Through this partnership with bowerbird, we bring experimental and improvisational music, film, dance and other creative, genre-defying performing arts to historic sites in the region. Events co-presented with Bowerbird will continue on an ongoing basis.

For upcoming bowerbird@LANDMARKS events, click here.

For details of previous events, please visit the bowerbird website here.

Hidden among the files of the Powel House records are photo albums, featuring the founding members, such as Francis Anne Wister, of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. Some of these photos capture fundraising events held at in the Powel house, which, not only paid for the restoration of the historic Powel House, but also celebrated the women's sewing, quilting, and needlework so romanticized during the colonial revival period of the 1930's and 1940's*.

In honor of these women, who were artists as well as charter historic preservationists, Landmarks is pleased to present three solo projects by artists Marie H. Elcin, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel and Phuong X. Pham. The exhibition, a series of three installations running concurrently at two historic house museums, is part of FiberPhiladelphia, the citywide 2008 International Fiber Biennial. A major international event, almost two years in the planning, FiberPhiladelphia encompasses two symposia and more than twenty-five exhibitions examining the current explosion in the use of textile and fiber materials in the field of contemporary art. Concurrent with the artists' installations, Landmarks will also present fiber-based highlights from the permanent collections of our four historic houses: Grumblethorpe, Physick House, Powel House and Waynesborough.

At the Physick House Museum--the Federal-style home of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery"--Marie Elcin's installation, Water, Water, Everywhere, explores the effect of water as a conveyor of disaster. Elcin's project is based in research about the 1792 Yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, during which Dr. Physick remained in the city, treating the afflicted. Through delicate beadwork, embroidery, and screen-printing, Elcin captures the tension of both historic and modern day life. Beautiful on the surface, Elcin's intricate work explores the tension between strength and fragility, life and death--even utilizing the molecular image of the Yellow Fever molecule as a recurring design element.

Elcin also relates the past catastrophe of Yellow Fever to contemporary concerns about global warming and our increasingly ambivalent relationship with water: both giver and taker of life. The life and well-being of our cities depend on the health of our rivers, and the proper treatment, distribution, and disposal of water. In Philadelphia, over 3000 miles of pipes lie under our feet. We turn on the taps and water magically, consistently flows. We are fortunate. We take it for granted. What happens when water mains break? When factories and runoff upstream pollute our waters? What will happen if sea levels rise? How many homes would be flooded?  What happens after months of drought? Is there enough? How close are we to epidemics of water-borne or vector-borne diseases? As Elcin examines our collective histories, she sees that everything is connected, and we stand in the balance between safety and catastrophe.

A block over at the Powel House Museum, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel's installation, Keeping it Under Wraps, is inspired by a piece of tatting by Martha Powel in the collection of the museum. Lathan-Stiefel takes the tiny, precise historic textile and transforms it, using it as a visual counterpoint to the symmetry and formality of the house's Georgian architecture. Lathan-Steifel uses commonplace materials  to give the work a provisional quality: her work commands the space but shuns monumentality.

The boundaries of women's lives in the 18th century were complicated and restrained by social mores. As the wife of the mayor of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Powel was keenly aware of this.  In her research, Lathan-Steifel was struck by a quote found in the book A Portrait of Elizabeth Willing Powel, by David W. Maxey, in which Elizabeth writes to her sister Mary Byrd:

With Keeping It Under Wraps, Lathan-Steifel creates something that both mirrors and transforms Martha's tiny piece of tatting--allowing a woman's creative work to seep outward and, in the words of Elizabeth Powel,  "run riot" amidst the solemn symmetry of the house's architecture.

Also at the Powel House Museum, in what is now called the "ballroom," Phuong Pham's installation Stasis, Extended is inspired by the physical history of the Powel House, which by the turn of the 20th century had become a horsehair mattress factory.  Her piece explores horsehair as a contemporary medium, while referencing the house's decline and rebirth over the centuries. Pham takes this coarse and unglamorous medium and uses it to express subtlety and delicacy in the elegant Powel ballroom.

Pham's installation is a meditation upon material history, as well as the meticulous and repetitive hand process of art, craft and industry. Her process is not necessarily spiritual, but metaphysical, in the sense that gestures made by hand question space and time in relationship to her own body. Like the tenuousness of history, her piece is an accumulation of actions and parts that come together in a poetic whole. Strands of common horsehair and delicate silk intertwine and dance throughout the ballroom, while thousands of knots in the materials act as evidence of Pham's exploration of the material and form. Her work honors and highlights the totality of the social history of the Powel House from the refined life of the 18th century, through the harshness of its industrial period, to its interpreted, restored state today.

At both Powel House and Physick House, the exhibition will also feature items from the permanent collections of all four Landmarks museums. Come and enjoy the visual dialogue between the artists' installations and selected antique collections items such as a 19th century dress, embroideries and needlework.

PIMA Group
Look!
A bowerbird@LANDMARKS project
Performances February 1-3, 2008

Powel House Museum

Michelle Wilson
Aftermath

November 2-November 25, 2007
Powel House Museum
 
What if the liberty we believe we know is only a shadow of true freedom?

Landmarks Contemporary Projects is pleased to present Aftermath, an important new project by artist Michelle Wilson. Aftermath will be on view from November 2-25, 2007 at the Powel House Museum, 244 South 3rd Street in Philadelphia. A free public reception with the artist will be held at the museum on Friday, November 2nd, from 6-9pm.

Behind the scenes of modern American comfort is a complex web of influence and deferred responsibility. Aftermath is a multi-media installation in which Wilson challenges viewers to consider the unseen consequences of the choices we make as a society, as well as the choices made for us by our government.

Inspired by the ideas of Plato's Cave, as well as alchemical theories of fire as a purifier, Wilson tries to find a way to see clearly in a world confounded by mass misinformation and misdirection. Aftermath exposes the ashes we have collectively brushed under the rug. Do you burn what you fear, or what you hate? Or are they the same thing?

Artist Michelle Wilson recently lived in the Powel House Museum for two years as Site Manager/Caretaker. Aftermath is heavily informed by her time in this historically significant site, which gave her a strong appreciation of the relationship between social responsibility and the ideals of our Founding Fathers. While living at the Powel House, the environment of historical interpretation challenged Wilson to view contemporary society with new eyes. The Iraq war, the degradation of the environment, imprisonment without trial, genocide in the Sudan--she couldn't help but wonder how we arrived in this situation as a nation. Through prints, installation, projections and sound, Wilson will attempt to break through this mask of comfort. The Powel House--as a center of the political and social milieu surrounding the birth of our Constitution--is an ideal, if poignant site for this experiment. The Powel House represents the best of our Revolutionary past and philosophy. It is a contextualizing environment for the idea that we live in a time where there is much debate about some of the political and philosophical ideals put forth in the Constitution: from wiretapping, to detention without access to lawyers, to freedom of speech.

Wilson's work has been part of exhibitions at the Phillips Museum, the National Constitution Center, the Nasu International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Japan, and the Second International Biennial for the Artists' Book, in Alexandria, Egypt. Wilson is former President of the Philadelphia Women's Caucus for Art, and holds an MFA from the University of the Arts. To find out more about Wilson's work, visit her blog, Rocinante Press, or see more of her work on Inliquid.com

September 14-October 21, 2007

Powel House Museum

Rules of Civility is a mixed-media installation that draws its inspiration from two Eliza's: Elizabeth Willing Powel and Eliza Leslie. Besides sharing similar first names, the women were roughly contemporaries, their lives having overlapped by 43 years. They both lived in Philadelphia. And they were both, very much, ladies of their time.

Elizabeth Willing (1743-1830) was the wife of one of Philadelphia's mayors, Samuel Powel, and the house they shared on 3rd Street was often visited by George and Martha Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. She was a prolific letter-writer and many of her personal papers are archived at the  Historical Society of Pennsylvania and at the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association in Virginia. Although credited with convincing Washington to serve a second term as president, much of her correspondence as seen by Maksymowicz deals with the day-to-day minutia of turn-of-the-century life. Her husband died of yellow fever in 1793, and Elizabeth spent her remaining 36 years as a widow.

Eliza Leslie (1787-1858) was born in Philadelphia and spent her childhood in London. Her father, Robert, was a clockmaker and a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin. The family returned to America when Eliza was twelve. Even at that early age, she loved to write but despaired at ever becoming a published author. When her father died in 1803, financial hardship caused her mother to take in boarders. Eliza went to cooking school, possibly to help with the family's new business. These studies led her to the publish a cookbook, followed by a series of children's books, magazine articles and etiquette guides. She eventually became somewhat of a celebrity and she received many distinguished visitors at her residence at the United States Hotel.

The Powel House installation consists of a series of open books, cast in white Hydrostone plaster, overlaid with quotations from Eliza Leslie's The Behaviour Book and Elizabeth Powel's own words. Images of Elizabeth, chosen from the numerous portraits painted of her during her lifetime, peer out from underneath the texts. The books, along with pairs of 18-century shoes, quill pens and inkwells also cast in Hydrostone are positioned within the various rooms of the historic house, along with items selected from the collection. Throughout the installation, a soft female voice can be heard detailing the etiquette of middle-class society. The title, Rules of Civility, is taken from Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior, a pamphlet of good manners written by George Washington himself.

Powel House Museum

Dates:

• September 7, 2007: First Friday 5-7pm

• Sundays in September:
  Sept 2: 2-4 pm
  Sept 9: 2-4pm
  Sept 16: 12-2pm
  Sept 23: 2-4pm
  Sept 30: 2-4pm

In the 18th Century, there were quite a few revolutionaries running about Philadelphia and the other colonies letting other know through their words, actions and images how they felt about things. Thomas Paine's Common Sense for example, was printed just a few hundred feet away from the Powel House.

Invited to Landmarks Contemporary projects by artist/curator Michelle Wilson, Zoe Cohen now gives you the chance to Show Someone How You Feel About Something. This ongoing public service art project, offers people in public spaces the opportunity to take a few minutes to make a drawing to express how they feel about something ( anything) to someone (anyone). The drawing is then mailed to their chosen recipient. Addresses of elected officials, a stamped envelope, paper, and drawing materials are provided.

Facilitators for the project will include Rebecca Ennen, Jodi Netzer, Michael Schwartz, and Leigh Seeleman.

Karen Kilmnik
June 26-August 12, 2007
Opening reception:
    June 26th, 6-8pm

Powel House Museum

The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks presented an exhibition at the Powel House Museum by internationally-acclaimed artist Karen Kilimnik. The exhibition will run from June 26 till August 12, with a free, public opening reception on June 26th, from 6-8pm. The latest in the Landmarks Contemporary Projects series, this installation by Philadelphia-native Kilimnik was been timed to coincide with the artist's retrospective at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (on view till August 5th).

The Powel House Museum---the Georgian home of Samuel Powel, the mayor of Philadelphia just before and after the American Revolution---has been a familiar site to Kilimnik while growing up in Philadelphia. As one of the centers of the political and social life in Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia, the Powel House is an ideal location for Kilimnik's ongoing interrogation of history. In its reconstructed and reinterpreted tourist-attraction state, the house is also a fertile ground for Kilimnik to continue exploring the magic potential of an artwork's environment.

Kilimnik's project at the Powel House was  her first major intervention in a historic space in the United States, and it is fitting that it should take place in her home-city.  The project consisted of subtle additions of sound works, paintings and sculptural elements that draw from sources as varied as 18th-century painting, stories by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Avengers television series. For viewers, Kilimnik's piece was be at once familiar and discordant: recognizable cues from popular culture will reveal the impossibility of objective interpretation. Her poetic and subjective explorations  -- such as placing picturesque tufts of artificial snow on certain interior windows of the Powel House, or showing  photographs of Philadelphia streets that give a Dickensian era feeling   - provide a new way to connect the contemporary mind to the past.

Karen Kilimnik concurrently had a mid-career retrospective on view at the ICA in Philadelphia that will travel to the MCA Chicago, and Aspen Museum of Art. A Catalog is forthcoming. In the past year, Kilimink has had  solo museum shows, at the ARC Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Le Consortium, in Dijon, France.  In conjunction with these European exhibitions, JP RIngier published the first monograph of Karen Kilimnik's work. In 2005, Kilimnik had one person exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa,Venice, Italy, and did a special exhibition of her work within the Haus zum Kirschgarten, at the Historisches Museum Basel, Switzerland.  Karen Kilimnik is represented by 303 Gallery, New York.

Caitlin Emma Perkins
Playing Telephone With Ghosts

Various locations throughout 2007 (details below)
Online at Playing Telephone With Ghosts: The Blog

 "The Junto, after several private meetings and adjournments at the Theater of Scandal, in Fourth Street, during two long weeks past, and at a prodigious waste of paper, and much inkshed, have at last sent forth one Benjamin Towne with a stink pot in his hand."
-18^th century text, Philadelphia

Playing Telephone with Ghosts by artist Caitlin Emma Perkins is a pliable mixture of fact and fiction, of seriousness and frivolity, of artistic virtue and humorous indulgence celebrating the synchronistic streets of Philadelphia. It is a project filled to bursting with ephemera, societes secretes, culinary excursions, clandestine meetings, literary investigations and pataphysical technologies. Throughout 2007, Perkins will present a series of participatory public events and web-based projects designed to slowly initiate visitors into a deeper understanding of our much-clouded politico-communal histories. Join Perkins as she disinters the writings of Swift, Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes, plumbs the considerable depths of the Founding Fathers tippling habits and learns how to prepare the perennial 18^th Century feast, Pigeons Transmogrified.

Landmarks Contemporary Projects
at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A 3^rd Thursday Double-Feature!

5:30 pm
Foolscaps and Inkshed
A Playing Telephone with Ghosts event

Facilitating portable reading and entertainment for men, women and children of leisure and toil

An interstate historical romp of an evening...

Inspired by the Philadelphia almanac printing industry of the 18th Century, join artists Caitlin Perkins and Katie Baldwin along with other cohorts in a traveling print shop and bindery at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art for a hands on evening of printmaking wonder!

A foolscap is a standard size sheet of paper folded three times to make eight leaves, creating a signature of 16 pages. It also happens to be the most common size of almanac printed in the early days of the U.S. Inspired by the early Philadelphia almanacs, Perkins and Baldwin will create a collection of printed ephemera which participants may take home. These works of art will be full of historical anecdotes, prescriptive literature, recipes, maxims and mayhem. All this fun within the margins of some simple sheets of paper greased with a little bit of ink and humor! 

The activities will include woodblock relief printing, screen-printing and a simple bookbinding activity so that participants leave with their own little collection of ephemera.

7pm
A.R.S. Trio
Are you ready for an aural and visual journey through history and contemporary culture? Then join us in DCCA's black box space for a performance of very serious art and music that may or may not be taken very seriously by the performers...

A.R.S. is a social outing group based in Philadelphia, PA whose members enjoy sight-seeing, taking snapshots, videotaping, and picnics.  The group's focus is on museums, restaurants with quirky themes, very large sandwiches, street performers, historical attractions, people who dress up like Benjamin Franklin, tripe carts, old forts, living statues, and other such cultural destinations.  Inspired by President Al Gore, A.R.S. is currently presenting a multiple-media slide show to whoever will watch/listen.  For its DCCA  visit, A.R.S.  will feature sounds and images collected from visits to the Powel House in Philadelphia, PA.

Roxana Perez-Mendez
La Declaracion
March 1-April 1, 2007
Powel House Museum

Landmarks Contemporary Projects is delighted to present La Declaracion, a new, site-specific installation by Roxana Perez-Mendez. Through a multi-media project and subtle interventions that use the Powel House Museum as a (historical) backdrop, Perez-Mendez invites the viewer to re-imagine American history and inserts both true and fictional references to the obscured colonial history of Boricua, the original Taino name for the island which was renamed Puerto Rico. La Declaracion is a project that delicately unearths the old wounds of possession, historical memory, lust, colonialism, and plants the fantasy of an alternate legacy.

In her artistic practice, Perez-Mendez re-examines history through the lens of the Puerto Rican experience. She inserts fictions about Puerto Rican achievements and monuments into the global meta-narrative. This method, which is guided by her notion of Vera Historia*, or True History, works to juxtapose, reflect, deconstruct and isolate the strains of difference associated with Puerto Rican culture, class and geopolitical position--the strains that define one as other. Vera Historia is an ongoing exploration of a wide range of tropes and models of modernization and globalization. In video performances and installations, Perez-Mendez plays with the visual's ability to position subjects in history and the contemporary. Fresh narratives arise, placing people, objects, and sites into new relations while sending others into a void. Working with humble, ephemeral processes and materials--such as works made from paper, light and shadow, she brings into being an everyday world where illusion and reality are confused. Her artwork becomes a fiction that forecasts the emergence of a new cultural, global politic that ends Puerto Rican exceptionalism.

*Vera Historia: transl. as True History. The first known science fiction novel, concerned with a voyage into space and to the moon was written two-thousand years ago by the Greek Sophist and satirist Lucian of Samosata. In this journey, the ship and its crew ends up on the moon, colonizes its inhabitants, and brings them back to Earth.

The Moles Not Molar Reading Series
January 26^th, 2007
Powel House Museum


Below: Detail from Basket of Blood by David Larsen
To open a PDF of the entire work, click here.

A.R.S. is a Philadelphia-based trio that will be performing a new improvisational piece designed for the Powel House which may or may not include: a piano, violin, percussion, Cantonese, Japanese and English.

The goal of Moles Not Molar is to put writers and artists pursuing exciting, innovative, and experimental textual projects into contact and dialogue with each other and their diverse audiences, creating exposure and engagement across regional and generic lines.

Candy Depew: Between Worlds
Physick House Museum
October 5-November 26, 2006

Featuring a museum-wide intervention by Candy Depew, this was the first-ever exhibition of contemporary art at Physick House--the Federal-style home of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery"--and the second exhibition of the new Landmarks Contemporary Projects program. Just as the surface splendor of the Physick House conceals a rich history of scientific advances and investigations into human life and death, so Depew's artwork offers an unexpectedly deep exploration of the fragility of materials and life that exists beneath the surface of 'beautiful' objects.

For a full project description and press release, please click here to open a PDF.

The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks presented the Philadelphia premiere of the films of artist David Gatten on November 7, 2006 at the Powel House Museum.

David Gatten's films explore the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century.

Click here to open a PDF of an article about David Gatten from the March 2006 issue of Artforum magazine.

This project was made possible through the 5-County Arts Fund, a Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts a state agency. It is funded by the citizens of Pennsylvania through an annual legislative appropriation, and administered locally by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Philagrafika presents Megawords
Powel House Museum
September 5-12, 2006

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