WHENEVER WEDNESDAY: WEAVING AS METAPHOR LECTURE SERIES

Explore the idea of weaving in the cultural landscape through a series of programs inspired by the work of Sheila Hicks. Four dynamic Philadelphia-area scholars will draw out these ideas in their own fields—architecture, economics, science, and religion—unraveling the ways weaving threads through so much of the contemporary and the ancient world.

• Wednesday, April 6 @ 6:30pm
  ARCHITECTURE: with Jenny E. Sabin, Department of Architecture, School of Design, and Director, Sabin+Jones LabStudio
• Wednesday, April 13 @ 6:30pm
  ECONOMICS: with Phil Nichols, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, University of Pennsylvania
• Wednesday, April 27 @ 6:30pm
  RELIGION: with Lucy Fowler Williams, Sabloff Keeper of Collections at the Penn Museum

TRAVELOGUE – SANTIAGO, CHILE WITH CAMILA MARAMBIO

Whenever Wednesday, April 20 @ 6:30pm

Take several "staycations" and visit faraway art centers through the eyes of those who know them best—all without leaving Philadelphia. Travelogue continues its year-long series of lectures by curators, writers, and artists with a talk by
Camila Marambio. Marambio is Head of the Visual Arts Department of Matucana 100, a contemporary arts center, and teaches at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago.


SPRING OPENING RECEPTION

Thursday, April 21 @ 7-11pm

Join us for the opening of two new exhibitions, One is the loneliest number and "That's How We Escaped": Reflections on Warhol, on view through August 7, 2011.

One is the loneliest number presents emerging artist duos based in Philadelphia and elsewhere. It features five collaboratives working in a variety of media, using a spectrum of approaches to highlight a collective mode that is increasingly present in contemporary practice. Ken Okiishi (and Google) translate poet Arthur Rimbaud and Nick Mauss illustrates directly onto the pages of the new manuscript. Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth engage Lettrism, a French avant-garde movement from the 1940s, through a range of mediums. Nicole Cherubini and Taylor Davis push a playful obsession with materials through their collaboration as Davis, Cherubini. Working seamlessly, Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib create gallery-scale video projections. Philadelphia-based Megawords (Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy) occupy the ICA mezzanine with a series of collaboration-themed events that accompany the exhibition.

"It was incredible to think of it happening at an art opening. Even a Pop Art opening. But then, we weren't just at the art exhibit—we were the art exhibit, we were the art incarnate."—Andy Warhol

"That's How We Escaped": Reflections on Warhol illuminates a night on Penn's campus that transformed an artist into a celebrity. A collaborative effort between Penn students in the Spiegel Contemporary Art Freshman Seminar and artist Alex Da Corte spotlights the night of October 8, 1965, the opening of Andy Warhol's first solo museum show, held at ICA (then located in the Fisher Fine Arts Library). Through a marriage of conceptual and archival elements, the show presents an interpretation of what was arguably the turning point of Warhol's career. It features 24 works, including photographs from the night itself, and an installation by Da Corte reconceptualizing the staircase by which Warhol and his entourage escaped from the crowd, into the night, and on to superstardom.


LAUNDRY BOAT

Saturday, April 23 @ noon-8pm

Inspired by Le Bateau Lavoir, or "The Laundry Boat"—as the bohemian enclave of Paris was called around the start of the last century—ICA presents a daylong immersion in the arts in conjunction with the city-wide Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA). With guest hosts galore, a full program of performances, poetry, projections, conversation, music, meals and libations, lumière and laundry will take place throughout the day and into the night.

For more information about the festival visit www.pifa.org.


Images, top to bottom: Photo by Bastiaan van den Berg. Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, 1965. Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives.