The sun is beating down in South Philadelphia. One of the best parts of summer in my neighborhood is Bob’s urban garden.
It’s hot enough to make fish soup in the koi pond!
I wonder what kind of plant this is?
This picture is from earlier in the summer.
Some pictures from the one hundredth and twenty third annual student exhibition at Fleisher Art Memorial. Click on each picture to see the artist and the name of the work.
I went to Cherry Street Pier with the Color Wheels gang last week. It was the first Color Wheels outing I’ve been on for more than a year,
The art project was drawing the Ben Franklin Bridge which is right next to Cherry Street Pier.
It’s not an easy task to draw a suspension bridge, even with an army of erasers and rulers. But lead artist Maureen Duffy helped a lot of people tackle the project and walk away with drawings. Here are some I got to photograph.
One of the best ways to see Philadelphia is to walk it. Here are some pictures I took on a stroll to Northern Liberties from my own neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
Every Spring for a week or so, the flowering trees in Philadelphia burst into bloom all over the city.
Everywhere you look, the trees are showing off their blossoms like they’re in a competition to see who can be the showiest.
The party lasts about a week and then it’s over. Enjoy it while you can.
Last week’s post which included a link to a film about the artist Judy Chicago got me thinking. If being an artist is challenging, being a woman artist is even more so. I saw a great exhibit at the Tate Modern a couple of years ago on the Guerilla Girls and one of my favorite parts of the show was their Advantages of Being a Woman Artist Poster. You can get a look at it here. And Jane Dunnewold has produced another excellent video, this one on Women Abstract Expressionists. You can watch that here.
I was not familiar with the work of Mildred Greenberg although I had known her daughter, Susan for many years and at one time we had even worked in the same office. Ancient history. We fell out of touch and the years passed. Then we got reacquainted, this time through my husband. And before the Coronavirus shut everything down, Susan invited us to the opening of a retrospective of her mother’s work presented by InLiquid, a Philadelphia Arts organization, ELECTRICITY: From the Mind of Mildred Greenberg.
Mildred Elfman Greenberg hailed from Philadelphia and much of her early work was produced for the W.P.A.s Federal Art Project during the Depression. Her bio from the British Museum, one of the many museums that have her work in their collection reads as follows. Painter and printmaker. Born as Elfman to Russian immigrant father and American mother in Philadelphia, where lived most of her life. Married Samuel Greenberg. Graduated from Moore Institute of art and Design in 1934; WPA 1940. No work between end WWII and 1974. That’s thirty years without making art. I believe at this time that the family had relocated from Philadelphia to California. It’s my understanding that Greenberg resumed her art career after moving back to Philadelphia in the 1970’s.
Later work
You can read more about Mildred Elfman Greenberg here.
I had some time after a visit to the hand doctor today, so I decided to check out the Philadelphia Fashion District.
The Gallery Shopping Mall in downtown Philadelphia has been completely renovated and reopened to the public in September as  Philadelphia Fashion District. No one shops at malls anymore, so the developers couldn’t just follow the old model of retailing in a renovated space. So in addition to the standard mall retail therapy establishments, the Fashion District is offering some intriguing opportunities for artists, makers, and entrepreneurs.
The Fashion District has invested one million dollars for art installations geared to “making museum-caliber art more accessible to the city, while also elevating the beauty of The District.” The Bridgette Mayer Gallery has a display there with art for sale.
Conrad Benner, whose blog StreetsDept.com, chronicles street art in Philadelphia, has been charged with curating an exhibit of the work of Philadelphia street artists. These works are currently on display on the lower (concourse) level of the Fashion District through the end of this year.
The Fashion District has provided space for RecPhilly, an organization who provides co-working space, recording studios, visual labs & conference rooms for creatives. RecPhilly membership is financially accessible and has proven to so popular that there is now a waitlist. But new memberships are sure to open up in the future. Read more about RecPhilly on their website here.
The Fashion District is sponsoring more art-related events than I’ve written about here as well as planning to open up movie theaters, restaurants and performance spaces. They are trying to do a lot and we’ll see how it goes. Here are some pictures.
I’ve written about public memorials before on this blog, but I have never seen one quite like the Memorial to the Lost.
Philadelphia lost a lot of people to gun violence last year. Michelle Tamika Washington, Rasul Benson, and Steven Wallace are three names on forty t-shirts hanging outside the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany on South 13th Street in Philadelphia.
  Guns murdered 295 Philadelphia residents last year. There were many more shooting victims who did not die.
The organization behind the memorial is Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence, Their literature describes the point of the memorial: “Each shirt has the name, age, and the date of the victim’s death. Each name represents a whole human being, a child of God. Each one deserves to be remembered. Each death deserves to be noted and mourned.” Â
The Philadelphia Obituary Project has a similar philosophy,
If you are interested in the movement to end gun violence, you can follow Heeding God’s call on their Facebook page which also contains information on volunteering and donating.
Jeweler’s Row is a Philadelphia treasure the future of which is being threatened by potential unbridled development.  Jeweler’s Row, located on the 700 block of Sansom Street, was not always the seat of the Philadelphia jewelry industry, having been home to the printing and engraving trades before morphing into a jewelry district around the 1880’s.  Many jewelry store proprietors from the Delaware valley and South Jersey made weekly trips to Jeweler’s Row to drop off and collect repair jobs, replenish their stock and to meet with their fellow jewelers to talk business.
A developer sold a brace of buildings to Toll Brothers Builders in 2017 and Toll Brothers got permission to tear down the buildings to erect a high-rise apartment building. There was plenty of opposition from the neighborhood and community groups but in the end it didn’t matter.
Last week, I got to tour 708 Sansom Street which is one of the buildings slated to be demolished. It is a cavernous four-story building with tin ceilings and ornate hardware. As I walked from floor to floor, I could see that the tenants, the majority of whom were manufacturing jewelers, were in the process of moving their equipment out of the building and finding new space for their businesses and studios.
I imagine that 708 Sansom Street supported many families over the years and that its tenants were a close-knit bunch. Now it is like a ghost town.
Most of the former tenants have found new space but it has not been easy. Many of them have had to relocate away from Sansom Street. 
While it’s true that the only constant in life is change, and that the face of the jewelry business is changing, there is still room for places like Jeweler’s Row. These business districts and manufacturing centers still serve a purpose. But then again, you never really miss something until it’s gone.
This is the best old Mummers video I have seen to date. It’s from 1930 but it looks contemporary.
From the website: “Old film of a New Years Day Parade in Philadelphia, USA on January 1, 1930. This is raw footage from the early Movietone sound cameras. This footage is particularly neat because most parades of the time were captured from a far distance. Worked on footage and sound a bit. Amazing!” Â
I agree!
And do check out Guy Jones’ channel on YouTube for more incredible videos.
For more Mummers posts from this site, press here.
Ornamento 