Friday 12/3, 3-7pm: AIR art show + Monday 12/6 @4pm and 7pm: Sabine El Chamaa at AIR

Please join us tomorrow as we close the current exhibit at our gallery (4007 Chestnut). This exhibit features work by four of our current residents: Ana B. Hernandez, Andria Morales, Erik Ruin, and Jim Garvey.

Then, on Monday, join us for this:

December 6, 2010 - 4:00pm

Sabine El Chamaa Public Exhibition

Sabine El Chamaa, Penn Middle East Center Fall Artist-in-Residence

40th Street Artist-in-Residence Gallery (4007 Chestnut Street)

A "gathering-presentation" of a work in progress, an open platform space where unfinished edits, footage, and trials and errors are exhibited. The public participates in deciphering, in thinking out, and in extricating meaning, and questions from the mix of fictional and non-fictional elements depending on the trajectory taken, the images found, the videos viewed, and the texts read. Recorded, collected, written, photographed before, during, or after, one war or another, the elements presented are part of a research project which attempts to both detect the confines of the visual and verbal frames of war, and to question the possibility of creating an audio-visual textual space that exists outside of the spectacle of war.
MEC Fall Artist-in-Residence, Sabine El Chamaa, will present an installation exhibit culminating her research and residency at Penn. Sabine's work engages with the representation and experience of war. The exhibition will open at 4:00pm and again at 7:00pm.
The space is limited so please RSVP at jinhees@sas.upenn.edu or 215-898-6335.
This event is free and open to the public. Open discussion to follow.

We'll see you at the gallery! See ya on Facebook!

Hi folks
We have two quick updates:


1. Our gallery (4007 Chestnut Street, first floor) will be open nearly every Friday (except Nov. 26) from 3pm until 7pm. Currently, we are exhibiting wok by four of our 2010-2011 residents. Stop in, say hi, and see some incredible art.

2. We're now on Facebook! We have some photos, videos (including one from last nights SCI West grant awards ceremony), updates, etc. Find us! Be our friend!

40th Street Artist-in-Residence Program has received a $3,000 SCI-West Community Grant award!

Great news! SCI-West has just informed us that we have received $3,000 to collaborate with Neighborhood Bike Works (NBW). Two of our resident artists have already begun working with NBW, using art as a medium for engagement with youth in particular. This award will help that work to flourish over the next several months, while ensuring a long and healthy relationship between AIR and NBW. This comes at an especially critical time as NBW prepares for several events and can now lean on our professional artists to make sure that the youth remain engaged through the arts.

A little bit about NBW:

The mission of Neighborhood Bike Works (NBW) is to create educational, recreational, and career-building opportunities for youth through bicycling in the Philadelphia area, and to promote cycling as an environment-friendly, healthy form of transportation. 

NBW foresees a future in which youth are empowered by bikes. Bicycles can aid in empowering youth in many ways. Bicycles promote self-reliance and self-confidence by giving youth self-propelled independent transportation giving youth the freedom to travel locally - to school, play, and eventually work. Self confidence and self reliance are also promoted by giving youth the ability to maintain and repair their own bicycle in addition to the accomplishment of having earned a bike through their own work.

Bicycles can be used, by youths and adults alike, to cross boundaries - literally and figuratively. Cycling can enable exploration beyond one's immediate neighborhood. Cycling also cuts across social classes, both recreational and utilitarian cycling enables people to meet others with like interests that otherwise would not be realized.

To advance this vision NBW will form partnerships and alliances with other groups, both in the youth development community and the cycling community.

Learn more at http://neighborhoodbikeworks.org

2009-2010 resident Vinson Houston discusses artwork by fellow resident Joanna Quigley in Joanna's studio; back in feb 2010

40th AIR in POST 2010 (October 2-3)

AIR participated in POST (Philadelphia Open Studio Tours)! Here are some photos of 40th ST AIR Gallery and the studios! Check out POST homepage <> for more information.

Announcing the Resident Artists 2010-2011!

Ana B. Hernandez

Ana B. Hernandez was born in Spain from a Spanish mother and a Puerto Rican father. In 1997 she moved with her family to Florida, where she obtained her undergraduate education. In 2003 she moved to Philadelphia to pursue the Masters of Fine Arts in Fibers and Textiles at Temple University-Tyler School of Art. After graduating in the spring of 2005, Ana attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Summer Residency in Maine, and was invited for a two year long artist residency at Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. Back in Philadelphia since fall 2007, her work has been included in a diversity of local and national solo and group exhibitions. She was a recipient of the Oasis Arts and Education Fellowship in 2009. Ana is currently a fellow in the Center for Emerging Visual Artists 2010-2012 Career Development Program and a resident at 40^th AIR.

Andria Bibiloni-Morales

www.andriabibiloni.com
www.areyoumyother.com

Andria Bibiloni-Morales explores the divide between art representative of culture, and art produced from within a cultural community. Through research and collaboration, she strives to create new possibilities for communication about sociopolitical and interpersonal issues. By immersing herself in situations where cultural identity is consequential, she aims to provoke viewers into a confrontation and analysis of their own preconceptions. These interventions are dependent on context – how the artist perceives herself, where she is, and how she relates to her surroundings. The resulting work is multidisciplinary, consisting of mixed media sculptures, self-portraits, performance based videos, and site specific installations.

Andria Bibiloni- Morales’ work has been exhibited at Labor K1 in Berlin, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Projects Gallery in Philadelphia, the Ice Box in Philadelphia, and the CUE Art Foundation in New York. In 2008 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant for her work in mixed media sculpture and installation. Andria currently resides in Philadelphia where she teaches at the Tyler School of Art.

Chris Lawrence

Chris Lawrence is an artist working in a variety of disciplines including sculpture, installation, sound and digital media. Born in upstate New York in 1976, Chris resides in Philadelphia, PA where he received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. His works, often made from DIY construction materials, repurposed consumer goods and components recycled from his previous installations often suggest building sites, improvised shelters, vessels and industrial stations in various states of completion or disarray. The functionality of these spaces tends to waver between specific, frustrated, absurd or unavailable. Overlapping fantasies, disrupted timelines and fractured memories feed nonlinear narrative undercurrents at play. Lawrence has exhibited his work in New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Melbourne, Australia.

Erik Ruin

http://www.justseeds.org/artists/erik_ruin/

I am a self-taught printmaker, illustrator, shadow-puppeteer and editor/self-publisher of numerous publications. My hand-cut images are intricately detailed yet bold and graphic. I draw from narratives both implicit and explicit to create art that inhabits the complex terrain of myth. My work explores social and political themes, from everyday alienation to international conflicts to more subtle expressions of hope, dread and endurance in an often troubling world. I frequently work collaboratively with other artists or activist campaigns- such as in imagery created for urban farming and prisoner advocacy groups- and collectively, most prominently as a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. I’m increasingly challenging myself to find new ways to combine my varied interests & practices- such as a small artist’s–book-&-CD “label”, a “banner library” on the theme of liberation, and installations and performances that incorporate cut, printed, painted & projected elements.

Jim Garvey

Glen Sacks at the Gallery of the 40ST Artist in Residence

Glen Sacks at the Gallery of the 40ST Artist in Residence • 4007 Chestnut Street

From April 10 through April 30, 2010, the gallery at the 40ST Artist in Residence program presents recent works by Glen Sacks, one of the five artists in residence.
An open studio event will take place on Friday, April 9 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM.

Sacks is showing large-scale photographs that document street-side memorials, storefront places of worship, abandoned churches, murals that commemorate peopled killed in gun violence and other sites in the urban Philadelphia environment that demonstrate different ways of addressing loss, grief, and spirituality in public spaces.

Sacks earned his BFA from the University of the Arts and MFA from Bard College and has shown his work in New York, Italy, and Columbia. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, including the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Mid-Atlantic NEA Regional Fellowship.