Douglas Witmer

Sunday, December 07, 2008

new green line art projects

I'm excited about these two new exhibitions at my cafes:
John Tallman--Contemporary Two-Dimensional Art Objects for Home or Office"
Through December 2008
Green Line | Powelton Village 3649 Lancaster Avenue

John Tallman has created a new set of colored cast resin objects created specifically for this exhibition.

Tallman's idiosyncratic art exists somewhere in between painting and sculpture, however they all explore vibrant color riding the vehicle of a wide range of materiality. All the work in this show are untitled, though the artist casually calls them "sponges, washcloths, and cotton balls." This underscores the way Tallman simultaneously embraces and pokes serious fun at the high-minded ideals of late modern “purist” approaches to art making.

His work was last exhibited in Philadelphia in 2006 at the Abington Art Center. Since then his work has been included in exhibitions at The Drawing Center (NYC), IS Projects (The Netherlands), and Sydney Non-Objective (Australia).

A native of the Philadelphia area, Tallman now lives and works near Chattanooga, TN.

Read a cafe customer's response to this work: "Toxic, Boring, Inhumane"

Visit the artist's website:
www.johntallman.com

Kathryn Van Steenhuyse--New Paintings
Through January 2009
Green Line Cafe, 4239 Baltimore Avenue

Interested in the process of "making sense" of an experience, Kathryn Van Steenhuyse uses painting as a way to be continuously suspended in a state of not-knowing and discovery. Each encounter with her paintings is somewhat baffling and that uncertainty is exciting.

Van Steenhuyse was born in Vinton, Iowa in 1979. She received her MFA in Fine Arts in 2008 from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and a BFA in Painting, 2001, from Washington University in St. Louis, Magna Cum Laude. She has participated in exhibitions at the Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Berlin Office, Berlin; Arts Benicia, Benicia, CA; Queen's Nails Annex, San Francisco, CA; Playspace Gallery, California College of the Arts, San Francisco; Crucible Steele Gallery at CELLspace, San Francisco, CA; HEREart Center, New York; The Department of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; the Moore College of Art + Design, Philadelphia, PA. She was also a Fellow of The Career Development Program at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 2006 – 2008, Philadelphia, PA.

Van Steenhuyse currently lives and works in Bolton Landing, NY.

Visit: www.kvansteenhuyse.com

Labels: artists, Green Line Art Projects

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

new green line art projects

Here are two new exhibitions up at my cafes:

Green Line | Powelton

Zarouhie Abdalian
Who you callin' gutter punk : recent engravings
Through January 2008
Green Line | Powelton, 3649 Lancaster Avenue

Zarouhie Abdalian's series of intimately scaled, exquisitely rendered engravings portray homeless youths. As engravings, hand-carved into copper, these portraits record acts of painstaking physical and mental exertion, determination, and care. The portraits describe individuals who are often indiscriminately and blindly labeled as "gutter punks" solely because of their status as homeless youth.

Zarouhie Abdalian grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and graduated from Tulane University. She has exhibited in New Orleans, Philadelphia, France, Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and South Africa. In 2007, her illustrations were published The Color Inside, a children's book by Folwell Dunbar. Abdalian's work is held in many private collections and is in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts.

Abdalian currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she is the Artist-in-Residence at the Philadelphia Cathedral.

For more information, visit www.zarouhie.com.

The Green Line Cafe

John Overmyer
Commentary 1995-2007
Through January 2008
Green Line Cafe, 4239 Baltimore Ave

Nationally recognized West Philly-based artist and illustrator John Overmyer shows hundreds of drawings completed over the past twelve years. Overmyer recently created the album art for Songs on the Green Line, released by the Cafe. Overmyer made many of the drawings in this show while having coffee at the Cafe. The work is installed on the Cafe's walls in a similar fashion to his studio...in an offhand collage fashion with tape showing.

One wall features preparatory drawings for "Songs on the Green Line." The other focuses on editorial illustrations, including work done on assignment for many widely known publications.

Labels: Green Line Art Projects, Green Line Cafe

Friday, November 16, 2007

new show : green line art projects

I've decided to begin posting here about the exhibitions I do at my cafes. With three locations, it's quite a big job. At two of the locations I focus on local artists. And at the third this past year I've begun to bring in work from connections I have around the country. I'm ambivalent about cafes trying to be galleries. But more recently, with the large audience of hundreds of customers a day, I've realized I have an opportunity to give artists a broad kind of exposure they wouldn't get in a traditional gallery. Green Line Art Projects is still a grass-roots, informal, mostly non-commercial affair at this point. I pretty much show what I think will work in a given space. As a "program" it is way less focused aesthetically than an actual gallery would be. But in the past year it feels like this aspect of the cafe has really grown and strengthened. The shows are getting noticed and reviewed. It has taken a lot of time and energy away from my personal studio work the last months, but it feels like good work to be doing. We have two new shows coming up. Here's info about the first of the two:

Brae Howard
China Portraits
Thru December 2007
The Other Green Line, 4305 Locust Street

In 2005, Philadelphia-based photographer Brae Howard lived in China for 10 months, teaching English, while documenting the people and absorbing their rich culture. She quickly felt at home in their culture and deeply admired their ways of thinking, their whimsical combinations of colors and patterns, their natural sense of community, and their easy humility. Most of the photographs are of strangers on the streets and some are of her students. The photographs are characterized by the warmth and natural fondness felt towards her subjects.

Labels: Green Line Art Projects, Green Line Cafe