The art of Jane Ferry is not quite enigmatic, because it appears to come from a place of deep certainty. In their scribbled lines there is an immediacy and transparency that complements stark words in a leaning hand. The words can feel prophetic or silly — often at the same time— but they are always authentically Jane. In their larger paintings muddy areas are brushed together with the same tender purpose as a child assembling mud pies, and bubblegum pinks and clover greens cleave the surface like giggles. There is an obvious playfulness that feels like they have a running joke with the universe. They are prolific as an artist— all of their friends have at least one Jane print on their walls— and that quickness is a pillar of their process. Ferry’s work feels like a map to understanding a world that is at once star-crossed and bleak, magical and dreary.
I wrote this as a gift for Jane’s birthday. We live in the same home, three blocks away from the Tyler School of Art. They are a printmaking major that recently decided that they don’t want to get an education degree. I have stood my easel behind them so I can watch them paint, holding the brush as far away from the bristles with pianist’s fingers as possible. I see their art more than anyone else’s.
Tyler Printmaking studio, afternoon
I walk through the rooms of the printmaking studio (which has my favorite reproachful “cleanup reminder” signs in all of Tyler) to find Jane. They are working on monoprints made with oil pastels on a sheet of glass, scrawling letters backwards so they will print the right way around. They often have trouble remembering to make their “P” and “B” backwards, a forgotten step that renders serious, often visceral poetry slightly goofy when words like “God” are spelled “Gob”. As I watch Jane write, sometimes the words spring forth from them, and sometimes they seem to be pulled out like venom being sucked from a wound. They are always written quickly. The glass squeaks quietly as Jane scrubs on crimson, outlining their paragraph in swatches of color.
Tyler Painting studio, evening
Purposeful and yet sloppy, they make eight oil paintings on cardboard primed with white gouache. I note that their professor had previously scolded them for letting gouache show through on their canvas paintings, but the painting they are proudest of has gouache as the main background ingredient. (This is the eighth. They stand at their easel looking at it before starting. They ask me what they should paint. I say “soup”. They paint about swallowing their teeth instead of spitting them out.)
My favorite of these eight paintings is a sketchy square with strokes carved back into white with the wrong end of a paintbrush. A blue line encloses the carved area, finalizing its improvisational shape, setting it in stone. It is in Jane’s typical, muddy palette: muted ashy pinks and matcha greens. (Jane had previously been forbidden to use pink by that same painting professor, but the ensuing painting was awful. Pink was allowed again.)
Home, night
Everything Jane makes starts in their journal. They let me look through it, though repeatedly glance over my shoulder as I flip through. Jane is self-conscious about their emotions—namely, about being too emotional. But this is their biggest strength. I once asked them what they think about when they make art. Laughing, they said “my feelings.” We are all grateful Jane has enough feelings to go around.
with a german K was reviled as a stain on the grand history of French classical beauty, and satirized brutally (and hilariously) in pop culture magazines. Seeing one culture’s perception of the aesthetics of another is fascinating, and undoubtedly, throughout history, these perceptions have been fed by xenophobia.
Now, that being said, the experience of being in a brown, dirty city in winter with a migraine is a valuable one. Cubism helps us understand the volatile nature of three-dimensional planes in space, how our eyes automatically seek to judge depth— and our unease when our eyes are confused. Highlighted by this exhibition, though, is how these aspects of Cubism spit in the face of authoritative aesthetics. Picasso was ostracized as a german sympathizer because the french perceived Cubism as “looking German”. This is amusing to me, because while Cubism can appear industrial and cold, it is really an inefficient way to depict things. (Perhaps even a single, but iconic, Dadaist 
work by a german artist would have been informative to the exhibit. One could argue that Cubism is a form of representational Dadaism, but that’s another can of worms.) I think Cubism could very easily be a lens into the psyche of any citizen of a country at war: trying to unite the intact with the disintegrating or splintered, and re-examining everyday objects or peers from harsh and conflicting angles, both which lead to an eventual existential deconstruction.
The pamphlet for this exhibition raises the issue of uniting “two apparently contradictory models”, but really there was no issue at all. To Picasso, those classical line drawings were the equivalent of going back to the drawing board. He needed to create a clearer body of work to find a way to precipitate a New Interpretation, a new style. You could not have those blocky, monumental, white-robed women in the last room without Cubism and the classical period of reflection before them.
was informed by his relationships (whose isn’t?), and mentioning the harsh criticism Cubism received, I don’t know if there was much “exploration” created beyond showing Picasso’s own personal exploration. The main joy of the exhibit was seeing works by Picasso that I hadn’t seen before, but I felt disappointed in the lack of direct and structural contrasts drawn between different 
styles. The categorization of the rooms hindered a dialogue between works that I think would have been more explorative. The symmetrical organization of the Barnes’ personal collection may have informed this rigidity. I wanted flourishes, cacophonous organization that would speak to the innate and infectious rhythms of Picasso’s works.
or turning the corner and being accosted by a twelve foot tall Cubist purple
horse was baffling. It seems obvious to me that a viewer should be led through the process of a multifaceted, multimedia piece in a way that builds understanding and excitement organically. Seeing the final product first meant that you viewed the ballet with a lack of context, and in a way that separated it from Picasso’s own process.
constant evolution, both of one’s physical work but also of one’s ego. An information plaque in the first room says that Picasso “regarded as facile” the imitative Cubist paintings of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. I regard them as more “facile” to look at than much of Picasso’s own Cubist works. They have pleasant, rich colors, interesting dissections of space—to my untrained eye, there is a difference in styles but no difference in quality. Picasso’s desire to keep moving Cubism forward was most likely driven by his own conception of himself as a bullish innovator.
I can’t help but push back against the often contradictory information plaques on the walls of this exhibit. Certainly, Picasso did not intend Cubism to be an anti-France movement. He and Braque created it before any stirrings of war. He may have been annoyed with the reception and the “political meanings ascribed to Cubism during the war,” but I am not convinced that he “had misgivings about Cubism”—he just wanted to keep innovating. Perhaps he used the criticism as a suggestive launching point to practice using a more traditional french eye, but I think that was more of an experiment for himself rather than any kind of bending to public will. 
notebook— taking notes, sketching, and writing down any ideas that occurred to me while looking at their exhibits. My parents would frequently bring me to museums as a child, and living in proximity to New York City meant I was no stranger to the Met, MoMA, and other large institutions with huge budgets for curation and facilities. The small Aldrich Museum remains, in my opinion, the best-curated museum I have ever visited.
crush. But this kitsch, when presented within the context of a museum-wide celebration of “installation art and exhibition design”, was made meaningful. That entire cycle of artwork, called “Circumstance”, took objects of little artistic significance and arranged them with seminal works, transforming them into a patchworked vision of American life and history. Nancy Shaver’s, shabby, small cardboa
rd boxes modpodged with fabric scraps and acrylic paint, when bridged between the stark depression-era photographs of Walker Evans and the luxe textiles of Sonia Delaunay, became sculptural representations of the history of American folk-utilitarianism and the artist’s own yearning to show a reconciliation between disparate socioeconomic classes. Displaying those sad cardboard boxes seemed to me an experiment the Aldrich embarked upon: just how much can we flex our curatorial muscles? How far can we push the power of exhibition design? The experiment succeeded. When I left that room I was amazed at how illuminated those cardboard boxes had become to me. 
memories. I first saw Hope Gangloff’s work there in 2011, and I remember feeling like I’d entered a world that made more sense than my real one. It felt like what my grown-up life would be and look like, painted or drawn in an illustrative line quality that rang truer than eyesight. It helped that she didn’t shy away from many of her subjects’ “distinctive” noses (as mine has been called) or natural gawkiness. Gangloff’s work wasn’t difficult to understand: it 
was a dialogue with her and her artistic friends and peers; what she wanted to highlight within them, how their messy world spilled onto them; the anxiety of b
eing in a changing world and rushing to document it. Lush, clashing patterns encased humans somehow simultaneously sickly and robust, smoking in rooms carpeted in socks and the bright packaging of Brillo pads. I stood for at least 20 minutes in front of a long-limbed woman splayed on a lake deck whose flip-phone, whatever it displayed, was knitting her eyebrows together. Gangloff is still one of my favorite artists.
near the murals of Isaiah Zagar, the creator of the Philadelphia Magic Gardens.My ex-boyfriend, visiting from Pittsburgh, went to the Aldrich with me and ended up including an analysis of Michelle Lopez’s nine-foot tall Blue Angel sculptures, installed in the Aldrich, in a paper on Heidegger. I visited a cardboard reproduction of a portion of the Trevi fountain installed outside the museum no less than five times in the months it was slowly decomposing in the rain, 
because it never failed to make me smile during a particularly difficult time in my life. The Aldrich was My Museum. I visited when I was in love or heartbroken, bored or busy, and always got some epiphanic experience out of it. 
Community building, especially in an often insular art world, is an extremely important thing to me. With this exhibition, the Aldrich became part of a community of small museums supporting each other, and forever solidified my love. A seven-pronged street sign pointed the way to each of the other museums to visit. I made it to four.
about ideas of art and artifice, and the way that art helps us look at things anew.” The Aldrich keeps this room because it forces viewers to look at length at something they don’t understand– and then realize that they are within the art itself. As a child, frustrated with my peers who ran through the museum without glancing at the art, being able to sit in this dark room with them and come to an understanding together was a gift that made the bus ride back to school much more tolerable. 
the exhibitionist 