Tuesday, June 16, 2009

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).

5 comments:

red studio said...

What a lovely and inspiring blog! The installation of orange sticks is quite nice, and the mosaic murals are beautiful. Thank you for the art tour.

Leslie Peterson Sapp said...

Wow, what beautiful shots. I love the people walking past the orange sticks installation, because it gives a better sense of scale and color.

gl. said...

travel is good for the art soul. :)

Seth said...

Been to the Magic Gardens. Pretty amazing. And that store display looks so cool!

futuregirl said...

Our Anthropologie brings the *awesome* every damn time. The previous window installations were three massive, beautiful beehives. One was made out of books, one was fabric scraps, and the last was rolls of paper. Each had a light inside so they glowed. Magnificent!

I concur that the orange sticks rock the house.

ShareThis