The ambitious projects the Center’s grants support originate in the Philadelphia region, and their impact often resonates far beyond the Delaware Valley, connecting with audiences around the world and advancing Philadelphia’s cultural reputation on a national and international stage. Below, read about three Center-supported exhibitions on view now in Berlin, Seattle, and Kansas City and an upcoming performance in New York City, plus a newly reopened Philadelphia-based project and two works set to tour after their forthcoming debuts.
Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation
After opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art, a retrospective on the groundbreaking work of video and performance artist Ulysses Jenkins traveled to Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum and is now on view at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin, Germany, through July 2023. Organized in close collaboration with Jenkins himself, Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation includes more than 15 of the artist’s videos and dozens of other works, including murals, photographs, and performances. The New York Times featured the Hammer Museum installation, describing how it “acidly critiques the cloying simplifications of mass media, yet beams with the excitement of holding the means of production.”
Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births
Originally on view at two Philadelphia locations—the Mütter Museum and the Center for Architecture and Design—Maternity Care Coalition’s Designing Motherhood has since toured to MassArt Art Museum in Boston and is now running at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle through the end of this year. The exhibition (curated by Michelle Millar Fisher, Amber Winick, and Juliana Rowen) features over 200 objects that consider the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design over the last century and illuminate contemporary experiences around birth and motherhood. The companion book that surveys the history of material culture that has shaped the many elements of birth and maternity over the past 100 years is available from MIT Press. The Guardian featured the project, examining how “these quotidian objects point to larger structural conversations.
Jayson Musson: His History of Art
Following his residency and exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, visual artist Jayson Musson’s His History of Art is open at the Kansas City Art Institute through June 2023. The installation features three videos, produced in conjunction with FWM, in which Musson and his puppet colleague Ollie examine art history through a biting comedic lens, along with a behind-the-scenes look at the costumes, scenery, puppets, and props used in the videos. The New York Times reviewed the exhibition, noting that it “draws on sitcoms, kids’ educational TV, performance art, and art history lectures to create something both wacky and profound.”
Prometheus Firebringer
Developed during theater artist Annie Dorsen’s residency at Bryn Mawr College, Prometheus Firebringer premiered at the college this past January and heads to the Chocolate Factory in New York City this May. Grappling with questions about the cultural implications of artificial intelligence, the work employs a predictive text model to generate speculative versions of the missing story from the Greek Prometheus trilogy, with digital masks performing a new iteration each night. In covering Bryn Mawr’s retrospective of Dorsen’s earlier works, Artforum noted “the force and meaning of her politically unsettling and artistically profound expeditions into computer-generated making, a practice with deep roots in visual art but few peers on the stage.”
Pool: A Social History of Segregation
After its debut in 2022, Pool has reopened at the Fairmount Water Works and runs through the end of September 2023. The multidisciplinary exhibition explores the history and present-day implications of segregated swimming pools in America, including site-specific works by regional artists including audio/visual work by Pew Fellow Homer Jackson and an animated film by Pew Fellow James Ijames. The original run garnered national attention, including a feature on WHYY’s Movers & Makers.
Polly Apfelbaum: These Boots Are Made For Walkin'
Polly Apfelbaum's solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery in London is open through May 5, 2023. The large-scale installations of textiles and ceramics include fifteen pieces Apfelbaum created for her 2022 exhibition at Arcadia University, For the Love of Una Hale. Created over the course of an extended residency at Arcadia, these works embody the artist's examination of the influence of Pennsylvania German craft traditions on her color-rich, multidisciplinary practice.
Looking Ahead
Farming
After it premieres on a farm in Newtown, PA, this June, The Crossing’s Farming will travel to Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY, on July 9. The choral work by composer Ted Hearne, performed outdoors with live instrumentation in the cultivated field of a working farm, grapples with society’s historical relationship to agriculture and questions what it would take to make the people who grow our food more visible.
