“Intimate Immensity’s strength derives from its quiet concentration, which feels to me like resistance built for the long haul. It also strikes me as particular to the ideas and attitudes that seem only to develop inside the nurturing world of artist-run spaces. PAFA provided this space to Granwell — who has most often worked in artist-run spaces, in particular Tiger Strikes Asteroid — not as a means to co-opt alternative methods, but because its leaders seem to understand the supporting role it can play in the development of artists and curators.

Other major institutions in Philadelphia — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, and the Institute for Contemporary Art — should rise to this challenge. To meet this call would be to focus on the collective and the restorative, which as Bea Huff Hunter writes, is at the heart of Intimate Immensity.”

— Stan Mir

[Curator Alexis Granwell] asked the critic and arts writer Bea Huff Hunter to write an accompanying essay, which is itself a creative document that eloquently explores the ideas and works in the exhibition. It is an unexpected text for a museum exhibition and fits well with the ethos of the works on display. 

— Susan Isaacs

[Louise Fishman] credited her move from Philadelphia and attendant discovery of the feminist and lesbian movements as shaping the path her life and career would take. “I’d watched my mother and my aunt, who is a well-known painter in Philadelphia, be isolated and stepped on,” she told Artforum’s Bea Huff Hunter in 2016. “It was hard to imagine a career as a female artist then—but I loved painting.”

— Artforum News