Spontaneous dancing erupted in the Mayor's Reception Room this morning upon the announcement of a project that will place a vibrant new work of community-based public art on the parking decks facing Interstate 95 at the Philadelphia International Airport. We're talking about a 50,000 square foot mural, incorporating the photographic work of its designer, artist Jacques-Jean "JJ" Tiziou.

Scheduled for completion in June 2011, this project is set to be one of Philadelphia Mural Arts' greatest accomplishments as it transforms a highly visible, dull facade:


into a brilliant representation of our city's life, culture, community, and artistic vision:



Visit This Page to learn more. And see the video in our previous blog entry.
Congratulations to Philadelphia Mural Arts and to JJ Tiziou!

From Philly Metro, Thursday, January 28, 2010:

"Reasons it was fun to live, work, and play in Philly
Why have we all had such a good time in Philly over the past decade? Here's just 10 of the reasons for it
#1 Tables turned: Thanks to powerhouses such as Stephen Starr; Marc Vetri; Jose Garces and Michael Solomonov, not even New York can pretend we don't have a dining scene to reckon with these days.
...
#3 Philadelphia Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival: This gigantic gathering of local, international, amateur and professional artists has been kicking since 1997, but it gets a little bigger, a little weirder, and a little more can't-miss every year."

But here's what the Metro doesn't know (yet!): Those powerhouse restaurateurs are in partnership with this year's festival, to bring you Feastival.
For more info on what will be the #1 reason it's fun to live, work, and play in Philly in 2010, CLICK HERE

What happens when the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program brings together the Philadelphia International Airport, Philadelphia Parking Authority, and photographer JJ Tiziou?

Come find out what happens, and participate in the announcement by Mayor Michael Nutter and Deputy Mayor Rina Cutler of an extraordinary new work of community-based public art that will celebrate How Philly Moves.

Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Time: Doors open at 9:30am. Presentation begins at 10:00am.
Location: City Hall, Mayors Reception Room - 2nd floor (please bring photo id to enter building)

Featuring live music provided by members of the ferocious and recklessly joyful West Philly Orchestra
This is about you, Philly. See you there.

>>>Some of our staff members have an absolutely crazy love for margaritas, hence their appreciation for (and insistence upon) El Camino Real for goodbye drinks. Tonight, we say farewell to information manager and copywriter Josh McIlvain, with whom I've worked closely on this blog (buy his books!). You have Josh to thank for the Fringe poems, which were his idea, and for the Festival Guide, which he shepherded through the publication process (or blame him if you find any typos, whichever). We're seeing off three of our interns too: Alexandra Nielsen, Sophie Ozenbaugh, and Geoff Weathersby (pictured right, with crowbar in hand at the new office digs back in May, prying metal studs out of a wall). They have all decided to continue their education, and not to enter the draft this year.

>>>Then around 7:00ish, we're hopping on the bandwagon and heading up to the opening party for the Pork Chop gallery. Featuring work by Jen Procacci (who totally hooks us up by distributing our Festival Guides thanks Jen!), five bucks gets you in, and over the endless beer, aerial performance, and solid music, you can argue about whether 1536 N. American Street is in Fishtown or not. Is the name Kensington really so bad?

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by Alice Hershey.

Remember when we were all, "oh, you should go to the First Person Salons, they're so cool"? Well, that was our excellent ex-intern Jennifer Burrini, who's now columnizing for Saint Joe's student paper, The Hawk.

Of course, everybody loves that Jenn plugged us, but she was right about the Salons too. And tonight, Fringe artists take over half of the event:

>>>Shareef Hadid Jenkins (subject of an extensive Q&A in this space yesterday) will present an excerpt from his show with Gladys Productions, Getting Your Life.

>>>Music and Motion Dance previews two excerpts from the 9 muses.

The Salons are pretty cool events: the audience is interested and supportive while experiencing new works and works in development, and the opportunity to so intimately engage people about their art is pretty rare. Also on the lineup tonight: artists Damon Reaves and Jennifer Baker.

Go, grasshopper. Learn from the arts. $8, 7:30 pm, Laurie Beechman Cabaret at the Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

A good trip home to the steel city includes food, art, and shopping, and I managed a good mix this weekend.

Our first stop was the Society for Contemporary Craft nestled in the historic Strip District market where you can find delicious pierogies, any Italian cheese imaginable, and enough black and gold knickknacks for the next hundred Super Bowls. The craft exhibition on our radar was Beyond Shared Language: Contemporary Art and the Latin American Experience, which brought together the work of 14 artists (working in clay, glass, metal, wood, fiber, and mixed media) who share Latin American heritage. My mother had seen a write-up in the City Paper of a meat sculpture made out of fabric, and we just couldn't stay away.

Bound (2007) is the handiwork of Tamara Kostianovsky, who writes that her aim is to "confront the viewer with the real and grotesque nature of violence, and offer a context for reflecting on the vulnerability of our physical existence, brutality, poverty, consumption and the voracious needs of the body." And I thought we were just going to see a giant cloth steak.

On Sunday we headed to the I Made It Market where more than 70 artists sold everything from poster prints to necklaces made from old typewriter keys (get your own at junxtaposition.com). The Market takes place throughout the year at different spots, but this weekend the artists set up shop at the South Side Works, as part of the Exposed festival. Tons of booths featured some sort of recycled material--River Rats Designs for example, cleans up local rivers and turns the junk into jewelry and home accents.

And the Sardine Clothing Company, whose owners made the trip west from Manayunk, patches together strips of old T-shirts to create unique and eco-friendly skirts. The Market is all about things creative and keeping the earth happy. There's already a branch in Los Angeles, and if the website isn't lying to me, an in-the-works extension in Philly as well.

I'll leave you with an image from a sidewalk art contest that unfolded near the Market, our favorite by far: Billy Mays, born in Pittsburgh's McKees Rocks, immortalized in chalk. At least until it rains.

--Mara Miller

Tonight: Vox V. Curators Ryan Trecartin and Larry Mangel guarantee awesomeness from these young emerging art bucks. Well, they didn't offer me, personally, a guarantee. But their reputation precedes them, and Vox Populi shows are always solid and usually a party. Tonight, 6:00 to 11:00 pm, 319 N. 11th Street, free! (And Saturday, head west and hit up the Philadelphia Record Fair, sponsored by Vox Pop, over at ICA.)

All weekend: The Nikola Tesla Inventors Club has dinner at Balkan Express (which has delicious foodstuffs, by the way) and celebrations, exhibitions, and demonstrations about the legacy of Tesla. Did you know that the genesis of the monologue Monopoly! from Mike Daisey (How Theater Failed America, The Last Cargo Cult) lies in the Tesla-Edison war over electricity? AC/DC throwdown! Tesla also has a star turn in Mike's Great Men of Genius. Various locations and prices, visit the website for details.

All weekend: In case you missed it being splashed everywhere, QFest is all over town starting, um, yesterday (oops). But you still have ten days to enjoy the largest queer film festival on the East Coast.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

My hometown gets a lot of hate here in the eastern half of PA, mostly for the Steelers and linguistic gems like "pop machine" and "gumband." But Pittsburgh offers a long list of arts and cultural experiences that shouldn't be missed. Tops on my list is the Mattress Factory, an art museum dedicated to large installations created by resident artists from all over the world. (And no, they don't make mattresses.)

The first time I went to the Mattress Factory (www.mattress.org), my friends and I headed straight for the Yayoi Kusama exhibits, Infinity Dots Mirrored Room and Repetitive Vision. The latter is little more than a mirrored room with polka dots on the floor, but it's dark inside. Step in and you feel like you're either on a different planet or in the year 2030. We were the only ones there, so we lay down on the spotted floor, crawled under the mannequins, turned our camera flashes into strobe lights. . . . I can't quite describe it, but the exhibits make you want to live inside them, not just look at them. And somehow the mannequins, fake hair and all, aren't creepy. Just awesome.

Fortunately for you, O Philadelphian, these are permanent exhibits, both created in 1996. Kusama's work was inspired by a waking dream in which she found herself sitting a table with a patterned tablecloth, in a room with patterned wallpaper, and saw that the pattern covered her skin, too. The artist lives in a mental institution in Tokyo--by choice. If that's not a recipe for creativity, I don't know what is. (See more of her work here.)

The Mattress Factory's current featured exhibition, which runs until August 2nd, displays the sculptures of 'Burgh native Thaddeus Mosley. Mosley's whole studio and parts of his home have been reconstructed within the museum. From what I can tell, it involves a lot of wood carving, some magazine clipping, and absolutely no mirrors or polka dots. Just in case that's not your thing.

--Mara Miller

Photos courtesy of The Mattress Factory.

Men in dresses parading, poignant and creative autobiographical art, a collection of the true stories of gay people worldwide, and a Transylvanian grandmother who wraps Christmas presents in used tin foil. And that's just the beginning.

At the Arts Bank's Laurie Beechman Cabaret, red velvet curtains line the walls while deep purple crushed velvet frames the performance space. Against this plush backdrop, the First Person Salons unfold every month. Produced by First Person Arts, the salons illustrate how narrative shades the work of artists across virtually all media. Last week I took in the most recent salon to watch four artists tell their own stories and discuss how narrative shapes their work.

Painting and autobiography are infrequent bedfellows (at least overtly) but painter Sarah McEneaney integrates both in her colorful and soulful work. She frequently incorporates her older artwork into new pieces, and much of it draws from difficult experiences from own life. She called one work a breast cancer self-portrait, placing a depiction of herself on a background of normal and abnormal blood cells. Another portrayed her rape, which she created using a tempera of egg yolk and the police's fingerprint dusting powder. Intimate and harrowing, McEneaney commanded the attention of the room.

Writer, producer, and performer Stephanie Yuhas followed on McEneaney's heels with a journey inside the world of her relationship with her nagymama, or grandmother, through an engaging, witty, and endearing excerpt of her film Nagymama: A True Story. The creator of American Goulash, Yuhas might be even better known for Nagymama, an animated film that has been a hit on YouTube hit. Like nearly 300,000 viewers before them, the audience erupted in laughter over her Transylvanian grandmother's idiosyncratic bedtime rituals. After the screening, Yuhas discussed and auctioned off Christmas presents she received one year from her nagymama: ball of yarn wrapped in previously used aluminum foil; a hot pink muumuu; extra-long Maxi Pads (with wings for extra protection of course!); and granny panties: awesome. By finding appreciation her own family's culture through humor, Yuhas's presentation was a fun reminder about how to celebrate our histories.

Next to take the stage was Michael Koeler, Philadelphia photographer, who presented his photo essay PARADE. He began his segment by dedicating his work to his adorable and pregnant wife. And by asking her to momentarily join him on stage, Koeler scored a collective "Awwww!" and unanimous brownie points from the audience. The idea of "parading as living" was the essence of Koeler's photo essay. He captured the spirit of Philadelphia during one of its most celebrated and memorable traditions: the Mummer's Parade.

But the collection sprawled beyond the confines of Broad Street, including Mardi Gras attendees, swimming boys in Croatia, an old lady at a flea market, and emotionally charged shots of his grandfather shortly before his death. Koeler documents the story of people parading through their lives; he captured the essence of lives in relation to one another; he captured lives exuding love. On PARADING, Koeler said, "[It's] sharing the way we all learn; it's what it's all about."

The last performance of the evening was by Nathan Manske, editor of ImFromDriftwood, a blog featuring true stories from gay life around the globe. In just two months, Manske's website has collected more than 100 tales. Along with three other presenters, Manske read aloud several of the stories from the website in monologue form.

The stories were poignant, powerful, some humorous, and all honest. Many discussed first loves, first heartbreaks, their hardest moments coming out, and their realizations of who they are. Manske's goal is to convey a sense of community through his website, a place where experiences can be shared and discussed.

Writ broad, the First Person Salons share this goal, as they strive to foster a genial sense of artistic community where active endeavors are shared and discussed, where audiences not only take in new work but give artists feedback that they integrate into the development of future projects, and where the arts communities of Philadelphia can come together even more.

--Jennifer Burrini

Photos by Andrew Schwalm

>>>Today, and every day: You can help keep Philadelphia's culture afloat! Or at least Governor Rendell can, and you can write him a letter. Senate Bill 850 may have been extinguished but the coast isn't clear yet. Soon, we'll get the governor's revised budget. Remind Gov. Rendell that arts and culture will never be expendable. Get more info and an easy-to-use template at the Greater Philadelphia Culture Alliance site.

>>>Saturday: Les Rivera, a Kill Me Now performer, also appears in Hidden City Philadelphia's massive Battle Hymns performance. Closet history nerds rejoice: it takes place in the 23rd St. Armory, once a Revolutionary War stronghold. Hymns combines the military aura of the space with Leah Stein's site-specific choreography and music from Alan Harler's Mendelssohn Club Chorus. Artillery's going artsy. June 13 (and also June 20), performances at 4:00 pm and 6:00 pm, 23rd St. Armory, 22 S. 23rd St., Philadelphia.

>>>Saturday and Sunday: While you're at it, make it a weekend with Les and check out his Latin rock band El Malito y sus Caballeros. I can't speak for his buddies, but El Malito promises a bit of baile to go with the guitar. June 13 at The Piazza, east side of N. 2nd St. between Poplar and Girard, 9:00 pm, and June 14 at The M Room, 15 W. Girard Ave., 8:30 pm.

>>>Saturday and Sunday: InLiquid's Art for the Cash Poor event lets us buy local artwork while reminding ourselves that we are rich in other things, like . . . well, not cash. For the tenth year in a row, some of the area's best artists will sell their work for under $200 (and sometimes under $100). DJ and live music included! Plus (shameless plug alert) make sure to track down our own Live Arts/Fringe info station amid the budget bazaar. 1:00 to 6:00 pm, Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St., Philadelphia.

--Mara Miller

Photo courtesy Les Rivera