The Borowsky and Open Lens Galleries are located at the Gershman Y, 401 South Broad Street (at Pine Street) in Philadelphia. Admission is free. Gallery information: (215) 446-3001.
Gallery Archives
2007 - 2008
Helene Aylon: My Body, My Self: Under the canopy; On top of the land; Out of the texts
Sunday, September 16th to Sunday, November 4th,
The Borowsky Gallery and The Open Lens Gallery: Three bodies of work by contemporary artist Helene Aylon explored the implications of her experiences in traditional Judaism. In My Marriage Contract, she uses artifacts from her own past, along with the photographs and other materials to question traditional religious views on women. Wrestlers, a series of commanding large-scale photographs, uses epic desert views to recall the unnamed wife of the Biblical lot. Aylon's searching Self Portraits have also been shown at the Jewish Museum in Vienna.
Gallery Archives
2007 - 2008
Contemplative Spaces
Thursday, November 15th to Friday, January 11th,
The Borowsky Gallery: Site-specific installations by James Fuhrman and Keiko Miyamori.Two Philadelphia-based artists known for their ability to create powerful, meditative environments each transformed one half of the Borowsky Gallery space. Fuhrman incorporated monumental wood sculpture and text in a space suggesting a Japanese rock garden. Miyamori, a native of Japan, will create a space with celestial leitmotifs.
Gallery Archives
2007 - 2008
Sharon Gershoni: Photographs
Thursday, November 15th to Friday, January 11th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Israeli photographer, Sharon Gershoni, showed kaleidoscopic prints created from extraordinarily detailed and luminous photographs of branches, weeds, and other natural and architectural sources. During an extended stay in Japan, Gershoni was honored with a solo show at the Kodak Salon. This was her first showing in the United States.
Gallery Archives
2007 - 2008
Clouds: An exhibit in many media
Thursday, January 24th to Monday, March 24th,
This invited group show of diverse artists examined the continuing fascination of clouds as a subject matter. Artists: Elsabe Dixon, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Nancy Hellebrand, Harry Kalish, Yukie Kobayashi, Libby Newman, John J.H. Phillips, Boris Putterman, and Jon Schueler.
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
John Cohen photographs: INSIDE the downtown art community NYC 1959 - 1960
Thursday, September 18th to Sunday, November 23rd,
Photographs by John Cohen, noted photographer and musician. Cohen documented his life in Greenwich Village in 1960s with portraits of such avant-garde icons as Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kline, Red Grooms, Philip Guston, Woodie Guthrie, Doc Watson, and Bob Dylan.
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
Beautiful Dreamers
Thursday, December 11th to Sunday, February 1st,
The Borowsky Gallery: Leo Lionni and Emanuele Luzzati - Work by children's book author Leo Lionni (1910-1999) and his friend, Italian illustrator and stage designer Emanuele Luzzati (1921-2007).
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
Roma Amor
Thursday, December 11th to Sunday, February 1st,
The Opens Lens Gallery: Digital assemblages by Joel Katz and work created in collaboration with poet Randall Couch.
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
Selections
Sunday, February 15th to Sunday, April 12th,
The Borowsky Gallery and The Opens Lens Gallery: Original works from The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James, 2nd Edition. Guest curator, Sarah Van Keuren.
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
From Tesfa to Tikva / From Hope to Hope
Thursday, April 23rd to Friday, August 7th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Photographs of Ethiopian Jews in Israel by Irene Fertik.
Gallery Archives
2008 - 2009
Invented: (un)Realities, in two parts
Thursday, April 23rd to Friday, August 7th,
The Borowsky Gallery: An exhibit in celebration of Vox Populi, organized by Julianna Foster and Josh Rickards. Part 1: April 23 - June 6: Amy Adams, Kara Crombie, Micah Danges, Kate Stewart, and Eva Wylie. Part 2: June 11 - August 7: Leah Bailis, Charlie Hobbs, James Johnson, and Roxana Perez-Mendez.
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Painting Midrash
Thursday, September 10th to Sunday, November 22nd,
The Borowsky Gallery: Abstract art in response to sacred Jewish texts - D'vorah Horn, Marc Salz, Jill Nathanson, Evelyn Stettin
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Coney Island Always
Thursday, September 10th to Sunday, November 22nd,
The Open Lens Gallery: Photographs by Olivia Antis, Ana Bernstein, Rivka Shifman Katvan
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Vitaly Komar: Three-Day Weekend
Thursday, December 10th to Friday, January 15th,
The Borowsky Gallery: Faces of Judaism Series
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Lost Futures: Journeys into the Jewish Diaspora
Thursday, December 10th to Friday, January 15th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Photographs of the Jews of India by Chrystie Sherman
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 - 1968
Friday, January 22nd to Monday, March 15th,
The Borowsky Gallery: Exhibition annex for the exhibit organized by the University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
City of Memory: New Orleans Before and After Katrina Photographs by John Woodin
Friday, January 22nd to Sunday, April 11th,
The Open Lens Gallery
Gallery Archives
2009 - 2010
Mapping: Outside/Inside
Sunday, April 25th to Sunday, August 15th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Large-scale pinhole photographs by Masaaki Kobayashi. Tsuyoshi Ito, Guest Curator.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
One Foot in America: Jewish Emigrants of the Red Star Line and Eugeen Van Mieghem
Thursday, September 16th to Sunday, November 21st,
The Borowsky Gallery: Portraits of Jewish emigrants by the Belgian artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930), seen from his vantage on the Antwerp quays. The Open Lens Gallery: A companion exhibit on the historic role of the Philadelphia-based Red Star Line in the great wave of Jewish emigration.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
The Thomashefskys: A Life in the Yiddish Theater
Sunday, December 5th to Sunday, February 20th,
The Borowsky Gallery: The careers of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, legendary stars of the Yiddish Theater, brought to life through posters, sheet music, and personal artifacts.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
Brother Bread, Sister Puppet
Tuesday, January 18th to Tuesday, March 1st,
The Open Lens Gallery: Photographs of the Bread and Puppet Theater by Donna Bister.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
Archie Rand: Had Gadya
Thursday, March 10th to Sunday, May 8th,
The Borowsky Gallery: Interpretation of Passover - Archie Rand's large-scale paintings offer a visual commentary on the traditional Had Gadya song.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
Galia Gur Zeev. Seder.Table
Thursday, March 10th to Sunday, May 8th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Interpretation of Passover - Galia Gur Zeev's photographic installation puts the Seder in a contemporary Israeli context.
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
Ecstatic Landscape
Thursday, May 19th to Sunday, August 14th,
Gallery Archives
2010 - 2011
Albert Winn: Summer Joins the Past
Thursday, May 19th to Sunday, August 14th,
The Open Lens Gallery: Photographs of Deserted, Abandoned, and Vacant Jewish Summer Camps.
Gallery Archives
Leon Bibel: Art & Activism in The WPA
Thursday, September 15th to Sunday, November 20th,
Powerful scenes documenting work, protest, social injustice and city life from the American artist Leon Bibel (1913-1995).
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, September 18 Time: 2:00 - 4:30 pm At 3:30 pm there will be a discussion of Leon Bibel's work and a discussion with Matthew Christopher Murray, Michael Christopher Brown, Joshua Lieberman, and Michael Meysarosh, whose photographs are on view in the Open Lens Gallery. Please note that the Leon Bibel exhibition will be closed on Saturday, November 5th.
Gallery Archives
Before and After Utopia: Images of Urban Abandonment, Absence and Aspiration
Thursday, September 15th to Sunday, November 20th,
Abandoned America, Ordos, China, Arcosanti, Arizona and Masdar City, Abu Dhabi -- four distinct models of modern urbanity telling us something important about our 'now'.
The 'now', which BEFORE AND AFTER UTOPIA: images of urban abandonment, absence, and aspiration calls to mind, is the present moment in our cities -- the moment between past and future, the convergence of reflection, innovation, and transformation. The famed philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre posited that humans always face an existential moment, a moment when we must project ourselves into the future, to imagine a mode of being for human living. In our mechanized, industrial centers we face that existential moment now.
A decade into the millennium, we witness civilization amidst crisis and challenge in modeling, powering, and maintaining its metropolises. Our modern cities are an urban jumble that evolved from the dominant utopian models of the twentieth century, expressions of the humanist imperative to move societies from scarcity to abundance, poverty to wealth, inequality to equilibrium, and ignorance to enlightenment. The results have been mixed, with many people ignoring or exploiting nature to further their dependence on materialism and excessive consumption.
Though it is common to think of 'utopia' as referring to impossible perfection tainted by a flawed humanity, the reality is more nuanced. From Plato's Republic to Le Corbusier's Radiant City to Andres Duany?s New Urbanism, humans have often modeled their societies on utopian visions. In planning our modern cities, skyscrapers were first imagined as pillars of steel and glass connecting earth to the heavens, suburbs as secure communities situated between nature and the industrial center, highways as automotive individualism, and the city center as the thriving urban marketplace. Of course, far too much of this was predicated on unlimited energy, endless resources, and non-stop consumption. Skyscrapers became banal, suburbs became sprawl, highways connected malls with shoppers in oil-guzzling SUVs, and our once-utopian visions for 'progress' and 'modernity' came to affect an increasingly dysfunctional, economically downtrodden, and ecologically-unsustainable dystopian reality.
In America, industry and infrastructure crumbles around us, and public initiatives to rebuild our roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals are abandoned as city and state budgets are slashed to suit self-interested, ideological agendas. Matthew Christopher Murray's striking photographs of Abandoned America offer the viewer an opportunity to rediscover and explore these lost and forgotten landscapes, to meditate on the ethereal grace and stillness that saturates such environments and to give a sense of the awe-inspiring beauty and profound sorrow that lingers after life has ceased and only echoes remain.
It is here we begin our journey with what came 'after utopia.' What we face now is the moment 'before utopia,' the moment when we must re-examine and re-think our urban metropolises.
The provocative images of Michael Christopher Brown, Joshua Lieberman, and Michael Meysarosh, pose questions for how we may re-envision our urban environments. What can we learn from cities like Ordos -- ghost cities built to garner investment and raise the country's GDP, with vacant doppelgangers continuing to sprout across the contemporary Chinese landscape? Is what began as a public-works project designed to house, employ, and entertain 1 million people in Inner Mongolia, now a mere Chinese version of American sprawl and consumption? Can Arcosanti's marriage of architecture and ecology be a useful model for environmental sustainability? Focusing on compact urban planning, Arcosanti, as envisioned by Paolo Soleri, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, is a living laboratory for an anti-sprawl city. Has this experimental city in the American desert inspired the utopian ambitions of Norman Foster's zero waste, carbon-neutral Masdar -- the world's first eco city to be powered solely by renewable energy sources?
It is easy to dismiss materialism, but humans do have all-too-real needs that are steeped in the emotional and material, aesthetic and functional. More deeply, can we qualify a new urbanity that merges meaning with materialism while integrating ecology with technology, garden with machine, nature with culture? We know that there are few final answers, as evolution is always in flux. But in these images we find suggestions of how it is possible to cultivate our cities and amass progressive, sustainable, and economically viable ideas for modern living.
Yesterday's planners are today's politicians, and undoubtedly those that oft have the upper hand fit snug in the deep pockets of corporate lobbyists with their mind on their money and their money invested in practices that will bring civilization, as we know it, to its ecological demise. The course of human destiny depends on our actions today, as we enter a critical 'now' demanding of us ideological evolution and transformative design.
Gallery Archives
BETWEEN COLOR AND LIGHT
Adele Aron Greenspun
Sunday, March 4th to Thursday, April 19th,
Photographer Adele Aron Greenspun's altered skyscapes create heightened mystery and move toward abstraction.
Opening reception: Sunday, March 4, 2:00 - 4:00 pm
