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EXHIBITIONS
Since its founding in 1915, the PAA has presented the work of artists and designers working in a wide variety of media, from ceramics and jewelry to textiles and sculpture. Each year we present up to twelve new exhibitions featuring the work of emerging and established artists. Rather than understanding “craft” as a class of objects, the PAA encourages visitors to consider “craft” as a verb. This broader definition means that our exhibitions encompass a range of topics and types of work, from useful and decorative objects to sculpture and installations. Our diverse program of exhibitions, inspired by our setting in a masterfully crafted domestic space, can thus be communicated to visitors in engaging and unexpected ways.
Emily Spivack's web-based art project Sentimental Value connects the age-old desire to tell stories through special objects with the easily accessible platform of the Internet. Spivack has recognized a new vernacular mode of expression emerging in the personal narratives accompanying clothing for sale on eBay, which has unintentionally become a repository of surprisingly personal anecdotes and memories. Spivack has been collecting and documenting these stories in all their raw honesty on the Sentimental Value website (sentimental-value.com), and acquiring the objects in the process. This exhibition is the first installation of Sentimental Value in its corporeal form, presenting original source objects alongside the original, unedited text from the listings Spivack found on eBay. A short video narrated by Spivack highlights additional unedited anecdotes along with their corresponding eBay photographs.
An exhibition catalog, with essays from Emily Spivack, Sarah Archer, and Rob Walker, is available for purchase at PAA and online here.
Biography
Emily Spivack has spent the past ten years exploring the way that clothing functions from a variety of cultural, historical, and therapeutic perspectives. Since 2007, Spivack has been collecting stories about clothing and memory from eBay posts for the web-based art project she curates, Sentimental Value. In 2010, Spivack launched Worn Stories, a collection of stories she edits from interesting people about clothing and memory. A book of Worn Stories will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2014. Spivack is the creator and writer of the Smithsonian’s blog about fashion history called Threaded. For six years, she was the Executive Director of Shop Well with You, a not-for-profit organization she founded which helps women with cancer improve their body-image and quality of life. Spivack has lectured at art schools and universities including New York University, Brown University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt, and Parsons. She serves on the board of Brown University’s Entrepreneurship Program and was an award recipient of Eileen Fisher’s Women Change the World Everyday campaign. Spivack graduated from Brown University with Honors with a degree in Art/Semiotics and was awarded the William and Alethe Weston Fine Arts Award.
Sunshine and Shadow is the first solo exhibition of Sabrina Gschwandtner’s film quilts in Pennsylvania. The exhibition features six quilts constructed from 16 mm film. The works are displayed in framed light boxes, engaging the notion of filmic suture through a reconfigured, backlit form. The show is based on "Sunshine and Shadow" quilts, which take their name from a concentric diamond pattern created by squares of color in dramatically intertwined light and dark hues. There are compelling connections between this body of work and Philadelphia’s status as a global center of textile production until the general decline of US manufacturing that began in the 1960s, as well as Pennsylvania’s rich heritage of quilt-making by Amish and Mennonite women.
"LTextile" brings together the work of artists and designers from Lithuania in a survey of contemporary textiles, co-organized by PAA Curator Sarah Archer and Egle Ganda Bagdoniene, Vice-Rector at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius. "LTextile" is made possible by the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.