BEA HUFF HUNTER

Tag: philadelphia

  • “Brighter Later,” Rebekah Callaghan, Gross McCleaf, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)

    “Brighter Later,” Rebekah Callaghan, Gross McCleaf, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    “I think I’ve been making the same painting for a long time and it just keeps ending in a different place at a different point,” Rebekah Callaghan told painter Aubrey Levinthal in a 2015 interview in Title Magazine. The conversation focused on Callaghan’s process of working from her immediate surroundings – her home studio and the garden of potted plants that…

  • Active Voice: Art and books

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    Ulises is a collectively run art bookstore and exhibition space—modeled after venues such as Printed Matter and Dexter Sinister in New York—whose quarterly, essayistic presentations constellate works of art, publications, and public programs around a curatorial theme. “Active Voice,” this season’s apt focus, places the politicized, pop-inflected narrations of Hannah Black’s recent videos and Steffani…

  • Ellen Harvey’s ornamental leaves and abandoned ruins

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    In a 2015 interview with Adam Budak, Ellen Harvey observed: “For me, the museum exists as an aspirational space, continually collapsing under the weight of its hopes and dreams, much like my own projects.” Since the late 1990s, Harvey has consistently submitted her artistic identity to the same careful scrutiny she applies to cultural institutions.…

  • 500 Words: Louise Fishman

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    While in graduate school in Champaign-Urbana, I took the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago and saw a hard-edged Al Held painting in a show of Minimalism at the Art Institute of Chicago, which had a big impact on me. The earliest painting in my retrospective at the Neuberger, In and Out, 1968, was influenced by…

  • Repeater: Painting like music like handwriting

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    In the essay accompanying this exhibition, curator Kelsey Halliday Johnson quotes Ian MacKaye, founder of the DIY label Dischord Records: “Playing music is like handwriting; if you play a song over and over, it starts to evolve.” “Repeater,” named after a 1990 album by Fugazi, includes drawing, sculpture, and video by three artists who translate…

  • Jennifer Levonian’s animation provokes self-reflection

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    Jennifer Levonian’s short, surreal cut-paper animation Xylophone, 2015, muses on the everyday clichés and complexities of gender, gentrification, and creative living in transitional urban spaces. Wryly referencing Philadelphia’s rapidly changing neighborhoods and rendered in swift, fluid watercolor marks, Levonian’s leafy farmers’ markets, tastefully rehabbed row homes, and yoga-studio lofts adorned with “Breathe in love, breathe…

  • Catherine Pancake’s complicity in Bloodland

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    Midway through Catherine Pancake’s video on citizen surveillance of the natural-gas fracking industry, Bloodland (all works cited, 2015), a female voice-over quotes Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” on the cultural implications of highly circulated, low-resolution digital artifacts online: “The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of…

  • Becky Suss’s domestic melancholia

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    In her 2011 memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson observed of the genre: “Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story.” The act of covering, then, in Winterson’s book and in Becky Suss’s first solo museum exhibition, refers not only to concealment but…

  • Matt Giel: Studio visit

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    Matt Giel was the first artist I met after moving to Philadelphia three years ago—his MFA show at the Crane Building was beautiful, so I picked up his postcard and gave him a call. I curated his work in the exhibition “Duett” at Grizzly Grizzly in 2012, he rescued a roving squirrel from my apartment…

  • Gabriel Martinez’s elegy for Fire Island

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    Bea Huff Hunter
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    Gabriel Martinez’s elegiac exhibition “Bayside Revisited” invokes the historic potency of Fire Island, New York, as a gay fantasy space and safe haven. By integrating archival materials related to the community into new prints and an installation, Martinez augments the current historical canonization of queer culture and the AIDS crisis recently seen in Keith Haring…