Southern Graphics Council Conference

Philagrafika 2010 will host a series of public evening programs* in conjunction with the SGC Philadelphia conference.

*All events are free and open-to-the-public with the exception of the Christiane Baumgartner talk at PAFA. Registration for the artist talk is required along with either a museum admission or SGC Badge (RSVP info below).

Mark/ Remarque

The conference will examine traditional and digital print processes (marks), critical discourse important to the field (remarks), and consider the concepts associated with the historical print term remarque: rarity, testing, concept amplification, and boundary extension.

This conference will take place during Philagrafika 2010: the inaugural presentation of a multi-sited international festival of contemporary art focusing on artistic practices that engage the visual, intellectual and creative frontiers in printmaking and how these approaches relate to social and political issues in the public sphere.

SGC conference website link

Public Events

Philagrafika 2010's The Graphic Unconscious, Out of Print and Independent Project venues will sponsor five nights of free and open to the public events around the Conference.

For address information, see Venue Information sidebar. For a complete listing of Philagrafika events during SGC conference check out Philagrafika calendar page.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Book Bombs will present site-specific installations at Love Park (16th and JFK), Kahn Park (11th and Pine) and Washington Square Park (7th and Walnut). The installations will be on view 24 hours a day throughout the duration of the festival.

The Print and Picture Collection at the Free Library will be open from 9am to 9pm, displaying the American Color Print Society's exhibition Beyond Color: a Rediscovery of the Spectrum as well as Mark/Remarque: A Collaborative Portfolio and Other Work by Philadelphia Printmakers.

The Historical Society of Philadelphia will hold special extended hours during thr first day of the conference for Duke Riley's Out Of Print exhibit Reclaiming the Lost Kingdom of Laird. HSP will open at 12:30pm and stay open until 8:30pm.

From 6pm to 10pm, Marginal Utility will feature an exhibition of prints.

The Graphic Unconscious artist Christiane Baumgartner will give an artist talk at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts starting at 6pm, .  Seating is limited so registration is required. RSVP to 215-972-2105 or email mzimmerman@pafa.org. Free with an SGC badge or with museum admission. 

The entire 1600 block of Latimer Street, in front of The Print Center, will be closed to traffic to host Drive By Press's Block Party Printing Event from 6pm to 8pm. The signature, one-day-only print event will feature a site-specific installation by artists Greg Nanney and Joseph Velasquez as they set up shop with their mobile printmaking studio. Come and make your own custom printed t-shirt!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom will present internationally known printmaker Judith K. Brodsky in an installation titled Memoir of an Assimilated Family. The exhibit will feature etchings based on old family photographs; each image is accompanied by anecdotal text. An opening reception and open house will be held from 5pm - 7pm.

At 5:30pm until 7:30pm there will be a reception at The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center at the Thomas Eakins House. Following the reception there will be a panel discussion about The Graphic Unconscious artist Carl Pope's collaboration with Mari Hulick and Homer Jackson The Wall Remixed: The North Philadelphia Small Business Advertising Campaign.

From 6pm to 8pm, the University of the Arts' Hamilton and Arronson Galleries will hold a reception for their invitational Printmaking and Book Arts Exhibition Social Remarque.

The Library Company of Philadelphia hosts a night of events from 5:30pm - 7:30pm. The exhibition Philadelphia on Stone explores the first 50 years of commercial lithography (1828-1878) in Philadelphia and its influence on the iconography of the city. In addition, the inclusion of the works of current lithographers Kip Deeds and Roberta Delaney will represent the impact of lithography on contemporary visual culture. At 6pm, there will be a talk by Nancy Finlay, editor of Picturing Victorian America: Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, 1830-1880 and Curator of Graphics at the Connecticut Historical Society.  RSVPs requested to 215-546-3181.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Design and dean Marilyn Jordan Taylor are proud to host New Prints, Part II, a juried exhibition with new works from over 50 artists at all stages of their careers. Organized by International Print Center New York, this show presents a wide array of exciting contemporary work that challenges our understandingof fine art printmaking. Like IPCNY and Philagrafika, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design is dedicated to highlighting and fostering excellence in art. Open to the public from 5pm - 7pm.

Over in Old City, Printeresting’s COPY JAM! will be an interactive print event at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Fifty works by fifty artists will be displayed in a grid on the wall. Upon arrival, each guest will be handed a complimentary ticket that can be exchanged for one black & white photocopy of any work the guest chooses. There will be no sales; one ticket equals one copy. Copies will be made LIVE in the gallery for one night only, from 6pm - 9pm.

Drawing on their long history as a center for Philadelphia printmaking, Space 1026 will host a reception for Separations Anxiety, an exhibition of prints and matrices from Space 1026 artists from 7pm - 10pm.

Friday, March 26, 2010

From 11am - 5pm, Lisa Anne Auerbach's Out Of Print project Tract House: a Darwin Addition will be open to the public at it's special storefront location at 2nd and Race.

On the Cruiser Olympia at the Independence Seaport Museum, Cannonball Press hosts their Bounding Billow: Sailors Printing on the High Seas Ice Cream Social with Franklin Fountain ice cream, from 3pm - 5pm. Cannonball Press will be reanimating the letterpress shop with live printing on board the Cruiser Olympia. Ice cream supply is limited! This event is for SGC attendees with a badge, but is open to everyone who RSVPs here!

At the Leeway Foundation, there will be a special Print Workshop with artists from their exhibition Shouts From the Wall, from 5 - 8pm. Space is limited, so RSVP's are requested. Please email rsvp@leeway.org, call (215) 545-4078 or register online at their website.

If you are near Moore College of Art and Design on Friday be sure to check out these out: The Graphic Unconscious exhibition at The Galleries at Moore, Beyond Color and the Mark/Remarque portfolios at the Free Library Print and Picture Collection and the Book Bombs installations at Love Park (17th and JFK) and Logan Circle (20th and the Parkway, across from Moore).

Later on Friday night, there will be several special events occurring in North Philadelphia. From 6pm - 9pm, Crane Arts will hold a number of receptions for exhibitions in their several galleries:

Several Mark/Remarque theme portfolios are on display:  Songs In Reverse, Curator Ron Abram; Hidden Agendas/Embedded Signatures,  Curators Deborah Cornell and Barbara Putnam; Reunion: Images 2010, Curator Kathryn Maxwell; and Philadelphia Mark:Remarque, Curator Rochelle Toner.

The Medium Resistance exhibition in the Ice Box presents contemporary works of craft and print that resist old-fashioned distinctions between high art and artisanship.

In the Grey Area hallway, InLiquid will present drawing machine by Chad Curtis. A wall-hung apparatus, drawing machine, much like a human hand, uses a standard mechanical graphite pencil to draw elaborate works directly on the gallery wall.

Indigo Arts Center's Grabados de Oaxaca : Graphic works from Oaxaca, Mexico presents the distinguished history of printmaking in Mexico is best represented today in the vibrant art center of Oaxaca. Works by Rodolfo Morales, Fernando Olivera, Eddie Martinez, Leoviglio Martinez, Felipe Morales & others are on display.

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to host .matrix, a group exhibition with works by artists that blur the line between photography and printmaking processes, one practice highly influencing the other, whether through digital or more traditional techniques.

The Extra-Dimensional Printmaking Invitational at NEXUS/foundation for today's art features artists and artworks that embrace the history, tradition, and process of printmaking while rejecting the confines of the 2-D picture plane. Special features of the night: Book Bombs Zine Release Party by Mary Tasillo and Michelle Wilson (first two hundred (or so) attendees will receive a free copy of their first collaborative zine!) and special take-away prints by D. E. DuVall Co.

UD@Crane will show Brand, Rebrand, De-brand?, a portfolio of printed works that complicate (and possibly undermine) the idea of artist as brand in the art world marketplace. Also on display is Catalyze This: Contemporary Ceramic Practices, an exhibition that presents a compelling combination of global ceramic technologies and local studio investigations.

Following the night's events at Crane Arts, Dennis McNett/HowlingPrint Studio presents The Big Takeover-SGC 2010 Viking Ship. Follow the Viking parade, complete with giant Viking ship covered in prints, from Crane Arts to the Piazza for more exhibitions!

Then, at the Piazza, from 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm Silicon Fine Art Prints and Tower Investments will be displaying works of art, created for print but not necessarily realized, on a high definition 26 x 16 foot screen at the Piazza. The Piazza is a beautiful Italianesque, pedestrian only square surrounded by restaurants, bars, galleries and stores and is part of a 28 acre, $500 million Northern Liberties project, the country's largest private urban renewal initiative. Members of Southern Graphics Council are invited to submit images to screen during the evening!

Don't forget to stop by the other North Philly galleries that night:

The Skybox at 2424 Studios presents Sublimation. Inspired by the dramatic turn-of the century industrial space, Curator Eileen Tognini invited artist David Meyer to create a monumental–scale floor based installation from thousands of pounds of sifted baking flour using half-tone patterns. A special tour for SGC attendees and Philagrafika goes from 6-9 pm with the artist and curator.

Taller Puertorriqueño hosts the exhibition Las Gallas: Aparece y Desaparce.

The Rochelle Toner exhibition A Selection From Forty Years of Nature, Pleasure and Innuendo also opens Friday night, with a reception from 5:30 - 7:30 at the Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery at Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

Also, at Little Berlin, The 1st Annual Little Berlin Print Invitational will showcase 12 artists working in printmaking today. This inaugural exhibition will feature both traditional and digital processes and highlight the vital role the medium of printmaking plays in contemporary art.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Saturday is the perfect time to check out the following events in West Philadelphia:

At the Institute of Contemporary Art: Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) is the first major museum survey of the work of Maira Kalman.

The PennDesign Alumni Association presents the fullscale printed media façade of Meyerson Hall. It will be exhibited throughout the year at Meyerson Hall. This installation piece creates an immersion of color and graphics through modern printing techniques.

There will be a Book Bombs site-specific installation on view on UPenn's campus and at Clark Park.

At the UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Pablo Helguera's installation What in the World? is on view for the price of museum admission. For What in the World?, Helguera presents an “unauthorized biography” of the Penn Museum, one of the most respected archaeological museums in the country. He takes his cue from the TV program of the same name, What in the World, which was created in the 1950s by Froelich Rainey.

Also on Saturday, there is a special event at the Sole Food Lounge at Loews Hotel in Center City: "Larry Sommers Memorial Happy Hour".  Seattle Print Arts would like to you to come celebrate the life of Larry Sommers over a drink from 5:30pm - 6:30pm.

Cerulean Arts hosts the closing reception for Intersection, an exhibition that features the work of artists Erin Castellan, Lisa Marie Hamilton, Jill Parisi, and Rita Reisser, whose prints intersect with other mediums, including sculpture, installation, and textiles. The reception runs from 3pm - 6pm.

And at the Schmidt-Dean Gallery, there is an exhibition reception for Dean Dass: Works on Paper and Randy Bolton: New Prints from 5:30pm - 8pm. Dass and Bolton are SGC artists.

The Leeway Foundation hosts an opening reception for Shouts from the Wall from 7:30 - 8:30 pm on Saturday night. Preceeding this reception, there will be an artist talk by Favianna Rodriguez and Jesus Barraza, from 6:00 - 7:30pm. Please RSVP by email or phone (215-545-4078)

The Tract House will also be open from 11am - 5pm.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

To wrap up the week of events is another day of events and receptions.

The American Color Print Society's exhibition Beyond Color, a Rediscovery of the Spectrum at the Plastic Club closes today as well. The reception for the exhibition that recognizes the past and utilizes its achievements in printmaking exploration runs from 4pm - 6pm.

The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown hosts the last day of Transforming the Ordinary: Bookworks by Hedi Kyle; and Nature Morte by Lynne Allen. The museum is open from 12pm - 5pm and does charge admission to non-members.

The Tract House is open once more from 11am - 5pm, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art is also open from 10am - 5pm, showing the work of Tabaimo and Oscar Muñoz as part of The Graphic Unconscious.

The A-Space in West Philadelphia will host the Just Seeds event Bring Down the Walls! Read-A-Thon all day from 10am to 10pm. join Just Seeds for a day of self-education, imaginative conversation, and reflective brainstorming - as well as snacks and hot beverages. The hours will be punctuated by presentations and guided discussions from various individuals and groups - a more detailed schedule of which will be forth-coming in the weeks to come. While some Books Through Bars members will be collecting pledges and also using this opportunity as a chance to raise always-needed funds for sending out educational materials to currently incarcerated folks, we encourage any and all to join us regardless of their ability to contribute monetarily. Thoughts, strategies, critique, and curiosity are for all of us as acutely needed a contribution as any. The event is free, but donations are accepted.