Latest news with #BarnesFoundation
Technical.ly
4 days ago
- Business
- Technical.ly
This Philly art museum built its own edtech platform — now it's licensing it to fund the future
The Barnes Foundation is increasing its reach and revenue — not with the art it's known for, but for the tech it developed to better understand its collection. The museum's proprietary Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) brings its vast collection into the digital age. Students in its educational programming can see Claude Monet's brushstrokes up close and examine a Pierre-Auguste Renoir sculpture from every angle, with deep zoom and panoramas in tandem with class discussions. Now, the Penn Museum will gain access to the tech to help it make online classes more engaging, and the Barnes earns $37,000 in annual fees. 'The long-term health of museums does depend on how well you're able to get your unique platform and message out there,' said Steven Brady, deputy director for digital initiatives and chief technology officer at the Barnes Foundation. 'We always saw it as something that was able to sustain us, and we thought [it] could be a really big positive for other institutions.' The Penn Museum is the first institution to partner with the Barnes to license this technology. The agreement allows the museum to use the platform for an undisclosed number of live classes and on-demand content. The museum will also receive audio and visual tech support, plus data about their programs through the Barnes' impact and evaluation team, to track results. The Penn Museum will implement VXP for two virtual programs this fall, Deep Dig and Archaeology in Action, according to Jennifer Brehm, director of learning and public engagement at the Penn Museum. It's an upgrade from the current slide decks offering limited perspectives of the art to hopefully increase engagement, she told 'The fact that we can really zoom in on some of the excavations, or maybe on some X-rays, if we're doing conservation work,' Brehm said, 'can really help to illuminate these details in a whole new way.' The search for a sustainable funding model The Barnes holds a range of classes, some focused on specific pieces of art and others focused on wider collections, as a part of its community education efforts. Many of those sessions shifted online during and after the pandemic. Going virtual, however, meant students couldn't get as up close and personal with the art, according to Brady. The museum already had an online version of its collection, using scanned high-resolution photos of the art taken for insurance when the museum moved to its current location on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012. Teachers, however, were looking for ways to make it more interactive, instead of just staring at static images. Launched in 2023, VXP displays 2D works like paintings as high-resolution images that students can zoom into, while 3D pieces such as sculptures — and even entire gallery spaces — are rendered as interactive models with 360-degree navigation. Industrywide, museums are constantly talking about how to design a more sustainable business model, Brady said. Many museums haven't recovered pre-pandemic numbers in terms of visitors and they aim to be less reliant on donor revenue and federal funding. The licensing model increases revenue and helps other museums expand their reach, he said. Licensing VXP out to others is the Barnes' way of doing that, while also increasing engagement, according to Brady. 'We were able to sustain ourselves with online educational revenue,' Brady said. 'There may be museums who don't care about revenue as much as outreach. And again, this serves that model as well.'
Axios
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Philadelphia weekend: Odunde, Luke Bryan and First Friday
🤠 Country star Luke Bryan is playing at Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden at 7pm tonight as part of his Country Song Came On tour. Tickets: $172+ 🥳 It's First Friday again! Cherry Street Pier is lined with art exhibitions, live music, a makers market, ticketed paint and sip from 4-9pm tonight. Chestnut Hill is having its third annual Pride Party at NoName Gallery from 5-8pm. Arts, zero-proof drinks, and a book signing from author Kay Synclaire, who is touting her new book " House of Frank." Dominican musician Yasser Tejeda will play hits from his latest album "La Madrugá" at the Barnes Foundation from 6-9pm. Tickets required. 🍓 Have a berry good Saturday at Linvilla Orchards' Strawberry Festival. Food, family-friendly fun and everyone's favorite unveiling of the largest strawberry shortcake at 11am. Pick your own strawberries, while you're at it. Admission is free but tickets are required for other activities. 🌍 Odunde marks its 50th year at 10am on Sunday around the intersection of 23rd and South Streets. This big African-American street festival will draw as many as 500,000 attendees to a roughly 16-block stretch of South Philly, and feature live performances, art, food and vendors. 🧙 Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Academy of Music to check out " The Wiz." In this modern twist on the American classic, Dorothy finds herself searching for her place in a new world. Runs through June 15. Ticket prices vary. 🖼️ The Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show enters its 98th year and showcases about 150 artists at Rittenhouse Square this weekend. Friday-Saturday, 11am-6pm; Sunday, 11am-5pm. ⚾ Head over to the Navy Yard for a fanatical 25th anniversary celebration. Food trucks, games, and a visit from the Phillie Phanatic. Saturday, 1-6pm at the Central Green. 😀 The Disability Pride Philly Party takes over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Saturday with a parade that steps off from City Hall at 11am.
Indian Express
10-05-2025
- General
- Indian Express
I went beyond the popular image of Kabir to create mine: Gulammohammed Sheikh
You joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda in 1955, within five years of its opening. Coming from a provincial town, Surendranagar, what was your experience like? It was amazing to be part of a like-minded community of artists and aspirants; to have the doors of our studios in the art school open, day and night. I had never imagined there could be a whole library full of books, only on art! The atmosphere in the college was liberal, which made newcomers like me feel at ease. Our teachers worked in the studios after class hours. We saw the seminal paintings of our teacher NS Bendre being painted. He gave demonstrations of oil painting and watercolour with such mastery, leaving us spellbound. Art History classes were conducted by artists themselves, except for Dean Markand Bhatt, who had studied it at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. He taught us Western art and aesthetics, while Bendre taught us Chinese art, and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, Egyptian and Mesopotamian art. You started your teaching career in Art History before you shifted to Painting. When I was a post-graduate student, there was an opening in the department to teach art history. The then Dean, Bendre, asked me if I would like to teach. It was a godsend offer as I was living on a paltry scholarship. I taught for three years before going to London in 1963. Upon my return, I taught again for 15 years till I moved on to head the Painting department. London played a role in igniting your interest in early painting traditions. The Painting Department at the Royal College of Art was adjacent to the Victoria & Albert Museum and students had free access. I used to eat lunch in the museum restaurant to avoid the bland fare in the college canteen, and on my way, I would see paintings in the Indian section. I was aware of the various schools of Indian painting, but a magical-looking Kota painting of a nocturnal jungle scene in the moonlight fascinated me. Robert Skelton, the Assistant Keeper of the Indian section, became a mentor. Writing my dissertation on Kota enabled me to have a closer look at the regional school of Rajasthan. During the summer vacation, I hitch-hiked in Italy to see the masters of the Renaissance. I was especially touched by the Sienese artists such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Sassetta. For them, painting was an act of love offered with humility and passionate conviction. I found them close to Indian painting in sensibility. After finishing my studies in London, I returned to India, mostly travelling overland. The three-month-long journey evoked greater love for the wanderings than I was already prone to. The year 1981 seems to be seminal, as you completed several important works. Yes, in that year I showed with artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Jogen Chowdhury and Sudhir Patwardhan in the exhibition we called, 'Place for People'. Each of us was involved in exploring and focusing on the world we lived in. In that sense, several works were autobiographical. In my case, Speaking Street recalled memories of my childhood in a provincial town. Following it, a large painting, titled City for Sale, dealt with the irony of communal riots raging at one end, and on the other portrayed a cinema hall audience, totally oblivious of it. The Tree of Life (1996), which you painted for the Vidhan Bhavan in Bhopal, was the first time you took up painting on such a massive scale for a public building. Yes, I had long desired to make a mural in a public space, after I saw the cityscape, Effects of Good Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Sienna. The mural in the Legislative Assembly was 31-feet high and 21-feet wide. The idea was to cover a cultural tapestry of India with its multiplicity and diversity. The central motif of The Tree of Life represents the lives of people, both past and present, including glorious as well as turbulent periods. Then, Kabir appeared in your work. The beginning of the 1990s was a period of great turbulence, which needed a healing touch. Kabir was the answer. Instead of using just the popular rendition of Kabir as a Vaishnavite saint, I also searched other images of Kabir as prototypes to create mine. The man who said 'tera Saai(n) tujh me', indicated looking inwards, instead of seeking an answer in the outer world. You started with a small town. Then, you entered the belly of a city, and then you moved to the world. In a chance encounter I found a medieval map of the world — the Ebstorf mappa mundi — which I used as a basis for re-enacting the world. In the 20-odd years, many such maps were made to reframe the world. The use of a portable shrine or Kaavad served as an alternative to the easel painting. Its format allows multiple stories like a picture book unfolding gradually. The recent work, Kaarawaan, at its core, holds the idea of a journey, wherein I packed my favourite characters from history, mythology and the world of dreams. I painted within it all the artists, poets and thinkers whom I admire. The intention was to paint a civilisational ark carrying a world of humanity in the midst of highly turbulent waters.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity
Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn't fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound. By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg's imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown's world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited. Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze. Ramberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country's No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite. Ramberg's work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women's slips. Her work can put you in mind of Roy Lichtenstein, with his nostalgic subjects and thick cartoon outlines. He and Ramberg both made memorable paintings of a female hand raised to display its slender white fingers and red-painted nails. A mesmerizing series by Ramberg of three small paintings from 1971, '(Untitled) Hand,' show a sinuous, near-boneless hand binding itself in a length of cloth that mutates into a glove. In the place of Lichtenstein's Pop jokiness, her work feels psychological and interior. Ramberg was adept at turning the visual clichés of cartooning into an entirely personal language, and her influence can be felt in the work of painters as different as Elizabeth Murray, Amy Sillman and Julie Curtiss, all of whom spent some time in Chicago. Born in 1946 in Ft. Campbell, Ky., Ramberg moved frequently. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, and her mother was a piano teacher. She believed that her father (her first critic) viewed her as 'awkward and unattractive,' as she later wrote, and she attributed her negative self-image to him. After her family settled in the Chicago area, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later joined the faculty and served as head of the painting department. She married a fellow artist and Chicago Imagist, Phil Hanson. They separated in 1980, but Hanson returned to care for her in 1989, when she was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She died six years later, at age 49. One of the fascinations of her short career is her devotion to the same limited repertory of subjects. 'Hair' (1968), her undergraduate thesis show, consists of a series of 16 small, square, olive-green panels that each depict the back of a stylish woman's head, with hairdos that are variously bobbed, plaited, or curled, and patted by a manicured hand. Whose head is this? Impossible to know, but I had a shivery vision of the young Ramberg watching the back of her mother's head as she played the piano, pressed into silence in that era when children were seen and not heard. In the 1970s, Ramberg's paintings shed their retro flavor and began courting figurative grotesqueries. The exhibition culminates in a room ringed with large-scale torso paintings, each about four feet tall and dominated by an action figure with broad shoulders, a small waist, and signs of brokenness. 'Troubled Sleeve' feels like a bad dream, with its four pickle-shaped organs sprouting from beneath a woman's tightly wound belts and tourniquets, defeating her efforts to control her body.¶ Philadelphia is the only East Coast stop for Ramberg's show, which was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has never been properly assessed by a New York museum, perhaps as a result of the geographic bias that has often afflicted American artists working outside of New York. The good news is that the situation is likely to improve in September when the Whitney Museum will feature Ramberg and other Chicago Imagists in 'Sixties Surreal,' a rethinking of more than 100 artists whose work was initially eclipsed by the shiny surfaces of Pop art. The subject of a handsome and high-spirited show at the Barnes Foundation, Cecily Brown is in no danger of being forgotten. Now 56, the British-born painter is one of the signal figures on the New York scene, having survived the contretemps of early fame and established herself as an artist of irrefutable seriousness. In 2023, she was accorded an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Death and the Maid,' a thematically focused show of works lamenting the brevity of life; it was shoehorned into a too-small space. The Barnes retrospective, by contrast, which was organized with the Dallas Museum of Art, is not large — it comprises just 30 paintings and related drawings — but spans her career and feels expansive. It's interesting to see her once-maligned early paintings, such as 'Untitled' (1996), whose circle of humping rabbits, in hues of gold and blue, today could pass for a relatively wholesome campfire scene. It makes sense that museums appreciate Brown, because she appreciates museums and centuries-old European masterpieces. She is hardly the only artist to raid art history as well as pop culture for inspiration — one of the defining activities of postmodernism — but she does so with an intelligence and ardor that are entirely her own. She isn't interested in recycling the past to bemoan the exhausted present. Instead, she is a kind of artist-explorer, feeling her way, as if eyes could walk, into long-ago scenes by Degas or Goya, into Fragonard's garden scenes or shipwrecks by Delacroix or robust hunting scenes by the lesser-known Flemish painter Frans Snyders. In the process, she recycles figuration as abstraction, collapsing the timeline of art history into a one-of-a-kind expressionistic lexicon of whippy lines and whorls of curling brushstrokes. One of her gifts, as we see in works ranging from the riotous, red-smeared surface of her 25-foot-long hunting epic 'The Splendid Table,' to a riveting, small-scale bedroom scene, titled 'Body (After Sickert),' is the way Brown dramatizes the act of looking at art, the process by which we — the viewer, standing before an unfamiliar painting — take it apart with our eyes and then reassemble it. Her best paintings and drawings take time to see, and the Barnes show would have benefited from benches. 'Selfie' (2020), one of the standouts, deepens the longer you look. The painting takes us into a cluttered, high-ceilinged room where a nude figure rendered as a wave of pink flesh reclines on an iron bedstead. Or are there two nudes — a woman on her back and a bearded man face down beside her, lost in his own thoughts? Around them, paintings are hung salon style, covering every inch of wall space. The furniture, which includes a tall grandfather clock, suggests that the room is a 19th-century European studio, or a picture gallery that looks a little chaotic. The dozens of picture frames hanging on the wall form a jumble of rectangles that emit a quivering energy, as if shaken by an earthquake. Looking at 'Selfie' you may feel it echoes your own situation amid the Barnes, its walls crowded from floor to ceiling with masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse and Renoir. There are so many paintings in the world, more than we can ever see, but as Brown's work exhorts us, take it one picture at a time, and look as searchingly as you can.
Axios
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Philly weekender: Bok Bar reopens and Otaku Fest
You know it's spring when Parks on Tap returns. The traveling beer garden sets up shop in the Azalea Garden near the Philly Art Museum. Today-Friday, 4-10pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-10pm 🎉 Rooftop bar season is upon us. South Philly's Bok Bar reopens Thursday. Stop by for tacos, beers or cocktails and enjoy views of the city. Hours vary. 🍽️ Last call for Dine Latino Restaurant Week. Deals or special menus at more than two dozen restaurants run through Saturday. 🦸♀️ Embrace a full weekend of cosplay at Otaku Fest at Cherry Street Pier on the waterfront. Also count on video game tourneys, dozens of vendors, panel discussions, food and drink. Friday-Sunday, hours vary. 🥳 Young professionals get their own night at the Barnes Foundation on Friday. 🎶 A pop-up exhibit on Saturday will spotlight Marian Anderson and the backstory of the singer's historic concert in 1939. Runs 10am-4pm at the South Philly museum dedicated to the singer. Admission: $5 🖌 Stock up on arts supplies at Art Star's CRAP Bazaar on Saturday from 11am-4pm inside the Independence Visitor Center. It's a rummage sale of gently used and overstock supplies. Plus: A spring pop-up market will set up shop nearby featuring a handful of local craft vendors. 🚗 Saturday is your chance to see a handful of early 20th-century cars out on the road in Southwest Philly. Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum's Demo Day will also feature a presentation about the autos. 11am-2pm 🛍️ Shop more than 50 vendors at the Ready, Set, Bloom Market under the El near 5 Sisters Ice Cream Parlor in Fishtown. Saturday, 11am-5pm Free live music, vendors, food and giveaways are on the agenda. Saturday, noon-7pm 🐕 Bring your pooch to Evil Genius brewery's Block Pawty on Saturday from noon-6pm in Fishtown. This family-friendly event includes dog-themed vendors, food trucks, beer tents and music. 🚶🏿♀️Stop by Rittenhouse on Sunday when seven blocks will go car-free again from 10am-5pm. This week's schedule includes a stringband, bubbles, entertainment and double-dutch lessons.
