Zoe Wray, Author at The Phoenix

Look Closer: Jennifer Bartlett’s Captivating Retrospective at PAFA

Have you ever laid on the grass face down with your eyes open? When you’re that intimately close to the ground, you can’t really see the grass. Rather, you see the blurs of rich, vibrant green and fuzzy, pointed spires pushing out

September 12, 2013

Campus Journal

Wear Your Art on Your Sleeve: Isaiah Zagar’s Intimate Mosaics

Earlier in the year, I fancied the idea of reviewing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s (PMA) latest exhibition, “Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.” Outsider art is the label given to artwork made by artists

April 18, 2013

Campus Journal

Our Fashion, Ourselves: Eclectic Art on Fashion at Penn’s ICA

“White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart,” on view until July 28th at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), considers a topic that has often been discussed in our postmodernist, institution-and-society-questioning age: how fashion relates to our narcisstic tendencies as

April 4, 2013

Campus Journal

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again! A Journey through Art History in Boston

Like many of the first cities of the American colonies, Boston is rich with history even as it retains a young, vibrant population by virtue of its reputation as a preeminent college town. This wide range in historical representation extends to its

March 21, 2013

Campus Journal

Still Pain Runs Deep: Another Heated Look at Sephardic Jewish Culture

The title of one of two recently opened exhibitions at the Gershman Y galleries of Philadelphia, “Turkey’s Sephardim: Another Look,” implies that there has been a previous look at this unique ethnic group. And, indeed, this sect of the Jewish population, which

February 28, 2013

Campus Journal

PAFA’s “The Female Gaze”: Bad Title, Fantastic Exhibition

Step into any art museum in the world and you’ll see that male artists have painted just about everything. Certain subject matter appear more frequently than others, such as Christian imagery or female nudes, but nevertheless it is clear that male artists

February 14, 2013

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What I Saw Over Winter Break: Picasso Black and White

Pablo Picasso painted Woman Ironing (La repasseuse) at the end of his Blue period, an era brought on by the suicide of his friend, Carlos Casegemas. The nature of the suicide was intensely tragic—Casegemas committed suicide when his lover left him for

January 24, 2013

Campus Journal

Where the Inconceivable is Absurdly Beautiful: The BMA’s New Contemporary Art Wing

When viewers pass through the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) Modern Art galleries to enter the newly renovated Contemporary Wing, which just opened on November 18 after a year-long closing, it feels as if they have walked into a different museum. This

December 6, 2012

Campus Journal

Speechless: A Strange Encounter with Manon de Boer’s Resonating Surfaces

Sometimes, art leaves us with incredibly intense emotions. We fall madly in love with one painting, nearly convinced that our true soul mate exists as pigment applied onto canvas. Another painting might provoke the exact opposite reaction: it may make us recoil

November 29, 2012

Campus Journal

Beautiful and Bizarre as Life: Dancing around the Bride Debuts at the PMA

Contemporary art can often seem cryptic and inaccessible to viewers. Devoid of recognizable figures, it leaves us with random dabs of paint, slashes of lines and absurd juxtapositions, making it appear impossible to even understand how the work speaks to us. And

November 1, 2012

Zoe Wray

Look Closer: Jennifer Bartlett’s Captivating Retrospective at PAFA

Wear Your Art on Your Sleeve: Isaiah Zagar’s Intimate Mosaics

Our Fashion, Ourselves: Eclectic Art on Fashion at Penn’s ICA

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again! A Journey through Art History in Boston

Still Pain Runs Deep: Another Heated Look at Sephardic Jewish Culture

PAFA’s “The Female Gaze”: Bad Title, Fantastic Exhibition

What I Saw Over Winter Break: Picasso Black and White

Where the Inconceivable is Absurdly Beautiful: The BMA’s New Contemporary Art Wing

Speechless: A Strange Encounter with Manon de Boer’s Resonating Surfaces

Beautiful and Bizarre as Life: Dancing around the Bride Debuts at the PMA

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