, PARTICIPANT INC, EFA Gallery and Vox Populi. He has expanded on the story of SKZ through performative drawing lessons taken from the school’s curriculum at the Hammer Museum, American Jewish University, USC’s Roski School of Art in Los Angeles, and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute in Berlin, Germany. He is the recipient of a Pollock/Krasner grant and Yaddo and MacDowell Fellowships, among other awards. He is currently based in Los Angeles.
Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Erica Baum, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Erica Baum, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Erica Baum, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Erica Baum, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Erica Baum, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Sharka Hyland, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Sharka Hyland, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Sharka Hyland, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Sharka Hyland, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Annson Kenney, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Annson Kenney, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Annson Kenney, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Annson Kenney, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Jessica Wynne, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Mangelos, installation view. Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.
Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms (installation view). Photo: Neighboring States.