passages November 24, 2015

Marion “Kippy” Stroud (1939–2015)

SEVERAL TRIBUTES APPEARED immediately after the sad, distressing news of Kippy Stroud’s death, paying due homage to her achievements as a creative force—artistic director, arts entrepreneur and producer, patron—while trying as well to capture something of her mercurial personality. An only child but with a substantial extended family of origin, Kippy also, by instinct and design, created an extended family of affinity within the organizations she founded, and within the larger art world. Each of us has our Kippy stories, our own understanding and interpretation of who she was. My relationship

print Summer 1990

JUDITH SHEA'S CONTEMPORARY KOREA

THROUGHOUT HER CAREER, Judith Shea has placed the female form—more accurately a series of its surrogates—at the center of her practice. If the work is feminist, however, it is neither overly theorized nor polemically bound to the direct critique of representation as it engages other, more ideologically minded female artists of her generation. Mary Kelly, for example, comes immediately to mind.¹ Shea’s art affirms, instead, certain aspects of art history and tradition in part to assume the weight of their authority, even as it may reverse or undermine their terms.

Shea’s artistic development may

print January 1989

SOMETHING TO DO WITH JENNIFER BOLANDE

JENNIFER BOLANDE'S HIGHLY individualized amalgam of sculpture and photography proceeds obliquely but precisely toward an accumulation of possible meanings. She is a connoisseur of unlikely but evocative details, of subliminally perceived, fragmentary images and events of a kind that would loiter on the periphery of vision had she not delivered them to the ring of attention. Much has been made of the idiosyncratic iconography of Bolande’s objects, but though her works may be initially reticent, and thwart conclusive explanation, they are far from incommunicative, resonating amply in the connotative

print December 1988

Robin Winters

The territory explored in this two-part installation, Leaning Missives/Floating Vessels, 1988, was the playground of the imagination. The missives, black-ink drawings on sheets of 8-by-6-inch galvanized tin, were installed in the gallery’s small entry space, arranged in two evenly spaced sets of 10 and one of 16 and set on shallow, eye-level ledges that traversed three of the room’s walls. The drawings depicted elements from Robin Winter’s familiar pictographic repertoire—quickly rendered, quasi-primitive images of maps, heads, and human or animal figures. While the rows of drawings could have

print November 1988

“Matter of Time”

This exhibition marked the tenth anniversary of the Academy’s Morris Gallery, a space dedicated to showing Pennsylvania-affiliated artists. It also inaugurated “Philadelphia Art Now,” a three-year series of city-wide events intended to promote local artists. The original concept for the exhibition was to commission a single, integrated, collectively created project on the theme of time, to be produced by the 12 participants selected by an academy-appointed review committee. Not surprisingly, the intended collaboration gradually devolved into a series of solo and dual efforts (with one three-member

print September 1988

Connie Coleman and Alan Powell

Exhortation, seduction, intimidation: Connie Coleman and Alan Powell’s ambitious video trilogy, entitled Negotiations for a Heaven on Earth: Threats, Promises, Desires, 1988, takes on these tactics of mass media manipulation in order to critique television’s power to fashion cultural consciousness. The piece employs borrowed texts and imagery from actual broadcast footage, reconstituting them via state-of-the-art image-processing; in terms of sophistication and methodology, the processing technique mirrors high-end media technology. The artists also devised three sculptural environments—one each

print Summer 1988

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly works on a remarkably ambitious scale. Corpus, completed in 1985 and shown here in its entirety, is only the first section of her ongoing Interim project. Begun in 1983, Interim focuses on the experiences of middle-aged women, a heretofore rather ignored segment of our society, through a planned exploration of four themes: body, money, history, and power.

Corpus’ formal and conceptual complexity demands careful description, as there are no insignificant details in Kelly’s work. It consists of 30 paired panels of image and text, arranged in five groups, three pairs to a group. The five

print May 1988

Robert Gober

There were only five pieces in this show of Robert Gober’s sculpture, an austere distillation of his work that emphasized its elegiac quality. Gober made these generic, unassuming objects out of such materials as plaster, wood, wire lath, and enamel. They were carefully installed in the gallery’s bilevel space: Slip Covered Armchair, 1986–87, occupied a corner adjacent to Two Basinless Sinks, 1986, in the smaller, upper entry room, while Untitled, 1984 (a single sink), Plywood, 1987, and Untitled, 1986 (a single bed) were juxtaposed in the larger, lower room. The way they were arranged, separated

print February 1988

“Photo-Mannerisms”

“Photo-Mannerisms,” a group exhibition of 18 artists, posited photography as the quintessentially mannerist art form. The intriguing conflation of the two was here arrived at via a Lacanian interpretation of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524, which the show’s curator, Klaus Ottmann, expounds upon in a brochure that accompanied the show. According to Ottmann, this painting corresponds to the essence of photography. “The photograph,” he writes in the middle of the brochure, “substitutes the mirror, the reflection of the Self, for the experience of the Other.” He shores up and

print January 1988

Brower Hatcher

Brower Hatcher's formally complex works are also allegories of time and the imagination. They are fantasy structures, the spaces of and for dreams, in which evocations and images of past, present, and future are conjoined in order to “invite reflection on what we have been, what we are, and what we may become”—Hatcher's description of the response he hopes his works will produce. This exhibition featured a selection of large and small sculptures, drawings, and proposals for public art, including a maquette for a project in Philadelphia and a drawing for a permanent piece commissioned by the

print December 1987

Jody Pinto

The impetus for Jody Pinto’s Fingerspan, 1987, her first permanent large-scale public sculpture in the United States, was a Fairmount Park Art Association project begun in 1980. The association invited artists to propose public art projects for this Philadelphia park that would, in the sponsor’s terms, “be utilitarian, site-specific, and integral to community life.” Pinto’s original proposal for a triple, split-tongued pier to snake out over the Wissahickon Creek in Fairmount Park proved infeasible for technical/environmental reasons. Eventually, at the suggestion of local citizens, the site

print November 1987

Peter D’Agostino

There was a great deal to recommend Peter D’Agostino’s interactive videodisc installation DOUBLE YOU (and X, Y, Z), 1987, besides its state-of-the-art technology. Installed in its own room, DOUBLE YOU was also a convincing piece of sculpture, with four 20-inch color monitors encased at about eye level in a white partition wall that zigzagged in an open W-like configuration. (This structural pun was paralleled by the work’s many other visual/verbal puns, including that of its title, which refers to, among other things, the children’s “alphabet song” and particle physics.) The monitors were

Paula Marincola