In the News: Performances and Exhibitions from Eastern State Penitentiary, RAIR, Ryan Trecartin, and More

A number of projects from grantees and Pew Fellows have garnered extensive national and regional press coverage in recent weeks.

Eastern State Penitentiary's new exhibition Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration was featured in an article by The Associated Press, which was picked up by The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and others. "In a transformation that began modestly a few years ago, the penitentiary that housed such notorious criminals as gangster Al Capone and bank robber 'Slick Willie' Sutton is completing a retooling of its programming to place a major focus on growing questions about the effectiveness of America's prison system," writes the AP.

Read more about Prisons Today in The Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY.

The Wall Street Journal profiled Recycled Artist in Residency's (RAIR) ongoing project Live at the Dump, which will bring live performances by artist Martha McDonald to the Revolution Recovery recycling facility. In the article, McDonald expressed her excitement for the project, saying "whenever I get pushed out of my comfort zone, interesting things can happen."

American Theatre published a feature on A Fierce Kind of Love, a play commissioned by the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, writing that the work "offers a new perspective on living with a disability."

Read more about A Fierce Kind of Love in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News, and WHYY.

Arcadia University's exhibition Pati Hill: Photocopier closed on April 24, following a successful run and a number of media reviews. For Hyperallergic, Meredith Sellers wrote, "I felt a stunning empathy for these images of daily life, laid bare on the cold, smooth glass of a hulking electronic machine, contextualized by snippets of writing that dipped in and out of memory, metaphor, wit, and the kinds of fleeting thoughts one thinks but never utters aloud."

Read more about Pati Hill: Photocopier in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Art News, and artblog.

Free Roses, an exhibition by 2012 Pew Fellow and visual artist Alex Da Corte at MassMoCa, received positive reviews from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and others. The Times called the exhibition "the most ambitious show of [Da Corte's] career," while The Boston Globe described the works as "taut, camp, blindingly bright, and simultaneously open-hearted and scathing."

Read more about Da Corte's Free Roses in Artforum and Philadelphia Magazine.

Guitarist David Frick lauded 2011 Pew Fellow and musician Chris Forsyth's latest album in Rolling Stone, writing: "Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band pack 'The Rarity of Experience' with great spirits, then deliver on every expectation."

Read more reviews of Forsyth's album in The New York Times and NPR.

2013 Pew Fellow and visual artist Ryan Trecartin's recent exhibition with Lizzie Fitch at Andrea Rosen Gallery was reviewed in Artsy, where Ian Epstein noted that, "as viewers embark on one of several possible routes through the exhibition and gain access to Fitch and Trecartin's dark, overwhelming world, the experience may become comparable to being a tourist in a big city without a map. As time elapses within the exhibition, a sense of suspense prevails, leaving the viewer yearning for answers and consumed by the chase."

Read more about Trecartin's exhibition in Art in America and Artnet News.