The City of Brotherly Love has a lot to offer this summer with shows by Terence Nance, Heather Ujiie, Henry Taylor, and much more.
By Isabella Segalovich for Hyperallergic
July 6, 2023
When you think of a city with a bustling art scene, Philadelphia may not immediately spring to mind. But its abundance of art schools, a growing number of art galleries, over 4,000 murals, and comparatively cheap rents make Philly a thriving art town. Many artists here are inspired by the city’s history as a center of industry and craft — hence the profusion of organizations like the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Museum for Art in Wood, and the Clay Studio. If you’re in town, take a break from our sweltering, swampy summer air and taste a bit of the artistic wonder Philadelphia has to offer.
This is the first solo museum exhibition by Terence Nance, the filmmaker behind the 2012 movie An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and HBO’s seriesRandom Acts of Flyness. Nance is known for his captivating video collages, which are boldly experimental yet also accessible to a wide range of audiences. The exhibition title, Swarm, refers to a Brooklyn-based artist community that Nance was a part of in the early aughts where he developed a body of work that harkened back to the breakthroughs of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. The exhibition is also the result of a partnership with the Philadelphia-based BlackStar Projects, home of the BlackStar Film Festival that uplifts Black, Brown, and Indigenous film artists, where Nance debuted Random Acts of Flyness in 2018.