It's always prudent to be skeptical of museum sales pitches. As proof, I offer the exhibition eccentrically titled "here." at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The museum describes this survey of current art as "challenging the presumption that globalization makes regional and national identity [in art] irrelevant."
The show further declares that "the drive toward global standardization has resulted in a reconfiguration of regional identity in which place, the local, and a sense of shared history take on a renewed significance."
In other words, "here." isn't reviving the parochial, mostly rural, and excessively romanticized culture of the Depression-era movement called regionalism, identified with painters such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Instead, art being created outside major art centers - New York, Los Angeles - is telling us that the assertion of regional character is a positive development, a corrective to the "homogenizing effects of globalism."
In fact, the experience of visiting "here." emphatically contradicts that claim. Even though it represents six important regional art centers across the United States, it fails to communicate much sense of regional variety, difference, or idiosyncrasies.
Rather, the show affirms that current art has become increasingly homogenized both conceptually and materially.
Despite proceeding from the idea that a sense of place "infiltrates and influences each artist's work in diverse and complicated ways," the exhibition doesn't demonstrate that this notion is in any way novel or exceptional.
Throughout history, artists, writers, and composers have always responded to their surroundings, particularly in their formative years. They could hardly do otherwise - all art is shaped to varying degrees by particular cultural environments in which geography, history, and emotional conditioning play their parts.
The exhibition correctly identifies the role of place in art-making, especially the fact that "place" involves more than grid coordinates. It's also true that some work in "here." is identifiably location-specific, particularly for viewers who live in or near those locations.
Yet the assertion that "here." represents an invigorated and more viable form of regional expression, a counterweight to global standardization of art, just doesn't stand up.
Granted, the show does offer a stimulating cross-section of what's going on in the country outside large art centers. Non-Whitney Biennial examinations of American art aren't so common that they can be safely ignored. This one has the added appeal of a Philadelphia component.
Academy curator Julien Robson not only had the idea of sampling new art in regional centers of activity, he was inspired to do so with collaborators. Consequently, the show has six curators, each responsible for choosing four artists from his or her area.
Besides Philadelphia, they are Cincinnati; Detroit; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Kansas City, Kansas; and Phoenix. The bias is decidedly East-Midwest, but when you see the exhibition you quickly realize that it probably would have looked similar if Robson had partnered Philadelphia with Miami, Seattle, Houston, Boston, and Denver.
While the show purports to champion regionalism, it isn't installed that way, which tends to reinforce the perception that "regional art" no longer exists. All the larger works and the installations are downstairs in the Hamilton building, while two-dimensional pieces and videos are upstairs.
I'm not going to list all 24 artists except for the locals - Lewis Colburn, Jennifer Levonian, Tim Portlock, and the duo (Dan Murphy and Anthony Smyrski) called Megawords.
Yet I am going to point out, apropos of the influence of "place" on inspiration, that the majority aren't native to the cities they represent. Only a few were born where they live, and many have skipped around a bit.
The most intriguing is Chido Johnson, who represents Detroit but whose art derives from being born and growing up in Africa, in Zimbabwe and Zambia. His art suggests that he's black but his ancestry is white; yet Shona, not English, was his first language. What sort of "regionalism" does his experience embody?
In their catalog statements, most of the artists struggle to rationalize how "place" informs their art, but few are persuasive. A few do make a solid connection, however, none more so than Liz Cohen, born in Phoenix, but representing Detroit.
Through two videos and large color photographs, Cohen blends two disparate auto cultures, that of the Latino low-rider with the proletarian East German workers' car, the Trabant.
After apprenticing for eight years in auto-body and fabrication shops, Cohen built her own "Trabantino" hybrid, with which she poses provocatively in various bikinis.
The work of the Philadelphia artists is perhaps the most consistently evocative of place. Portlock's large inkjet prints, which originate as photographs that he manipulates in his computer, depict a city resembling Philadelphia that looks both mythical and abandoned.
Colburn juxtaposes a small-scale section of the Market-Frankford El he can see from his studio window with slabs of pastel-colored building panels that symbolize the gentrification going on in his Kensington neighborhood.
Levonian also addresses Kensington gentrification, through a video, The Oven Sky, composed from animated watercolor cutouts (with music by Rachel Mason). Levonian is one of a number of artists who have adopted this labor-intensive stop-motion process to achieve the equivalent of a handmade look, as compared with one that's computer-generated.
(North Carolinian Glenda Wharton also uses hand-drawn animation, as a way to transform memories and dream sequences into compelling narrative. Her video The Zo, 5,000 drawings made over five years, is one of the stars of the exhibition.)
Finally, the Philadelphia cohort offers Megawords, the tabloid-format magazine self-published by Murphy and Smyrski and distributed free, including in the exhibition. Perversely, the current issue is almost all photographs, credited but maddeningly uncaptioned.
