In the News: Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Piffaro, and More

Several Center-funded performances and exhibitions have garnered national and regional media coverage in recent weeks.

In Performance

Composer Julia Wolfe, who collaborated with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia on the Center-funded premiere of Anthracite Fields, received a MacArthur Fellowship. In an article announcing the award, The Philadelphia Inquirer described the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields as "an ambitious oratorio that gave voice to coal mining communities."

Opera Philadelphia's world premiere of Breaking the Waves was covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other publications. "It is not easy to find new operas that command attention, tell their story lucidly and create a powerful, permeating mood. Dark and daring, Breaking the Waves does all this with sensitivity and style," wrote Zachary Wolfe for The New York Times.

Choreographer Nora Chipaumire's dance work portrait of myself as my father, presented as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Creative Africa programming and supported by a Center Advancement grant, was "unforgettable," according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "Even as Chipaumire exhorted her father to assume a true masculinity, it took shape within a larger context that constricted and confined," wrote Hugh Hunter.

Boris Charmatz's dance work Levée des conflits, presented by Drexel University Westphal College, was reviewed in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Broad Street Review, which called the performance "hypnotic," and stated: "This piece is a constantly evolving organism, merging and dividing."

Daniel Fishkin's sound installation and performance series Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016 was featured in PhillyVoice and WHYY. "My tinnitus threatened to sever my connection with people, and this project is the opposite. I'm trying to restore my connection with people," said Fishkin in an interview with PhillyVoice.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed The Musical World of Don Quixote, "the grandest project of [Piffaro, the Renaissance Band's] 31-year history," according to music critic David Patrick Stearns, who praised the concerts' "arresting directness" and "wonderfully authoritative" performances.

Ann Hamilton's multi-venue textile exhibition habitus, presented by The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), was featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Broad Street Review, which wrote: "In assembling habitus, Hamilton has fused Philadelphia's text and textile traditions in new ways, forcing a reconsideration of the relationship between them, and with ourselves." The exhibition continues in FWM's galleries through January 8, 2017.

Conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas' ongoing photography exhibition The Block, presented by the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC) as part of its ongoing project Hank Willis Thomas: Philly Block Project, was featured on WHYY. "We were amazed by how welcoming the neighbors were," Thomas said in an interview with WHYY's Peter Crimmins. "The fact they were willing to open their doors to us was the reason we made some photos really large. But then also letting the eye wander over small details, thinking about the community members as the building blocks of the community, and the photographs being the bricks of that metaphor."

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's reinstallation of the South Asian art galleries was covered in The Philadelphia Inquirer, which wrote: "considered one of the finest outside India, the collection...has been reinstalled in totally new ways."

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the Penn Museum's public lectures series Science and Race: History, Use, and Abuse, stating, "this is the first time the museum has hosted a free, college-level series of this sort."