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Philadelphia WCA Chapter
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Reset Gallery Emerges with Collaborative Show
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Hollywood, Ending? Bruce Graham's
"According to Goldman"
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Putting the Urban Art onto Market Street - Union
237 Gallery
Smita Rao - Layered Landscape Luminates
Lushly in Lahaska
Roxborough-Manayunk's Spellbinding
Artist, Kate Moran
Handling Images and Holding on to
Innocence with Singer / Songwriter Joe Webber
"King Otep" - D.J. Otis the
Rigger
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Modern Goddesses: Kerisa West - Painter
Mickey
Roker The Voltan of Ortlieb's Jazzhaus
- Eric Alexander at
Chris' Jazz Cafe
- A.K.A. Gene Shay
Columns
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A Modern Girl's Guide to Philadelphia
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Artist Ivey: Genuine Outsider
Propensities
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Trouble Everyday CD Release
Show/Band Interview
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Poetry and Prose
- Mercator Projection
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- The Indians Or The Ghost Dance
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Artist Ivey: Genuine Outsider
Propensities
by F.D. Walsh
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"Art
has always been political." Photo, Frank Walsh |
Another one of the great, fine, fairly undiscovered artists in
Philadelphia is the sculptor/ painter "Ivey," who resides on
North 33rd Street in Powelton Village and sustains a studio on American
Street (a.k.a. North 'Two' Street) in the Northern Liberties section of
the city. I say undiscovered, but there is no reason for this state of
negligence on the part of the community, yet at the same time probably
plenty of rationales on the part of the institutional and academic arts
and culture establishment, such as it exists invisibly and quietly, are
directed against this creative titan because of his political and
genuine outsider propensities. Otherwise, this is an individual who
works in the monumental and populist matrix of artistic expression.
"Art has always been political," Ivey said. "It's
subject is always historic time. Sculpture marks time and is
political".
That's how Ivey initiated the interview seated near a window of his
sunny third floor work room, where I was accompanied west Philly's 18th
Century wit and iconoclast Karl Wenclas, who is the publicity director
for the infamous Underground Literary Alliance and our friend Vic
Thompson.We were sitting, spellbound for nearly two hours, listening to
the artist's fascinating account of his formative years in Austin at the
University of Texas, as an undergrad and grad student, melding his
impressive take on the history, social import, and the legacy of Modern
and Contemporary Art and culture with tales of equally substantial
political activism. He tells of civil rights protests in which he
participated during high school in Louisiana in 1963, up through
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| Ivey
relaxes at home, reading a copy of 'PAW Print'. Photo, Frank Walsh |
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his
working a bit later for Nixon, John Towers--- even LBJ, whereon in
Texas, his baptism by radicalism began. He remarks about his publicly
challenging the Philadelphia police on South Broad Street in the 1980's
while protesting with Act Up!' and his involvement with an artists
coalition of that day, the Art Emergency Alliance, which fought
censorship and nepotism in the arts and funding establishment.
"That group was defeated by increasing corporate interest and
growing nationalism, the same things that now control the Republican and
Democratic parties," Ivey resignedly but winsomely remarked. But he
further qualified this. "Money does of course matter and art is not
just one thing, according to somebody's views and ideas about what art
should or should not be... The artist is very good about slipping out
and changing to escape those kind of things... It's only wrong when this
is the only way to do your art... to get funding and exposure. That's
what's going on now."
We were also treated to Ivey's vision of the mushrooming affects of
American's millennial technological explosion, where, in inspired detail
bordering on well-conceived science fiction or horror- fantasy power
pop, the artist reflected on how technology is way over the head of
human beings, is spiraling out of control and may well destroy us.
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"Folk
Art speaks more strongly than academic artistic standards."
Photo, Frank Walsh |
I turned to one of Ivey's grand sculptures in the room, a scale model
constructed with superb craftsmanship of the Fat Boy atomic bomb dropped
on Japan. The piece is called, "Homage to the Twentieth
Century." An aesthetic shiver ran up my spine, while I talked to
Ivey about his employment of Folk Art motifs that are both salient, and,
to which the artist subtly alludes, in his work.
"Folk Art speaks more strongly than academic artistic
standards," Ivey said.
Some of the other pieces that have blown me away, which I've seen
over the last few years are the "9- 11" monument and the
massive, absolutely terrifying beauty, "Ground Zero. Both pieces
exhibited at the Painted Bride last November. Then there is Ivey's
touching sculptural hagiography attributed to victims of the Aids
epidemic, "Saint Sebastian." His painted panels for his
work-in-progress, "Baghdad" are profound. I think about his
legacy of exhibiting at Philly's University of the Arts and the
Alternative Museum in New York City. Ivey sums up his career as a
work-in-progress.
"[It's] iconography but in motion, striving intently at ...
embracing all aspects again of our inheritance."
At least as Philadelphians--- but perhaps more so as Americans, in a
time of empire, or just as each of us is but another animal on the
endangered species list, the man is right.
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