Found: Installation Art in Philadelphia

Ah . . . Back from a lovely trip to Philadelphia, and was delighted by the art I discovered . . . in some unlikely places.

The first was the downtown Anthropologie store . . .

This window display is both inside and outside the windows . . . and wraps around the building.


It's a crazy juxtaposition between the architecture of the old building and the wacky, modern flow of the orange sticks . . .

I love how it pours up and out of the windows and down around the entrance to the store, especially since it's not a traditional consumer building.

I also wandered into the Magic Gardens, a raw mosaic folk art wonderland created by artist Isaiah Zagar. He's done mosaic mural projects all over Philadelphia . . . while he was at it, he also did mosaic over every surface in his studio and transformed the vqcqnt lot next door into a mosaic maze of quotes, drawings on ceramic, and well, junk, cemented together. Like most outsider art, photos don't really do it justice: you've got to be there.









And if you're keen on seeing a huge variety of mosaic art locally, I understand that this years Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts is having an exhibit called Cutting Edges - the largest fine art mosaic exhibit in the U.S. (at least according to their press release).