Latest news with #PhiladelphiaMuseumofArt
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity
Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.' These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women's body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they're sensual, they're also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women's bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg's work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'Without the face, the body must tell all.' What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg's explorations began to take shape in the late '60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg's teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of 'looking,' and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of 'looking.' Ramberg wasn't unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and '80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early '70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg's work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early '80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention. Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg's paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex. One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer's eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer's attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are. In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg's intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg's wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself. The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the 'layers' we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable. Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings—one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility. As Ramberg's work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women's bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women's bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg's diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn't cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work. The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg's mode of 'looking.' Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her 'satellite' paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order. Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick's disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to 'just beginning and deeply committed artists' and helped her balance 'immersion in my own work.' Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when 'the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,' as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer's experience, and then expand it. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Axios
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Axios
Philadelphia road closures for Pride and Roots Picnic
Philadelphia's Pride March and Roots Picnic are headlining a jam-packed weekend in the city. Why it matters: Parties, performances and one big Pride festival will draw tons of people downtown. That also means a potential traffic mess: The multi-day events are closing down several streets in Center City and elsewhere. 🏳️🌈 State of play: Philly's Pride weekend — among the largest LGBTQ+ celebrations in the country — kicks off today at the Rocky Steps (9am) as organizers tour city landmarks with a 600-foot rainbow flag. Saturday features the Pride Promenade and L.U.V. Awards (7pm) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Tickets: $50-$100) The weekend culminates Sunday with a march (11am) starting at Sixth and Walnut streets and a street festival (noon-7pm) in the Gayborhood. 🎤 Meanwhile, the Roots Picnic takes over Mann Center in West Philly on Saturday and Sunday with performances by Meek Mill, Maxwell, Lenny Kravitz and Glorilla. 🚧 Road closures: For the Roots Picnic, road closures are already in place around the West Fairmount Park open-air venue, including South Concourse Drive between Belmont Avenue and 52nd Street. Starting today, crews will shut down more streets, including Wynnefield Avenue between Parkside and Belmont avenues. Streets will reopen on a staggered schedule through next Thursday. Roads in the Gayborhood will close 6am-9pm Sunday for the Pride Festival and March, generally stretching between Walnut and Pine streets, and Broad and 11th streets. Other street closures include: Juniper Street from Walnut to Cypress streets. Manning Street from S. Camac to 12th streets. 🅿️ Parking restrictions will be in effect in the area on Sunday starting at 5am, so look for posted signs. Vehicles parked in those areas will have their cars relocated. 🚌 SEPTA will detour bus routes around the Pride events on Sunday from 4:30am to approximately 9pm. What else: There's plenty more going on this weekend.
Atlantic
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity
Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.' These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women's body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they're sensual, they're also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women's bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg's work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'Without the face, the body must tell all.' What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg's explorations began to take shape in the late '60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg's teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of 'looking,' and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of 'looking.' Ramberg wasn't unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and '80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early '70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg's work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early '80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention. Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg's paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex. One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer's eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer's attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are. In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg's intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg's wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself. The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the 'layers' we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable. Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings— one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility. As Ramberg's work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women's bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women's bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg's diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn't cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work. The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg's mode of 'looking.' Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her 'satellite' paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order. Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick's disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to 'just beginning and deeply committed artists' and helped her balance 'immersion in my own work.' Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when 'the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,' as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer's experience, and then expand it.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Karate Kid: Legends' Is a Kick for Hardcore Fans Only
It was the crane kick seen 'round the world. There he is, skinny and picked-upon Daniel LaRusso, squaring off with the Cobra Kai dojo's resident Aryan-youth bully and ace leg-sweeper Johnny Lawrence, in the final round of the All-Valley Karate tournament. His sensei, Nariyoshi Miyagi, watches impassively from the sidelines as his prize pupil, already injured, is further hobbled by several less-than-kosher moves. LaRusso refuses to give up. He raises his arms, bird-like, and brings one leg up, precariously balancing on his bad leg. We've seen him try to master this move for the better part of the last hour. Miyagi nods his assent. Lawrence goes in for the kill. LaRusso kicks him in the face. He wins — the fight, the tournament, the girl, the movie. Watch this moment again if you haven't seen it for a while. It'll still make you want to jump out of your seat and cheer. Nestled somewhere between Rocky Balboa sprinting up the Philadelphia Museum of Art's steps and the scoreboard-shattering home run in The Natural in terms of iconic sports-movie moments, the end of 1984's The Karate Kid remains one of those sequences that, even seen out of context, is pure triumph-of-the-underdog bliss. It's not a stretch to think that scene alone virtually underwrote two sequels, a LaRusso-less spin-off (1994's The Next Karate Kid), and a 2010 remake featuring Jackie Chan; the fact that the Hong Kong movie legend teaches Jaden Smith kung fu instead of karate didn't stop them from using the name. You don't mess with the brand, people. More from Rolling Stone Wes Anderson's 'The Phoenician Scheme' Is One of His Best Mia Threapleton Idolized Wes Anderson. Then She Became the Breakout Star of His New Movie 'Highest 2 Lowest' Isn't Spike Lee's Best or Worst - Just a Chance to Watch Denzel Go HAM Love for the original never really faded, even if it was seen as more a blast from the past — one more thing to squeal over in an 'I Heart the '80s!' time capsule. If someone had told us that a Netflix series devoted to updating us on what happened to LaRusso, Lawrence and everyone else from back in the day would make folks highly invested in these characters again, almost 40 years later, we might have laughed them out of the room. If they'd said that the show would then go on for six surprisingly strong seasons, we'd have thought they were seriously high on drugs. But it did, and it has, and thanks to the success of Cobra Kai and the allure of intellectual property and the never-ending need to turn nostalgia into future revenue streams, we now have Karate Kid: Legends. The basics remain the same: A young man — in this case, a Beijing teen named Li Fong (American-Born Chinese's Ben Wang) — is uprooted to a new city — in this case, NYC — and the fish-outta-water kid finds himself dealing with bullies who use martial arts for bad instead of good. Fong already knows kung fu, courtesy of Mr. Han, i.e. Chan's character from the 2010 redo. The wrinkle is that, because of a past family tragedy involving kung fu, he's forbidden to fight by his still-traumatized mom (Ming Na-Wen). Still, when you've got a movie that's putting a conspicuous 'dragon kick' on the mantle in Act One, that move is probably gonna go off in Act Three. This is officially known as the Chekhov Karate Kid Franchise Rule. Look it up. There's a romantic interest, naturally, in the form of Mia Lipani (The Goldbergs' Sadie Stanley), who helps run the family pizza shop around the corner from the Fongs' downtown apartment. Her dad (Joshua Jackson) used to be a big deal in Gotham boxing circles before the birth of his daughter made him hang up the gloves. Except Pops owes some neighborhood no-goodniks money that he borrowed to open the pizzeria. And in what has to be the epitome of one-stop-shopping narrative convenience, these loan sharks also own the MMA dojo where Fong's tormentor, Conor Day (Aramis Knight), practices. Conor is the reigning champion of the annual '5 Boroughs' tournament. Also, Conor is Mia's ex. Also also, he's, like, a total dick! Long story short, Fong trains Mr. Lipani, things don't go well, and once again, the peaceful warrior will be forced to take up the ways of the foot and fist. This requires Mr. Han to show up in New York and help his ward get back into fighting shape. It also requires the help of an old acquaintance of Han's, a gentleman of a similar age who's also got a history with martial arts and bullies and toxic masculinity and trying to outlive the past. He lives in Southern California. Three guesses as to who this might be. So yes, what was once thought to be two different Karate Kid cinematic universes has been, in fact, one cinematic universe this whole time, and in a feat of pure corporate synergizing, Legends combines both of them into a super-duper KKCU. We're frankly surprised that the powers that be stopped at just those two — at one point, after a particularly dexterous three-against-one brawl in an alley set to LCD Soundsystem's 'North American Scum' (?!?), someone refers to Fong as the 'Chinese Peter Parker.' And given that Sony still owns some of the rights to the webslinger, you completely expect Tom Holland to swing in and go, 'Did someone mention my name?' and wink at the camera. Go full mega-multiverse or go home, you cowards! In any case, one cross-country plane ride later, Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso join forces to school Fong in the ways of both karate and kung fu, with the hope that a 'two branches, one tree' hybrid of these martial arts will give him the edge in the 5 Boroughs tournament. Chan and Macchio admittedly have a nice sort of bickering rapport with each other — they're like a Punch and Judy team with actual punches being thrown. But there's a too-little-too-late aspect to their team-up, which means you have to suffer through pile-ups of subplots and peripheral dramatic business taking up a lot of oxygen and a gajillion montages. (Seriously, find someone who loves you the way Karate Kid: Legends loves montages. There are training montages, of course, but also new-kid-in-high-school montages, scootering-around-Chinatown montages, pizza-making montages, tournament-bracket montages — we only counted three of the five boroughs in the main '5 Boroughs' montage, but never mind — and a few other montages we're likely forgetting. Whenever director Jonathan Entwhistle, a TV veteran responsible for The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This among other shows, is at a loss, he drops in a montage. If he can also take a song on the soundtrack and slow it down as if a record player was running out of power, a trick that's clever the first time and annoying the proceeding 99 other times it gets used, all the better.) Eventually, Legends gets around to the final showdown between Li and Conor, which takes place atop a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, and the outcome is never in doubt. It's all over but the dragon kick, and a coda with a fan-service cameo. We apologize for sounding cynical, but there's a slightly ramshackle feel to this that makes you feel that you're not watching a movie so much as math: Add two different Karate Kid stalwarts, multiply the nostalgia and stock story beats, divide the returns by half. We can handle corniness, which is a main ingredient for so many sports-underdog classics, but the cobbled-together feel is a downer. Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
CBS News
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Philadelphia's 2025 Pride weekend will feature 600-foot Progress Pride flag, largest in U.S., organizers say
The largest Progress Pride flag in the U.S. will return and be even larger in 2025 as Philadelphia's LGBTQ+ community and allies gather for the Philadelphia Pride March and Festival. Organizers with Philly Pride 365 have already announced a ton of plans for the kickoff weekend starting Friday, May 30, but more announcements are coming in the next one to two weeks, including performers, stage locations and food truck and vendor lists. The group says this year's Pride Month is extra special in Philadelphia — it marks 50 years since former Pennsylvania Gov. Milton Shapp signed an executive order making the Keystone State the first to prohibit discrimination toward LGBTQ+ state employees. The order was later expanded to include state contractors as well. Advocates have called for the Pennsylvania Senate to pass the Fairness Act, a bill that ensures equal protections for LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians. Philly Pride 365 When is the 2025 Philadelphia Pride Parade? Pride Weekend in Philadelphia features several events leading up to the June 1 Pride March, not a parade. Things kick off with the Pride Around the City event on Friday, May 30. During this event, the massive Progress Pride flag will make its way to several major landmarks around the city. The flag will be 600 feet long this year, longer than an average Center City block. Last year's 400-foot Pride flag stretched down all the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so it'll be interesting to see how Pride Around the City handles the extra 200 feet of fabric! The Philadelphia Pride Flag seen on Independence Mall in 2023. Philly Pride 365 The 600-foot flag will be the largest pride flag in Philly history and may set a record for the biggest pride flag in Pennsylvania. It was designed for the 2025 Philly Pride March and made in the state. Saturday, the day after Pride Around the City, features the LUV (Legacy, Unity, Visibility Awards) and the Pride Promenade held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sunday's Pride March will kick off from 6th and Walnut streets at 10:30 a.m. and end in the Gayborhood. Philly Pride 365 says the exact route is still being finalized and will be revealed closer to the date of the march. The events this year have a new fiscal sponsor, the Urban Affairs Coalition. Philadelphia Pride Festival is larger this year Following the march, the Philadelphia Pride Festival is happening from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. The festival area will extend from Walnut Street down to Pine and from Juniper Street east to Quince Street. The festival will feature entertainment zones with stages, a youth and family zone with drag story time, a "sober vibes zone" that's alcohol-free, a sensory-friendly zone and the Sapphic Way. There's no admission or registration required to attend the festival, and food and drink are pay-as-you-go. Watch out for road closure announcements closer to the event. What is the Progress Pride Flag and how is it different from the traditional rainbow flag? The most common rainbow Pride flag has six stripes: red, orange, yellow, green, royal blue and purple. The late activist Gilbert Baker is widely credited for creating this flag in 1978, originally with eight stripes. The redesign and cut to six stripes happened in part due to a shortage of commercially available pink fabric and a desire to keep the number of stripes even. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the Progress Pride Flag features all the colors of the traditional flag with additional white, pink and light blue stripes to represent the transgender community, and black and brown stripes to represent LGBTQ+ people of color. The black stripe is also a memorial to the thousands of people who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, HRC says.
