Latest news with #PhilipSmith
Miami Herald
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Mystical painter highlights MOCA North Miami's spring season
There's plenty going on in the mind of Philip Smith, and it shows in his art. The Miami-born painter's canvases are full of esoteric symbols and mystical imagery gleaned from years of studying ancient cultures, world religions, and the work of historical magicians. Spirals, DNA strands, minerals, magic circles, foliage, human hands – all coexist in a ghostly mélange of images and ideograms. 'These images are meant to basically provoke your imagination,' says Smith, who is currently the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, which opened Wednesday, April 30 and is on view through Sunday, Oct. 5. 'The idea of looking at my paintings is a bit akin to sitting in a planetarium, where you're looking up at the stars and they project all these patterns. And you're told to see those patterns, that this is the Milky Way, but then your mind wanders and you start to see other things. And that's the idea with my work, really. It's a portal for the imagination.' Smith's encounters with the supernatural began during his childhood in Miami. His father Lew Smith, who had been an interior decorator for famous and powerful people such as Walt Disney and Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, one day discovered he could speak to the dead and heal the sick. He became a faith healer, and the difficulties this placed on then-teenage Philip, who eventually wrote about the experience in his memoir 'Walking Through Walls,' put him on his own spiritual quest. He tried drugs. He joined, and later left, the Church of Scientology. And finally, he moved to New York to become an artist, and from there he developed the image-dense visual language in his paintings. 'As a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist, so I was looking at, obviously, Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian temples,' he says. 'I wanted to sort of create a pictographic language, also a slightly cinematic language. Because I think we respond to that experientially and also cerebrally more than words,' he says. Smith explains that words have to be learned, whereas images are immediate. 'When you speak to mediums or psychics, they get their information visually. It's imprinted. They see things as they're talking to you. And so all those components go into making up this visual language,' he says. Smith's work managed to get noticed by the critic Douglas Crimp, who put him in a soon-to-be-influential show at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan called 'Pictures.' It included several artists, including Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, who would later be part of the so-called 'the Pictures Generation,' a group of artists who were deeply influenced by the culture of mass media that was present at the time. Smith describes the art scene of that time as vastly different from today's more professionalized art ecosystem, full of passionate people that did what they did not for money, but because they felt a calling. 'I didn't understand what kids learn with their MFA today, how to network, how to write emails, how to get curators into your studio. I thought my job was just to make art, and the art world was very small and very personal. You kind of met everybody.' He says he was friendly with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. '(Warhol) would call me every Saturday at the studio and chat. I interviewed Jasper Johns for Interview (magazine), and I would walk over to Bob Rauschenberg's house at four o'clock in the morning and sit there and drink with him. It was a very different world. And it was more a world where you kind of made it up as you went along. None of us knew what we were doing, but we all knew we were doing something different.' Still, he always wanted to come back to Miami, the place he considers his true home. After nearly three decades in New York, in 2019, he returned to South Florida and has staged several shows since then, mostly with the Little River-based gallery PRIMARY. The MoCA show, his first solo museum exhibition in Miami for several decades and one that incorporates work from 'Pictures' to now, is something of a culmination for him. 'I've always wanted to do a major show in Miami, because it's the city that I really love,' he says. 'I had to leave Miami as a young artist, because there was no opportunity. There were no real museums, no galleries, no collectors. There was nothing here. So that's why I went to New York.' Smith mentions the progression of Miami's art museums. 'Whether it's the Rubell Museum, or Marty Margulies, or Art Basel – it's an extraordinary transformation that I don't know, that people appreciate, how it went from the desert to Tribeca in a generation or two.' For the artist, the retrospective at MoCA is important on many levels. 'It's a very meaningful show to me, because I feel it's giving back to Miami as a Miami person, and I'm not coming in as a New Yorker saying 'see how great I am.' I'm coming in and saying, 'I want to share with you what my life's been about.'' Smith's status as a Miami-born artist who spent much of his career in New York complements that of MoCA's other spring show, a New York-born artist who spent much of her life in South Florida. Vickie Pierre worked for Miami art institutions, including at the former Miami Art Museum (now PAMM) and as registrar at MoCA NoMi. But alongside that career, she also made art herself, and now her work is on view in the show 'The Maiden is the Warrior.' The exhibition zeros in on the artist's 'Poupées in the Bush' series, featuring amorphous black blobs with clearly defined feminine features, somewhere between figures and abstract forms. Some have fingers, horns, and other protrusions appended to their bodies. Others wear rings or are surrounded by floral assemblages. Reflecting the duality of womanhood as in the title of the show, the Poupées are meant to have a bit of softness as well as ferocity, according to curator Adeze Wilford. 'The thrust of our show is really about the duality of their forms. Like they can equally be these, very soft, reclining figures, kind of droopy and globular but also very, almost Rubenesque in how they're conceived of. But then there are some that have these very fierce bearings,' says Wilford. Though the two shows are quite distinct, Wilford, who is curating her final show for MoCA after moving to the Memphis Art Museum in January, hopes viewers will be able to envelop themselves in each. 'The way that I conceive of solo presentations is really that the artists are inviting you into their world, into how their brain is working, and so they're very different people, and we can see how things are unfolding for them both.' WHAT: 'Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields' and 'Vickie Pierre: The Maiden is the Warrior' WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami WHEN: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 5. COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for seniors, students with ID, ages 12 to 17, and disabled visitors; free for museum members, children under 12 years old, North Miami residents and city employees, veterans, and caregivers of disabled visitors. INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 and is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don't miss a story at
CBC
09-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
P.E.I. Family Violence Prevention Services has 2 new ways to offer psychological support
Social Sharing P.E.I. Family Violence Prevention Services has come up with ways to deliver more free psychological support to its clients, with the help of the University of Prince Edward Island and an innovative enterprise it calls The Nest. The organization traditionally focuses on things like education, support groups, emergency shelters and outreach services. But executive director Danya O'Malley said there was a gap when it came to offering clinical services. "There's a lot of reasons why support is exactly what people need. They need somebody to walk alongside them on the path that they're on, somebody to help them navigate services," O'Malley said. "We do see people who are in some very fragile conditions, psychologically, and it is sometimes challenging to receive services in a timely way." That's why last year, they began working with UPEI Doctor of Psychology practicum students to offer free services to clients, with oversight from the university, O'Malley said. "It was a wonderful experience," she said. "The students have been amazing." Two new practicum students started in May and will be spending two days a week with Family Violence Prevention Services until mid-December. UPEI psychology professor Philip Smith said a supervising psychologist will ensure any client is a good fit for the student. Then they work on a plan of how to proceed and keep a close eye on how the process is going. "The clients can be assured that the students in a practicum setting are being supervised, so that the level, the quality of service that the clients are receiving would be parallel to the quality of services that they would receive from a registered psychologist." This is an opportunity for them to work with ... folks who have had experiences around family violence, domestic abuse. — UPEI professor Philip Smith It's also a chance for the students to learn directly in the community. "This is an opportunity for them to work with... folks who have had experiences around family violence, domestic abuse," said Smith. "That's an important kind of learning opportunity for the students." Clinical services for public Family Violence Prevention Services is continuing to build on work like this. O'Malley said the organization is now offering some clinical services to the general public — including therapy, assessments and consultations. It's called The Nest. "We have started essentially the same thing as a private counselling firm, but it is run by us and funding us," she said. "So a clinician would be an employee of ours, and then we receive their billable hours, and they are paid a portion and a portion goes back to the organization." She said it's run as a social enterprise — the goal is to eventually generate enough revenue from paying customers so that money will be available to offer clinical support to some clients for free. "It is a gap, definitely, for our clients, for everyone. People can wait a long time ... [services] can be very expensive," said O'Malley. "We have many children on our caseload whose parents would love to get a child assessment — a psycho-educational assessment perhaps, or maybe an autism assessment. And access to those things can be incredibly difficult." It all depends on the uptake, but O'Malley is hoping such assessments will be available free for some clients this year.
BBC News
25-04-2025
- General
- BBC News
Sunderland shipbuilders bring back heritage with boat launch
Volunteers have launched what they believe to be the first boat built in Sunderland since the loss of the shipyards nearly 40 years is a 20ft (6m) replica of a Wearside foy coble used over many centuries to ferry goods and people along the North Sea Maritime Heritage (SMH) has been working on building the vessel since 2019, with lead boatbuilder Philip Smith saying it required "every skill... that would have been done on the Wear 30, 40 years ago".Mr Smith celebrated the launch by saying it "didn't leak, it didn't sink", following its successful maiden voyage. Wearside's shipbuilding history dates back to 1346 and was once dubbed "the largest shipbuilding town in the world".Throughout its history, Sunderland had more than 400 registered shipyards, with the last closing in trustee Peter Johnson said the foy coble would have been a "regular boat" on the Wear and "all over the place". SMH said it had taken four years to create and "started life as a few planks of wood" from a "couple of trees".Loved ones and spectators waved the Lilian off on her first vessel has already been sold to a private buyer and will live on in the River Johnson said: "It was never about building a boat to sell, it was about learning how to build a boat."When asked if the team was taking anymore orders, Mr Johnson added: "We have a squad of builders now, so who knows." Follow BBC Sunderland on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
BBC News
21-03-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Fish monitoring on the Tyne in hiatus as equipment breaks again
Fish counters which monitor fish stocks on "England's best salmon river" have broken once again, having been damaged last autumn two months after long-awaited repair fish pass on the River Tyne - at Riding Mill in Northumberland - has been fitted with a monitor to check the water body's salmon and sea trout populations since monitor broke in July 2023 and was not fixed for 11 months while the Environment Agency (EA) waited for "safe and suitable" the new installation was only fully operational for two months before one of four channels broke last October, with the EA saying repairs are expected to take place early this summer. The EA said the channel on the monitor broke due to high flows in the "dynamic" river, which typically carries a large amount of debris means, since October, the agency has only been able to record partial fish counts for the the agency said it was confident in its ability to "estimate the number of fish" in the meantime, using a range of addition, fish counters on the River Wear broke in their entirety at start of this year, meaning no fish counts have subsequently been recorded for the Wear. The EA said it was still investigating. Sudden flood events Both the Tyne and the Wear contain populations of sea trout and salmon. The counters help river and fishery managers "decide what actions" are needed to try and ensure the sustainability of thosee populations, said Dr Philip Smith, at the University of years ago, in 2023, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reclassified the Atlantic salmon from "least concern" to "endangered" in Great Britain 30–50% decline in British populations since 2006."It is more important than ever that we accurately monitor salmon numbers across key rivers such as the Tyne and Wear, so that we can track both short and long-term trends in population size," said said Dr Anna Sturrock, of the University of Essex. But she also said that sudden flood events can damage river counting equipment, and with climate change "these events are likely to become more frequent"."[This will require] additional time and funding for maintenance," she added. The EA said it can only repair fish counters during "safe and suitable" conditions, which meant installation work tended to take place in the cited the repairs to its counting site on the Tyne as particularly "complex", in part because water had to be diverted away from a weir before the work could begin. The agency said it was looking into how to install counters which are less susceptible to damage. Follow BBC North East on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
