17.1.11
Tectonic Quilt: Clouds
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Tectonic Quilt: Clouds
Drawing from maps that outline political boarders and from the distinct flags that emblemize nations, young artists set out to respond to an earth divided by political geographies. Their designs begin to map an initial engagement with places and a people outside of their immediate context. Our exploration of these nations has created an artwork with an imagined space where land forms, physical properties and cultural difference does not divide or separate. We have created a cumulous map of the imagination that quilts us all together in a new way.
@ the Delaware Center For Contemporary Arts through Spring 2011
13.9.10
HOME THAT WAS
OBJECTS THAT FILL A HOME, ON THE WALLS OF A HOUSE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS
Located at 10th and Vine Streets in Philadelphia, Home That Was is a temporary artwork created during the summer of 2010. Benjamin Volta worked with a team of intergenerational artists from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create wallpaper patterns that explore consumption, memory, and loss. Attached to the exterior wall of a neighboring row home, the wallpapers are installed on the thin plaster remains of a house that no longer exists.
LINK TO PROJECT BLOG
Located at 10th and Vine Streets in Philadelphia, Home That Was is a temporary artwork created during the summer of 2010. Benjamin Volta worked with a team of intergenerational artists from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create wallpaper patterns that explore consumption, memory, and loss. Attached to the exterior wall of a neighboring row home, the wallpapers are installed on the thin plaster remains of a house that no longer exists.
LINK TO PROJECT BLOG
6.9.10
9.6.10
ART IN THE OPEN PHILADELPHIA: POLYGON BLOOMS essay by gerard brown
GETTING TO THE POINT
Since September 11, 2001, we have been obsessed with ‘connecting the dots’…and failing to do so. Conceptually, the world has become a vast array of points, and the paths and vectors that unite and direct them are beginning to form a kind of 21st century astrology understood (one hopes) by the vast security and intelligence complexes that have sprung up to interpret them.
As people, places, and events become coordinates in a grand matrix of possibility, it comes as little surprise that the paths we create as we walk through space, invisible trails we inscribe on our cities, should be of interest to us. I think of this as I meander an uncharted path through web links, browsing images of Grover Washington Jr. Middle School students tracing crystalline forms created by plotting the positions of landmarks. Distilling the messy, organic world of lived experience into the clarity and precision of geometry takes effort.
Benjamin Volta, Jerry Jackson, and their students generate complex geometric shapes from map coordinates. The students have explored a middle terrain between art and mathematics to arrive at their endpoint. They have translated these illusionistic flatforms into actual objects. In 3D space, these forms look like radio towers, electricity pylons, and they call to mind the Watts Towers. Engaged as they are with information, they belong to a genre of art and design that extends from Mark Lombardi and Edward Tufte. But – engaged as they are in the community from which they arose (an 8th grade class at a Philadelphia school) - they seem like a kind of Modernist folk art.
They look like knowledge…at once crystal clear and confounding. One thing that comes to mind is an image by designers Lisa Streusel and James Nick Sears that appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on December 3, 2006. It was an immensely complicated tangle of white lines connecting names of places (New York, World Trade Center, etc.) to people (Mohamed Atta, Tawfik bin Attash) to very general nouns (flight school, place of worship, and so on). This inter-penetrating 3D bubble chart is a beautiful mess – the very image of clarity causing confusion. Anyone who hoped to connect the dots in this thicket was looking for trouble.
But aren’t these things the outcomes of any effort to structure something? Loss? An appearance of clarity where none actually exists? People want things in order. And the clarity of a diagram is seductive for how it pares away all the troubling textures of the world.
Mathematics provides a brilliant metaphor to address the complexities of adolescence. Polygons can be regular and irregular, forms closed or open. Line, arcs, and shapes may be tangent, overlapping, or exclusive. Life is made up of these things. However, once a clear but abstract message passes beyond the charmed circle of the community in which it was invented, who knows?
And is it our business to worry about such things? I doubt it. For now, the constructions blossoming in Grover Washington Jr. Middle School are arrestingly gorgeous, simultaneously simple and complex. I want to pull a student aside and ask her to explain them to me. That’s the life they’ll have – one that is carried out by communication from one student to another. That way nothing gets lost,
and all dots will be connected.
- gerard brown
gerard brown is an artist and writer living in Philadelphia
POLYGON BLOOMS created with Grover Washington Jr. Middle School for the ART IN THE OPEN PHILADELPHIA festival on June 9th, 2010.
Wednesday June 9th – Saturday June 12th
Schuylkill River Banks, Philadelphia PA
Along the Path Under the Market Street Bridge
Special Reception on Site Saturday June 12th from 3 – 5pm
ART IN THE OPEN PHILADELPHIA is a new citywide festival that celebrates artists, their inspirations for creating art, and their relationships with the urban environment.Inspired by the tradition of plein air painting, the four-day festival
presents over 35 artists working in a variety of media and styles on site, outside, along the banks of the Schuylkill River in downtown Philadelphia. Complementing this unique display of art-making-in-action will be a host of public programs presented by many of the 34 partner institutions and showcasing the vibrant community of working artists, galleries and institutions that make Philadelphia a major urban art center.
http://artintheopenphila.org/
POLYGON BLOOMS BLOG
3.6.10
28.5.10
ARTS BRIDGES @ SOLIS-COHEN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Avid Eyes
These gigantic eyes reflect our exploration of artwork that hang in five galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Each student created a triangular drawing that reference these great artworks from the past. Throughout the project the students’ individual drawings presented a main idea in their foreground and supporting details in their background. To create a collaborative artwork we arranged the students’ individual drawings around a central axis to form a new design. The gigantic eye design can be seen as the overall main idea, and the drawings throughout can be seen as the supporting details.
Archival Pigment Print on Stretched Canvas with Reflective Vinyl
Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership project - Arts Bridges: Building Literacy Through an Integrated Arts Collaborative Model is made possible by a grant of federal funds to The School District of Philadelphia by the United Sates Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement, under the Arts in Education Model Development & Dissemination Grant Program. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a collaborating partner.
17.5.10
9.4.10
NEW WORK ON VIEW IN THE EDUCATION GALLERIES AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
DEFIANCE
We worked from a selection of artwork in the museum collection that depicted images of violence and attempted to dissect the conflict in each work. On the wall are black silhouettes based on aspects of the original artworks. These silhouettes were placed with digital reproductions of the works they were based on. Suspended white flags transfigure the dark silhouettes on the wall away from violence and toward a peaceful, yet fierce, resolution. To connect their new understanding of conflict resolution in art to an understanding of conflict resolution in the world, students selected quotes calling for peace and wrapped the text around each flagpole.
Benjamin Volta with Conwell Egan Catholic High School, Fairless Hills PA
Collaborating Art Teacher: JoAnne Gari
Collaborating Students: Alexandra Antonello, Kayleigh Clemins, Nicole DeFinis, Kelly DeMarshall, Christine Gordon, Elizabeth Lyman, Kelly Mott, Michael Payne, Pil Kyung Son, Guannan Wang, Sean McCarthy, and Casey Phillips
This project is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Futures Residency. This program is made possible with generous funding from the Delphi Project Foundation, Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company, Frances S. Middleton, and Business Leadership Organized for Catholic Schools (BLOCS).
Read our review in the Courier Times
Photos of our process:
7.4.10
Everyone is Welcome A K.O.S. Panel Discussion
Everyone is Welcome
A K.O.S. Panel Discussion
Moderated by James Romaine
The New York Center for Art and Media Studies
44 W28th Street, New York, NY 10001
April 8th 2010, 7:30-8:30pm
This event is Free to the public.
Please RSVP to Janna Dyk at jad64976@bethel.edu.
New York, January 18, 2010—The New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS) is pleased to announce Everyone is Welcome: A K.O.S. Panel Discussion. This panel will be held on April 8th 2010, from 7:30 to 8:30pm at The New York Center for Art and Media Studies. This panel is being organized in conjunction with the exhibition Everyone is Welcome: A K.O.S. Showcase, February 19th-April 9th, 2010. The exhibition features the work of K.O.S. artists Angel Abreu, Wesley Martin Berg, Robert Branch, Daniel Bocatto, Daniel Castillo, Ala Ebtekar, George Garces, Nelson Ricardo Savinon, Steven Vega, Benjamin Volta, and Bryce Zackery.
Since 1981, members of K.O.S. have collaborated with artist and educator Tim Rollins. Their collaboratively produced art is in the permanent collection of more than eighty museums and has been the subject of more than one hundred solo exhibitions. The art of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. is currently on view a traveling retrospective, organized by the Tang Museum, at the Frye Art Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by MIT Press.
Over the past three decades, many members of K.O.S. have continued to produce and exhibit independently created art. The remarkable quality and diversity of this work disproves any suggestion that there is a “K.O.S.-style.” Everyone is Welcome: A K.O.S. Showcase is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the work of current and former members of K.O.S.
For more information contact:
New York Center for Art and Media Studies
44 West 28th Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10001
212 213 8052
12.3.10
DELPHI BUS SHELTER @ 19th and Chestnut St
"TRY TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU PASSED, BUT WHEN YOU GO BACK MAKE THE FIRST THING THE LAST"
Created with Russell-Byers Elementary school at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delphi after school Art Club.
Philagrafika blog post
8.3.10
HEARTS & MINDS
Students created orthogonal perspective drawings over a digital print of Raphael's painting, "The School of Athens".
On the left students drew their Geo-Emblem drawings vanishing at Plato's chest. These drawings visualize the students' idea of an ideal geometric design.
On the right students drew their Contextual-Coordinate drawing vanishing at Aristotle's head. These drawings visualize the students' experiential relation to observable the world (ie Philadelphia).
GROVER TAP 304 BLOG: CHECK IT OUT
9.2.10
GHOSTLY GALLEON MOONLIGHT (After The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes)
GHOSTLY GALLEON MOONLIGHT (After The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes)
Created with Grover Washington Jr. Middle School, Philadelphia PA.
48" x 48" Archival Pigment Print
4.2.10
OPENING TONIGHT: CFEVA-PHILAGRAFIKA INDEPENDENT PROJECT
Selected especially for the Philagrafika 2010 and Fiber Philadelphia 2010 festivals, "Sweet Spot" features six CFEVA artists whose prints, sculpture, and installations incorporate printmaking and fiber in unusual and unexpected ways.
Artists:
Katie Baldwin
Julia Blaukopf
Andrea Cote
Matthew Neff
Marisha Simons
Ben Volta
Dates: January 28 – February 18, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 4, 5:00 – 7:00
Location: The Center for Emerging Visual Artists
1521 Locust Street
Lower Level
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Hours: Monday – Friday, 11 am - 5 pm
(other hours by appointment)
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