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About the Exhibition
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 13, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
IMPRINT, Philadelphia's
first major billboard exhibition and the city's largest temporary
public art project to date, is supported with a $181,516 grant
awarded by The Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Exhibitions
Initiative. "The concept of IMPRINT comes directly from its
definition: The act of making an indelible impression on the senses
and the mind. Each public site (billboards, bus shelters, newspapers,
coffee cups) uses the multiplicity of the print to reach the public
on familiar turf - driving, buying coffee and reading the newspaper.
These sites, usually used for commercial advertising, offer an
ideal format for public art. They offer the advantage of art embedded
within the context of daily life, bringing art to people rather
than people to art. By subverting expectation, they offer an idea
rather than sell a product," according to project curator
Joan Wadleigh Curran.
"Several other major cities including
New York, Los Angeles and Vienna, have staged billboard exhibitions,
but the diversity of sites offered by IMPRINT exceeds them all,"
said Print Center Executive Director Christine Filippone, "IMPRINT
will bring art and ideas to more than 14 million people."
The six artists chosen for IMPRINT each deal with issues in their
work pertinent to the public discourse: aging, race and ethnicity,
gender and class. The artists whose work will be on display simultaneously
are Kerry James Marshall (Chicago, IL), John Coplans (New York,
NY), Dotty Attie (New York, NY), James Mills, Virgil Marti and
Susan Fenton (Philadelphia, PA).
Beginning in September, their work will
be seen:
On forty sites: billboards and bus shelters
in the Greater Philadelphia coffee shops throughout the city of
Philadelphia and at the cafés of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.
- In six full-page, full-color "collectible prints"
in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine, one per
week, for six consecutive weeks (September 8 – October 13).
- The artists will conceptually unite the three public components
of the project in installations of their work at The Print Center.
About the Artists:
The participating artists were selected
based on their varying approaches to printmaking and/or photography,
and for the issue-related content of their work.
Dotty Attie's paintings and prints juxtapose
images and text in order to pose questions about their paired
meaning. Her images create a provocative visual narrative that
encourages the viewer to contemplate new meanings based on their
own experience. Attie's work is familiar to a national audience
through exhibitions at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art
and the Brooklyn Museum.
John Coplans makes large-scale photographs of
his aging body. His arresting photographs shatter conventional
expectations. They call attention to our discomfort with the aging
process by presenting images of the aging body rather than the
conventions of youth and beauty. Coplan's images are internationally
known as critic and former editor of Artforum magazine.
Susan Fenton hand-colors her photographs of
figures in controlled environments suffused with mystery. Fenton's
images flirt with the conventions of fashion and advertising and
create powerful allegories about the relationship between beauty
and adornment of the human form and its power to transform. Fenton's
photographs are well known both locally and nationally. She is
on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph's
University.
Kerry James Marshall uses the format of the
comic book to present aspects of contemporary African American
life, and to confront contradictions inherent in American life.
In his comic book project, "Rhythm Mastr," Marshall
uses figures from African art as superheroes who battle the forces
of corruption and violence against the backdrop of urban decay.
Winner of the prestigious MacArthur Prize (1997), the Chicago
based artist’s work has been included in exhibitions at
the Whitney Museum of Art and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany.
Virgil Marti's work addresses the relationship
between art and mass culture, good and bad taste, nostalgia and
issues of class. Marti's images of bonsai trees use the seductive
conventions of advertising to present images of stylized nature,
displaced yet beautiful, full of tenderness and saturated color.
Marti has received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship and a Pew
Fellowship.
James Mills combines text and context to surprise
the complacent viewer and pose questions about the role of art
and advertising. In his sculpture and installations, Mills uses
commonplace words in different contexts to encourage new thinking
about the realities of life. Mills has recently shown his work
at the ICA in Philadelphia, and has received a Pew Fellowship.
To coincide with IMPRINT, The Philadelphia Print Collaborative
presents the festival ‘Image & Print: A Contemporary
Conversation with History.’ www.printcollaborative.org
This project has been supported by grants from
The Berwind Corporation, Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation, Beneficial
Savings Bank and the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program
funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by The University
of the Arts, Philadelphia. The Pew Charitable Trusts support nonprofit
activities in the areas of culture, education, the environment,
health and human services, public policy and religion. Based in
Philadelphia, the Trusts make strategic investments to help organizations
and citizens develop practical solutions to difficult problems.
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