Entryways: Xenobia Bailey @ ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia - Univesity of Pennsylvania - A Site-Specific Installation

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 

Through August 9, 2026

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

In July 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA), unveiled a striking new public artwork as part of ICA’s annual Entryways commission by visionary artist Xenobia Bailey. Spanning 400 square feet, the site-specific installation transforms ICA’s façade with a “Funktional” design and visionary illusion inspired by domestic crochet, natural cosmologies, masquerading culture, and local Philadelphia legend Sun Ra’s artistic philosophy. Entryways: Xenobia Bailey was developed in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for interiors, and is on view through August 9, 2026.

“Entryways: Xenobia Bailey continues our partnership with Maharam to transform ICA’s entrance into a space for experimentation,” said Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator and Interim Director. “ICA champions exploration and public engagement in meaningful ways, and local artist Xenobia Bailey’s site-specific work will do just that, inspiring visitors and redefining the way we remix, and they encounter, our space.”

For the Entryways commission, Xenobia Bailey began by crocheting decorative elements of vibrant yarn, before draping these crochet afghans over a ladder and photographing them. These images were digitally composed into the work’s centerpiece: a figure of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, whose Philadelphia-based jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra embodied a holistic Black cosmology and philosophy. Bailey drew inspiration from masquerading traditions—used to channel ancestral spirits—and memories of homemakers such as her mother, who transformed household furniture pieces by draping colorful crochet textiles over them. Astrological symbols orbit the figure and reappear across the building’s surface. Later this year, Xenobia Bailey will also introduce a digital element to her process for the first time. An Augmented Reality (AR) feature extend the installation into an interactive realm and virtually suspend the masquerade designs, underscoring their multidimensionality and further evolving a “Funktional” Black aesthetics into the future. Deploying intuitive, organic improvisation, Xenobia Bailey translates the frequencies of Sun Ra’s music into a symphony of crochet stitches, colors, and forms that come to life through AR. Honoring Sun Ra’s ability to bring the frequency of a Black cosmic aesthetic into material culture and lifestyle and using textiles as animating masks that energize space, Bailey’s Entryways design reimagines ICA’s façade as that of Sun Ra’s spirit welcoming visitors and passersby.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

“In this expansive new commission, Xenobia Bailey draws on the legacies of Black utilitarian makers, including her own maternal lineage, from whom she inherited her ‘Funky’ textile aesthetics. She brings her medium of crochet, which she associates with domestic and sharecropping textile craft, into conversation with the architecture of ICA,” remarks Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator. “Bailey carries this spatial expansion into the all-encompassing experimental cosmos of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, who surveys Philadelphia from above. Bailey adds to this Funk-tional orbit a towering masquerader.”

Entryways is a continuation of Bailey’s ongoing, multi-part, research project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, a series she began in 1999 to build a distinctly African American aesthetic—one she experienced in her childhood, but had not seen represented in her academic industrial design education. Bailey’s body of crochet work, developed since 1984, stands as a testament to evolving textile material culture “funktioning” simultaneously as a source of sanctuary, comfort, historical preservation, and cultural identity. Born in Seattle and raised in rural and urban Washington, Bailey’s early life was shaped by Northwest forestry seasonal rhythms and land and stream-based living, guided by tools like the farmer’s almanac. Informed by this upbringing of being in sync with the natural environment, as well as thorough research on independent historical and contemporary radical elite Black communities, Bailey's work contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the material culture of funk, and emphasizes research, experimentation, development, and sustainable socio-economic models.

Artist Xenobia Bailey

Internationally recognized artist Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA) produces artworks and installations inspired by urban material culture and rural African-American homemakers. A student of ethnomusicology and industrial design, Bailey is well known for her crocheted sculptural headwear, wall hangings, and tents that articulate the utilitarian material crafts of the funk counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Using fiber and found items as her primary materials, Bailey produces a range of pieces that frequently riff on traditional home furnishings with inventive twists of color and texture.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey is commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) and developed in partnership with Maharam as an initiative of Maharam Digital Projects. The installation is curated by Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA)

July 12, 2025 –– August 9, 2026

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images @ ICA Philadelphia - Retrospective Exhibition

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

Through December 7, 2025

Mavis Pusey with her work Within Manhattan 

Image courtesy of Studio Museum in Harlem

For the first time, the life and work of Jamaica-born artist MAVIS PUSEY (1928-2019) is fully explored in a major museum survey. Through December 7, 2025, ICA Philadelphia presents Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, an extensive retrospective spanning the prolific artist’s 50-year career. Featuring more than 60 works – including paintings, drawings, and prints – as well as archival materials, the exhibition explores the influences that led Pusey to develop her unique visual language through experimentation with geometric abstraction. Tracing her journey from Jamaica to New York, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Virginia, Mobile Images demonstrates the evolution of Pusey’s work throughout her life, and offers a long-overdue reexamination of her impact on American abstraction and beyond.

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images was curated by Hallie Ringle, Interim Director and Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator of the ICA Philadelphia, with Kiki Teshome, Curatorial Assistant at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where it will travel in Spring 2027. The exhibition is supported by extensive research and preservation initiatives conducted in partnership with the Getty Research Institute and Getty Conservation Institute with significant support from the Mellon Foundation. ICA hosted a two-day symposium, bringing together scholars, artists, community leaders, and the public to discuss Pusey’s legacy and the continued relevance of her work today. 

“It has been a monumental and collaborative process to bring this project to fruition. Culminating over a decade of partnership, working initially with the artist herself and collaborating alongside Thelma Golden and the Studio Museum, the exhibition marks the first time that Pusey’s work will be on view publicly in a comprehensive manner,” remarks Hallie Ringle. “Our goal is to enable audiences to appreciate the breadth and evolution of Pusey’s work within a deeply researched framework, and for the public, scholars, and artists alike to be able to draw connections between her work and key art historical narratives and contemporary practices.”

While Pusey’s dedication to geometric abstraction earned her recognition from key curatorial voices during her lifetime, like Howardina Pindell, her work remains largely overlooked. Born and raised in Retreat, Jamaica, she created rich abstract paintings and works on paper inspired by her wide-ranging interests in fashion, print-making, and the urban environment of cities she lived in throughout her life. Mavis Pusey studied at the Art Students League under Will Barnet (1961–1965) and, later, worked at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (1969–1972), which was frequented by significant figures such as Emma Amos, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Melvin Edwards, among others. A passionate educator, she taught for some time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia as she continued to develop her own studio work.

Mavis Pusey resisted pressures to create figurative, overtly socio-political work and remained committed to working in abstraction, retaining a focused thematic vision of her work throughout her career. However, discriminatory hiring practices that barred her from tenured teaching positions, and a late-in-life illness further contributed to the fragmentation and near-loss of her artistic archive. Starting in 2015, Hallie Ringle, who at the time served as Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum, worked closely with the artist; Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum; and the team at the Studio Museum to painstakingly reassemble her body of work before her death in 2019, including the acquisition of a large portion of Pusey’s work for the Studio Museum’s collection. With her appointment at ICA, Hallie Ringle continued to advance her research, prompting a close collaboration between ICA and the Studio Museum on comprehensive conservation and research initiatives to preserve the artist’s legacy.

Thelma Golden said, “Mavis Pusey was a truly pioneering artist of the abstract movement who should be rightfully recognized for her formal precision and boundless curiosity. My immense gratitude goes to Hallie Ringle for her unwavering care and research throughout this process and to the entire team at ICA Philadelphia and the Studio Museum, especially Kiki Teshome, for their dedication and attention over the course of this exhibition’s planning.”

Mavis Pusey 

Paris, Mars – Juin, 1968 

Image courtesy of the Estate of Mavis Pusey

Unfolding across ICA’s first and second floors, Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images is organized in thematic sections that explore important motifs in her work, including the body, music, and demolition/construction. The exhibition will debut seven newly discovered paintings, on view for the first time alongside key works moving through each period of Pusey’s creative trajectory. Although some of Pusey’s works are over 50 years old, the themes addressed connect deeply to contemporary life. Her “Broken Construction” series (1960s–1990s) explores ideas of destruction and renewal as a metaphor for societal change. Her compositions, which show bricks and boards falling to the ground, are not dystopian realities but rather hopeful imaginings of the future. Another highlight are Pusey’s works created in reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and student protests in Paris during the 1960s. After witnessing the student protests in Paris, Pusey created several prints inspired by the movement, including Paris, Mars - Juin (1968) that shows the city in flames. Eric (1968), named after a friend, was inspired by an encounter she had with the French police: the periphery of the print is minimalist in form and grows increasingly chaotic towards the center, representing the emotional turmoil Eric felt under his cool demeanor. These and other works are contextualized by the inclusion of photographs, notes, and ephemera from Pusey’s lifetime, which offer historical and personal insight into the artist’s boundary-pushing body of work.

Conservation: Much of Pusey's work has needed conservation, and experts across the country have been working to restore her paintings and prints. As part of this initiative, ICA Philadelphia and the Studio Museum are working collaboratively with the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute to jointly conduct a thorough study of Pusey’s work. The study includes focused technical analysis of the artist materials and conserving her works on paper. All of Getty’s findings was published so that the technical aspects of Pusey’s practice is made broadly accessible to the public.

Exhibition Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication documenting Pusey’s creative practice. Designed by Miko McGinty, the catalog includes forewords by Thelma Golden and Hallie Ringle, an introduction by Ringle, guest essays, a roundtable on experimental music and its impact on Pusey’s work, and an archive essay by Kiki Teshome. The publication is co-published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, July 12 - December 7, 2025

Isaac Tin Wei Lin @ Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia - 'Intertwined Infinities' Exhibition

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities 

Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia 

November 20, 2025 — January 17, 2026 

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities, 2025 

Flashe and acrylic gouache on linen 

16 ⅛ × 12 ½ in (41 × 31.8 cm), ILI 662

© Isaac Tin Wei Lin, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman

Fleisher/Ollman presents Intertwined Infinities, a solo exhibition with Isaac Tin Wei Lin featuring paintings on paper, panel, and canvas; and drawings on paper and photographs. Lin continues his ongoing exploration of how calligraphic gestures can be melded with abstract elements like lattices, biomorphs, and op-art shapes. A new theme in his work are images of tentacle and vine forms that appear part animal part plant. Lin’s paintings often reference patterns and structures found in nature bringing to mind single cellular organisms, plants, DNA helices, and clouds. Lin’s abstraction can also transcend the terrestrial and the somatic and move outward into the cosmos where constellations pulsate with colorful vibrancy and alien life forms sprout from strange vases and egg-like sacs. While Lin’s practice is distinctly his own, his work nonetheless resonates with the history of 20th century abstraction by artists such as Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; and the extreme patterning of contemporary artists like Barry McGee and Andrew Jeffrey Wright.

Lin’s play between the earthly and the cosmic might be the fruit of his 2025 residency at Oreum on the volcanic island of Jeju, South Korea. This unusual setting allowed for a new experience where he engaged with the wonders of a primordial landscape that evoke both the origins of our planet and the universe itself. The drawings on photographs on view in the exhibition depict the otherworldly lava rock formations on Jeju as well as other sites he visited while traveling in Asia. The Oreum residency was a much needed respite from a period in Lin’s life marked by alienation and doubt, where he found time to make paintings that he views as “meditations on absence, temporality, gravity and the fabric of space, emptiness and fullness—how both can seem the same.”

Isaac Tin Wei Lin (b. 1976; lives and works Philadelphia, PA) has had solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, the Asian Arts Initiative, the Print Center, Fleisher/Ollman, and Gallery 543 at URBN (all in Philadelphia); Park Life, Queen’s Nails Annex, Woodward Flats, RVCA, and Needles and Pens (all in San Francisco); and Lamp Harajuku, Tokyo. Isaac Tin Wei Lin participated with the DFW collective in Arts Le Havre, 2012 Contemporary Art Biennial, France. He has been featured in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Fleisher/Ollman, Painted Bride Arts Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (all in Philadelphia); the Hole, Bravin Lee, and Franklin Parrasch (all in New York); MASS Gallery, Austin; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Somerset House, London, UK; and Scooters for Peace, Tokyo, among others. Isaac Tin Wei Lin has been commissioned to paint several large-scale murals, including three through Mural Arts Philadelphia; a multi-story stairway mural for Facebook's headquarters in San Francisco; and a thirteen-story mural in Heerlen, the Netherlands, commissioned by Stichting Street Art Foundation. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Isaac Tin Wei Lin was a resident at Oreum, Jeju Island, South Korea in 2025.

FLEISHER/OLLMAN

915 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia PA 19123

www.fleisher-ollmangallery.com

Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation' Exhibition

Jane Irish 

An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia 

October 3 – November 15, 2025 

Jane Irish 

Archimedean Spiral, 2024

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 56 x 50 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Jane Irish (b. 1955). This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Excavating traumas of war and colonialism and embedding these histories into elaborate architectural settings, Irish’s disorienting scenes are layered with multiple visual narratives. Of this new body of work, the artist says:

“Painting representationally or figuratively can be an act of imagination, but entails a code of truth, especially of the interior… The depictions of colonialism and the luxury items in French chateaus, which are often my subject matters, have an overt or covert connection to world systems of exploitation, including especially French involvement in Indochina...I try to exploit a certain doubleness: a harsh critique coexisting with the optimism of political prefiguration.”

Foregrounded by prefigurative politics—an activist approach to ideating a future society—her work analyzes the roots of Western painting and exposes its violent remnants. Within the title, “An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation”, she reinterprets the concept of symbiosis drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem Eureka. Focusing on a reciprocal adaptation of ideas and mediums, Irish understands how these relations produce a “prefiguration of peace.” Her persistent interest in the cultural memory of the American War in Vietnam reappears in these new works, including references to the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), which the artist has worked with for decades. 

Jane Irish 

Return, 2025 

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 55 x 64 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

In a large painting on bamboo paper titled Our Testimony (2025), she embosses the VVAW preamble from a 1971 U.S. Congressional record atop an ornately decorated living room. In another painting titled Agent Orange (2025), Jane Irish calls to mind the pollutant used in herbicidal warfare programs with a muddy, darkened palette, while mutating, floating apparitions haunt the room and her 2021 painting Phosphorous hangs on the wall. Of the painting, Jane Irish says,  “I emphasize the violence in the room’s decor. With a breaking heart I ask, ‘Why wouldn’t we repeat and preserve the abuse and killing since we idolize our lives around these acts?’”

Meta references continue in Return (2025), where she transforms her series of colonial scenes titled Decay Puits Sauvage (2025) into a phantasmic wallpaper. Paintings of the decaying wall are shown alongside the semi-fictionalized setting in Return, signaling a spiral of meaning and “coevolution.” Juxtaposing images of colonial violence with the indigenous Vietnamese cloud flooring, Irish’s room becomes both contemplative and confrontational.

Also on view is a large-scale study for Irish’s Renaissance-style ceiling painting titled Cosmos Beyond Atrocity (2024), which was commissioned for the new building of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounting the study as a wallpaper and hanging the drawings in front, the installation presents Irish’s adaptive process to illuminate the layered temporalities and spatial collisions.

Artist Jane Irish

Jane Irish (b. 1955) received her MFA in 1980 from Queens College, CUNY. She got her start as an artist in the East Village in the 1980s and moved to Philadelphia in 1982. 

She has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. 

She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant (2025), a BAU Institute Arts Residency Award from the Camargo Foundation (2025), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2024), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2011), a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009), a Painting Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts (1984), and a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). 

Her work is held in public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Pat Steir @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'Before the Rain' Exhibition

Pat Steir: Before the Rain 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Pat Steir 

Winter Daylight, 2021-22 

Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Before the Rain, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Pat Steir. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the Locks Gallery.

A monumental figure in contemporary painting, Pat Steir developed her distinctive style of Waterfall paintings in the 1980s, embedding deep, lyrical meaning in the free expression of paint. Surrendering herself to chance and “non-intention”, Steir’s process of dripping, pouring, and throwing paint marked a defining moment in her exploration of materiality and of the artist’s role in creation, opening a way for her continued mastery of this dance between paint, gravity, gesture and ground.

Steir’s new works find her building upon and refining these guiding variables. Against a darkened ground, as seen in Many Colors II (Blue) (2022) and Winter Daylight (2021-22), dripping multi-colored brushstrokes act as prisms within the encompassing layers of poured paint while precise white lines recall her underlying interest in grids and matrices.

Pat Steir 

Monday Circus, 2022-23

Oil on canvas, 108 x 72 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

In tandem with the darkened palette and hypnotic allure of these paintings, Steir’s nomenclature also entwines itself with a certain poetics, inspiring viewers not just to look but to ruminate. The artist has said, “[T]he poetry of the title is part of the picture for me. It’s absolutely the same thing.” Take Monday Circus (2022-23), where swinging strokes of chartreuse, maroon, and orange conjure a myriad of evocations from playful to melancholic. In her succinct yet nuanced phrases, such as One Green One (2025), Pat Steir incorporates rhythm in the language of her titles that helps instill the image in the “mind’s eye.”  

Artist Pat Steir

Pat Steir (b. 1938) was born in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. 

Throughout her renowned career, she has been the focus of numerous solo museum exhibitions and site-specific installations. 

Pat Steir was the recipient of a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship (1981), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1973), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute (1991) and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001). 

She is a founding board member of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and the landmark feminist journal, ‘Heresies’. 

Her work is represented in major collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Gallery, London.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Sebastian Errazuriz @ Philadelphia Art Museum - 'Double Take' Mid-career Survey Exhibition

Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take

Philadelphia Art Museum

November 22, 2025 – August 16, 2026

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Lightning Strike Lamp, 2025

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Chicken Lamp III, 2014

Edition of 12 

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

The Represented Self, 2020 

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

The Represented Self, 2020 

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take, a mid-career survey by artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz (b. 1977, Chile). The exhibition explores Errazuriz’s multi-hyphenate practice spanning art, craft, design, and technology, from antiquity-inspired furniture to multimedia work informed by artificial intelligence.  

Alongside the exhibition, Sebastian Errazuriz will be honored with the 39th Collab Design Excellence Award. Collab is the museum's affinity group for modern and contemporary design and has celebrated diverse international designers who have made important contributions that advance all disciplines of design. Collab was established in 1986 and presents the award annually. Previous awardees have included Florence Knoll Bassett, Naoto Fukasawa, Zaha Hadid, Ingo Maurer, George Nakashima, Gaetano Pesce, Patricia Urquiola, and Marcel Wanders, among others.  

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Magistral Chest, 2014

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Bust Shelf Green Marble, 2018

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Bust Shelf Green Marble (Detail), 2018

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

Errazuriz’s creative imagination challenges upheld ideas of what design should be and, moreover, asks what it could be. Embracing humor and appropriation, his limited-edition and unique pieces often have a subtext that goes beyond form or function to include personal narratives, political messages, and cultural commentary. While many of Errazuriz’s pieces are functional, his work upends a number of conventions established within the design industry, including the notions that form should follow function, or that materials should be used where most appropriate.  

Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take presents over 20 years of making, including early conceptual works that take nature and existing found objects as sources of inspiration. The exhibition features furniture, mirrors, and other products that the designer creates from appropriated and digitally manipulated Greco-Roman antiquities from museum collections. Also on display will be a range of the designer’s “kinetic” cabinets, defined by their moveable elements. Errazuriz is interested in disrupting the idea that cabinets must consist of a box with two front doors, regardless of their design. Instead, objects in Double Take propose a dynamic way of living with furniture that rotates, spins, and fans out in different directions.  

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Piano Shelf, 2014

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

IMAGINE, 2025 

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

A final, monumental installation features a full-wall graphic made up of drawings that Sebastian Errazuriz has created through the use of artificial intelligence. Overlaid is a new work, which spells out the word “IMAGINE” in neon lights, the letters flashing in alternating patterns to alight only “AGI” at certain points. Unlike current AI models which are trained for specific tasks, the concept of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, involves systems possessing human-like cognitive abilities, allowing them to learn new skills, adapt to novel situations, and demonstrate common sense and creativity without explicit pre-programming. This focal point of the exhibition explores Errazuriz’s fascination with, and apprehension about, the potential impact of AI on artists, designers, and culture more broadly. 

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Fan Cabinet, 2014

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Narcissus Bowl, 2022

Designed by Sebastian Errazuriz

“The diverse body of work by Sebastian Errazuriz conveys imagination and cleverness, while also bewildering those who encounter it. The pieces are meant to be lived with, but, at the same time, are provocations. They have an air of mystery around their function and meaning,” said Tiffany Lambert, The Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Design. “This survey exemplifies one way to understand and challenge how design can impact our daily lives.” 

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM

Alter Gallery (Gallery 276) 

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting @ Philadelphia Art Museum

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting

Philadelphia Art Museum 

Through November 16, 2025 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Who is Queen), 2020 

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-19 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Figure and Malcolm X), 2020

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-20

Chuck Close 

Self Portrait, 2017 

Screenprint in ninety-one colors 

Sheet: 69 × 57  3/4 inches (175.3 × 146.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x21994(10)

The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting, the first exhibition to spotlight four decades of collaborations between the Brand X printmaking workshop and a diverse roster of contemporary artists. On view through November 16, 2025, the exhibition features more than 80 screenprints by Helen Frankenthaler, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Tschabalala Self, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others.

The exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Brand X Editions Archive to the Philadelphia Art Museum, presenting a selection from the over 400 screenprints given by master printer and founder Robert Blanton. Since establishing the workshop in 1979, Blanton and his team of skilled printers, chromists, and specialists have worked in collaboration with an impressive list of artists to push screenprinting techniques to meet the artists’ varied styles and expressive ambitions. The body of work from Brooklyn-based Brand X builds significantly on the museum’s extensive holdings of historical screenprints, adding major contemporary examples of traditional and experimental techniques. The Philadelphia Art Museum now holds one of the most comprehensive collections of screenprints along with essential archives related to the medium’s history and evolution from commercial tool to vibrant fine-art technique.

Emmanuel Taku

Entanglement, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-three colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-32

Emmanuel Taku

Got You, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-seven colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-33

“It is an honor to be the chosen home for Brand X’s magnificent collection of prints, said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “As expert printmakers, internationally renowned for their craft, Brand X are the true leaders in this field. For a museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with such a rich and dedicated history in printmaking, it is a privilege for us to have this opportunity to welcome our visitors to experience and enjoy this generous gift.”

Deborah Kass

OY/YO, 2011 

Two screenprints, printed in three colors on  paper board 

Framed: 21 1/2 × 20 inches (54.6 × 50.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22034a,b

Deborah Kass (b. 1952)

Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, 2022 

Silkscreen, printed in seven colors on Coventry Rag paper 

Sheet: 57 × 57 inches (144.8 × 144.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-4

On view throughout the galleries are the results of Brand X’s dynamic collaborations across four decades of work. Together, the prints reveal the remarkable versatility of screenprinting. In the first gallery, for instance, works by Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Adam Pendleton, and Mickalene Thomas demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic the richness of paint layers, render a photographic precision, and produce variegated textures and surfaces. These artists expand the technical boundaries of screenprint in their exploration of themes relating to belonging, memory, and self-definition. From the dense, painterly urgency of Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red to the layered intricacy of Mickalene Thomas’s November 1977, each work here shows how, at the Brand X workshop, screenprinting can be stretched, challenged, and transformed in response to an artist’s creative impulses.

Troy Michie 

Doubling, 2019 

Screenprint, Framed: 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22005(6)

Emily Mae Smith 

Poetry (Toy in Blood), 2022 

Screenprint, printed in forty-seven colors 

Sheet:  60 × 45 1/2 inches (152.4 × 115.6 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2024, 105- 2024-30(11)

The exhibition also addresses themes relating to text and language, pattern and decoration, graphic illusion, and landscape and figuration. Eight progressive proofs of Vija Celmins’s Ocean Surface offer a rare view onto the screenprinting process. From print to print, visitors can see how the image was formed cumulatively—by the sequential printing of individual screens, each bearing a single layer of ink. In final form, Celmins’s image materializes through sixteen applications of nuanced grays—an additive and subtle process apt for rendering the depth and detail of the ocean. Throughout the exhibition, equal emphasis is given to the pictorial and the material. Brand X Editions shines light on the technical procedures and the many roles—beyond that of the artist—that are vital to the production of screenprints.

“Just like the work that happens at Brand X, this exhibition and its catalogue were thoroughly collaborative endeavors, said Louis Marchesano, curator of the exhibition and the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation. “The addition of the Brand X Editions Archive, which will continue to grow as the studio produces more editions, goes a long way toward building an authoritative resource on screenprinting at the museum.”

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Rashid Johnson 

Seascape, 2023 

Screenprint, printed in nine colors, with hand, 

applied navy acrylic mixture 

Gift of Brand X  Editions, New York, 2023, 105-2024-9

Rashid Johnson 

Untitled Large Mosaic, 2025

Screenprint, framed: 61 X 105 inches (1 154.9x 266.7 cm)

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x 22005(5)

Extending the exhibition beyond the gallery space, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic), 2025, is displayed in the museum’s Forum Balcony. For over three years, Rashid Johnson and his collaborators at Brand X developed this spectacular 293-color print, combining traditional screenprinting techniques—visible in the flat passages of bold color—with unconventional materials, including wood veneer, mirrored mylar, and cast paper oyster shells. Inspired by Johnson’s low-relief wall mosaics composed of innumerable tile fragments and other bits of material, this project captures Brand X’s enduring commitment to pursuing new levels of technical innovation and experimentation.

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Philadelphia Art Museum curators and paper conservators, an interview with Robert Blanton and David DeSanctis of Brand X, a technical glossary related to the history and technique of screenprint, and an inventory of the archive held by Philadelphia Art Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Louis Marchesano, the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Cultural Affairs and Conservation, with Em Dombrovskaya, the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow; Laurel Garber, the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Emily Friedman, the Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Dallas Museum of Art.

A series of exhibitions by Brand X collaborators including Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler will be shown at the Philadelphia Art Museum through 2028.

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM 

Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the Philadelphia Art Museum

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the Philadelphia Art Museum

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

The Philadelphia Museum of Art reintroduced (October 8, 2025) itself to the city, the nation, and the world as the Philadelphia Art Museum.

The museum has unveiled a new brand that places Philadelphia front and center, celebrating the city's grit creativity, and industrial heritage. Developed with Gretel, a nationally renowned branding, strategy, and design studio, the new identity reflects the museum’s transformation into a more engaging and expansive institution.

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Every design choice deliberately embraces Philadelphia's independent spirit—from custom typography that merges the museum’s institutional heritage with the city’s visual language to reviving the iconic griffin in the logo as protector of the arts. The new brand identity captures Philadelphia’s vibrant culture, reflecting how art influences everyday life and resonates across the city’s diverse communities. It embodies the mission to bring art into the everyday, making the museum accessible, relevant, and deeply connected to the people it serves.

“The Philadelphia Art Museum has long been the cultural heart of the city, and it’s our duty to maintain that role,” said Sasha Suda, George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “Our focus and vision are unabashedly Philadelphian; we’re opening our doors to become more collaborative and future-focused for all.”

 

New Philadelphia Art Museum merch 

Photo by Rob Cusick

New Philadelphia Art Museum merch 

Photo by Rob Cusick

The Philadelphia Art Museum is a local, national, and international treasure that belongs to the city. The rebrand reinforces the museum’s commitment to engaging Philadelphia’s communities and visitors from around the world in dynamic conversations about art and life.

“This project is the result of more than a year of research, collaboration, creative development and iteration,” Ryan Moore, Executive Creative Director and Partner at Gretel, said. “Our main objective was to ‘come down the steps’ by putting the museum in dialogue with its community, which is and always has been the city itself. This new identity reflects the future of the institution: more engaging, more dynamic, and more inviting to new audiences.”

Philadelphia Art Museum

Social Media Social Stickers

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 @ PMA - Philadelphia Museum of Art - A major exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Surrealist movement

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100

Philadelphia Museum of Art

November 8, 2025 – February 16, 2026

Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, born Greece, 1888–1978) 

The Soothsayer's Recompense, 1913 

Oil on canvas, 53 3/8 × 70 7/8 inches (135.6 × 180 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-38

André Masson (French, 1896–1987)

The Landscape of Wonders, 1935 

Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 × 25 3/4 inches (76.5 × 65.4 cm) 

Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 

Bequest, Richard S. Zeisler, 2007, 2007.44

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989) 

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 

(Premonition of Civil War), 1936 

Oil on canvas, 39 5/16 x 39 3/8 inches (99.9 x 100 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-41

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989) 

Aphrodisiac Telephone, 1938 

Plastic and metal, 

8 1/4 × 12 1/4 × 6 1/2 inches (21 × 31.1 × 16.5 cm) 

Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 

The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 96.2 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) presents Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, a major exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Surrealist movement. As the final stop in an ambitious  tour organized with the Centre Pompidou in Paris—and the sole venue in the United States—the PMA will tell the story of Surrealist art, spotlighting the makers who sought out new expressive forms to expand the reach of the creative imagination.

The five touring partners are: the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels), the Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), and the PMA. Each  venue was tasked with presenting a distinct story of Surrealism relevant to their own histories and collections. At the PMA, Dreamworld will provide a chronological installation arranged through six thematic sections, including one, unique to Philadelphia, that focuses on artists who fled from Europe to Mexico and the U.S. during World War II.

In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, poet and artist André Breton addressed what he saw as a crisis of consciousness: at around twenty years of age, he said, humans discard their childlike imaginations to adopt adult sense, decorum, and judgement. Breton believed that the only legitimate aspiration is to obtain a state of freedom, achievable solely by reharnessing the imagination. Surrealism, the movement in literature and art that Breton codified with his manifesto, would continually seek new techniques for exploring the human capacity for astonishment.

The first self-described Surrealists working in Paris rejected the representation of objective reality in art as antithetical to a truer, higher beauty, and instead, sought to produce images with a dreamlike character. The first section of this exhibition, “Waking Dream,” traces the development of Surrealist imagery and experimental techniques across mediums in the 1920s, from the found-object constructions of Man Ray and the collages of Max Ernst to hallucinatory canvases by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí.

Jean (Hans) Arp (French, born Germany [Alsace], 1886–1966) 

Growth, modeled 1938; cast by 1949 

Bronze, 31 1/4 × 12 1/2 × 7 3/8 inches (79.4 × 31.8 × 18.7 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

Gift of Curt Valentin, 1950, 1950-78-1

Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911–2002) 

Morphology (Fantasy Landscape), c. 1939 

Oil on canvas, 12 × 16 1/8 inches (30.5 × 41 cm)

Collection of Andrew S. Teufel

Dorothea Tanning (American, 1910–2012) 

Birthday, 1942 

Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 × 25 1/2 inches (102.2 × 64.8 cm)

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th Anniversary Acquisition. 

Purchased with funds contributed 

by C. K. Williams, II, 1999, 1999-50-1

Dreamworld will then journey through sections exploring the themes of “Natural History” and “Desire.” Capturing a sense of wonder in nature was crucial for the development of Surrealist sensibility. Visitors will encounter enigmatic landscapes and fantastic creatures; torn-paper collages by Hans Arp will be displayed alongside Paul Klee’s vibrant painting Fish Magic (1925), the disorienting photographic landscapes by Lee Miller, and Joseph Cornell’s boxes containing found objects. Nearby, works by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, André Kertész, and others will demonstrate the powerful ways in which photography served the Surrealist interest in eros, or desire, and the reinvention of the erotic body.

A through line of the exhibition is the use of mythology to convey the Surrealist world view. A section titled “Premonition of War” features images of monsters and creatures of strange and terrifying shape, which artists such as Dalí, Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso used to respond to the devastating rise of totalitarianism and war in Europe in the 1930s.

With the outbreak of World War II, many Surrealists working in France left for North America, taking refuge in Caribbean ports, Mexico, and the United States. This is the focus of a section unique to the PMA, entitled “Exiles.” This section features treasured paintings in the PMA’s collection in addition to major loans such as Frida Kahlo's My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936). In New York, Surrealism’s wartime capital, younger artists developed innovative forms of painting in tune with Surrealist methods. Highlights here will include Jackson Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–1943) and Mark Rothko’s Gyrations on Four Planes (1944).

The exhibition’s concluding section, “Magic Art,” focuses on a new type of esotericism that emerged within Surrealism in the aftermath of World War II. Filled with imagery of magical and alchemical beings, celestial figures, and symbols of the occult, this section will feature Leonora Carrington’s The Pleasures of Dagobert (1945), which materializes the magical, metamorphic imaginings of an early-medieval French monarch, and Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957), in which an owl-headed painter uses starlight to bring a painted bird to life.

Remedios Varo (Spanish, 1908–1963) 

Icon, 1945

Oil with mother-of-pearl and gold leaf inlays on wood 

Closed: 23 5/8 × 15 7/16 × 2 1/8 inches 

(60 × 39.2 × 5 .4 cm) 

Open: 23 5/8 × 27 9/16 × 2 1/8 inches 

(60 × 70 × 5.4 cm) 

Colección Malba, 

Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 1997.02

Illustrated by Arshile Gorky (American, born Van Province, 

Ottoman Empire [present-day Turkey], c. 1904–1948) 

Text by André Breton (French, 1896–1966), 

Dust jacket and cover designed by Marcel Duchamp 

(American, born France, 1887–1968), 

Cover of Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares, 1946 

Hardbound book with paper cover design by Marcel Duchamp

Book: 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 inches (23.8 x 16.2 cm)

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

Gift of an anonymous donor, 1988, 1988-8-2

Victor Brauner (Romanian, 1903–1966) 

The Lovers (Messengers of the Number), February, 1947 

Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 × 28 3/4 inches (92 × 73 cm) 

Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris: 

Bequest of Mme Jacqueline Victor Brauner, 1986, AM 1987-1204

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903–1972) 

Untitled (Constellation), c. 1958 

Box construction: wood, metal, cut paper, glass and found objects, 

13 × 19 3/8 × 4 1/4 inches (33 × 49.2 × 10.8 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

Gift of Josephine Albarelli, 2015, 2015-144-5

“Surrealist art has been a focus of our museum since receiving the generous gifts of the Louise and Walter Arensberg collection in 1950 and the bequest of the Albert E. Gallatin collection in 1952,” said Matthew Affron, the museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art. “Today, our permanent collection features outstanding works by a range of artists associated with Surrealism, including Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, and Dorothea Tanning. As the main repository of works by Marcel Duchamp, one of Surrealism’s most influential guiding spirits, the PMA is very proud to build on this monumental exhibition and present it to audiences in the U.S.”

“The PMA has an extraordinary collection of modern art, and through this exhibition, we can offer our visitors a new perspective on Surrealism and showcase the strength of our own collection,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO. “I can’t think of a more perfect way to celebrate 100 years of Surrealism.”

In Philadelphia, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 is curated by Matthew Affron, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, with Danielle Cooke, Exhibition Assistant. It will be accompanied by an illustrated publication by Matthew Affron, detailing the the key motivations, principles, themes, and techniques of Surrealist art from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

PMA - PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

philamuseum.org

Related Posts on this blogzine:

Surrealism and Its Legacy in the United States (Essay, June 2025)

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

The Hepworth Wakefield, 23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

Out of this World: Surreal & Fantastic Art in Photography

Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York, October 3 – November 15, 2024

Mona Kuhn: Between Modernism and Surrealism 

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, 4 April - 25 May 2024

Surrealism Beyond Borders

Tate Modern, London, 24 February 2022 – 29 August 2022

Surrealism and the dream

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 8 October 2013 - 12 January 2014

Dali. All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, April 27 - September 2, 2013

Marcel Duchamp on Display: Optics, Exhibition Installations, Portable Museums

Zabriskie Gallery, New York, March 22 - May 5, 2001

Dreaming with Open Eyes

Israel Museum, Jerusalem, December 22, 2000 - June 2001

Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years 

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth , January 14 - March 17, 1996