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Philadelphia artist duo, the Dufala Brothers, never had a gallery show before last month. Now, thanks to winning the West Prize, Billy and Steven, both hovering near 30 years old, have $25,000 in pocket and will be showing at a prestigious art fair in Chicago. But perhaps most significantly they have been acquired to be part of the West Collection.

Dufalas: "Being in good company is always desirable. It means that the work will be out there in front of people, kind of all the time."
"And they promote it themselves – that's part of their mission."

The Dufalas make large and small three-dimensional art works, like a huge ice cream truck outfitted to look like a tank, or a dumpster lined to look a coffin. While most art prizes have a cash component, few come with the prospect for exhibiting pieces like these permanently. The prize is the vision of Paige West. She acquires the work of up and coming artists with a single-minded goal of bolstering emerging artists as they set out on their paths.

West: "We were hoping to reach a new audience about the collection and then publicity for the artists in reaching a new collecting or gallery audience."

The West Collection, where the Dufala Brothers' art will be on permanent exhibit, still sits in Oaks, Pennsylvania. It originated there 15 years ago at the headquarters of the investment company SEI. Paige West is daughter of SEI's founder and was an art history student at the time. It was her job to curate the collection but it didn't take long for her to feel something was wrong.

West: "I was going into galleries, and I would ask questions about artists. It was very difficult at that time to get any information, unless the gallery knew who you were and I've had people say that, 'I don't have time for this,' those kind of things, which I just don't think is any way to run a business."

The West Collection, West Prize, and a new gallery in New York that West opened, all run completely opposite to what she found as the entrenched ways of working with contemporary art. They're open to new buyers and artists, forthcoming about prices and information. Ed Winkleman has owned and operated a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan for nearly a decade.

Winkleman: "By taking chances on younger artists who can really use the prestige of being in the West Collection to help build their careers, and to purposely seek out emerging artists, it opens doors."

Winkleman suspects West and her co-curator, Lee Stoetzel are making shrewd decisions about artists whose work will likely appreciate in the future.

Winkleman: "Lee and Paige both have really strong eyes – they have a sense of what quality is. Obviously they know what they're doing. They're making really smart choices."

West insists that money isn't the driving motivation. After all there are no guarantees of appreciation that come from winning the prize or being acquired. And the winners of the first West Prize seem to agree. They say they have more credibility now and opportunities for collaboration. But materially, their lives haven't much changed since winning.

Dufalas: "It's pretty much the same. I still don't have a home."
"He stopped sleeping on my couch."
"I still don't shower very regularly. I'm still in the studio pretty much every day. It wasn't like, this is time to kick back and not do anything. It's probably gonna make me want to work harder."

Indeed, the Dufala Brothers now have to figure out what works they'll exhibit when Paige West takes their art to Chicago's Next Art Fair in May. By simply spurring these emerging artists on, the West Prize may be working just as intended.

More information:
Learn more about the Dufala Brothers and their work at their website.

The West Collection website includes more photos of the Dufala Brothers work and information about the West Prize.

Check out Ed Winkleman's gallery and read his blog

Read about Chicago's Next 2009 art fair where the Dufalas will be exhibiting their work in May

Inquirer: Galleries | Not what's expected: Wilson's portraits, Dufalas' recyclings (3/15/09)

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The new Asian Arts Initiative space on Vine Street is envisioned as a multi-tenant facility that will serve as a cultural resource for the redevelopment of the north end of Chinatown. The one catch is that the three-story, 24,000-square foot space may not be permanent. The Initiative's option to buy the building expires in September, per an agreement reached with the landlord. Gayle Isa is director of the Initiative.

Isa: "People at the city level have met with us, told us they would support our project. Our state rep, state senator, have expressed support of the project. We're really just waiting for decision makers, like the Governor in Harrisburg, to decide that our project is a worthy priority, and release the funds."

If the building is not purchased, Isa says the group may not be able to afford commercial lease rates. The cost of the space is $2.5 million and may be paid for with Redevelopment Capital Assistance Program funds.

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Drexel University has one of the country's top graduate programs in arts administration.  So sending graduate students to DC to sit in on meetings with federal representatives is a natural extension of their classroom studies.  Students pay for the trip with an art auction, which grossed 8000 dollars this year and has sent 12 students to the capitol.  Quiana Clark-Roland came to Philadelphia from Kentucky for Drexel's program and has one semester left.

Clark-Roland: "I'm always advocating, keeping up with listservs, seeing what's out there, finding out the new issues affecting the A&C sector. To be an advocate, you don't necessarily have to be very forceful in terms of your views. Being informed can make you a very good advocate."

Some of the issues the Philadelphia delegation is focusing on are health insurance for artists, visas for visiting performers, and funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

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An Iraqi citizen sitting at 5th and Arch might find it difficult to get the public's attention these days. But park an American soldier and a rusted, bombed-out vehicle from Baghdad next to him, and passers by just may perk up. The interactive piece, which will be at Independence Mall on Saturday, is designed to stimulate discussion, says artist Jeremy Deller particularly at a time when national attention seems to be focused elsewhere.

Deller: "In a sense it's a little nudge or reminder, but also by bringing the car you're bringing a piece of evidence. It's definitely a piece of material culture, the kind of thing you might see in a museum in 20 years, but we brought it over to show the public."

The intended conversation on Independence Mall will be followed by a more in-depth discussion in the evening at the Slought Foundation.

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After giving back over half a million dollars of the funding increase this spring, Fairmount Park will be planting around 450 trees this spring. But the park doesn't do it alone. Private and state-funded partners help with tree planting. Turns out, they're struggling too. The state-funded Treevitalize program has set a goal to plant 1000 trees in Philadelphia each season, but at this point there's only funding for 850. Michael Leff is program manager at Treevitalize.

Michael Leff: "The one wonderful thing is we are not being held back by a lack of demand. The challenge is piecing together various pots of funding to be able to plant all the trees we would otherwise be able to."

Both Fairmount Park and Treevitalize set tree planting priorities through requests from citizens. Hundreds of requests will be rolled over from the spring into the fall planting season.

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From what Ray Murray says, the hybrid name of the film festival seems like a meaningless relic of a tiff between festival managers. Murray is artistic director of the festival.  He says the venues, types of films and format of the festival are basically identical to last year.

Murray: "A lot of people are confused, but we try to keep them, saying, 'hey, it's the same it ever was.' So, in the odd way, a lot of the controversy that preceded the film fest has generated a lot of interest"

Murray says ticket sales are up 10 to 15 percent from this time last year, with opening night already sold out. While the plan is to split the festival in two events next year, with Cinefest in the spring and Philadelphia Film Festival in the fall, Murray says he believes top management is likely to reconcile.

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Driving north on Broad Street from City Hall, the enormous, shuttered Philadelphia Opera House building may have caught your eye. Inside, it's full of dust but you can make out some elaborate detailing through the rubble. It was built in the early 20th century as a competitor to the Academy of Music by opera impresario, Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the famous lyricist. Thaddeus Squire is artistic director of Hidden City.

Squire: "The apocryphal, infamous story is the night he opened the Philadelphia Opera House, he was running a production of Aida, which was what the Met was running at the same time on South Broad Street. All the Philadelphia audiences left at intermission and walked up Broad Street to watch the second half at Hammerstein's House."

The festival will also bring dancers, musicians and other artists to perform in eight lesser known sites across the city this summer.

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Rather than call people and ask how many times they had been to a theater or orchestra performance in the past year, the new Cultural Engagement Index tracks all kinds of cultural activity, like making up dance steps at home and writing a poem.

Consultants asked questions at public places in every local zip code to compile the study. It turns out that young people, and Latino and African Americans are actually far more active culturally, using this broader definition of culture. Alan Brown was lead author of the study.

Brown: "It's only by asking hard questions and looking as clearly as possible at the cultural system that we can get creative ideas for example for how to get hundreds of thousands of people dancing, or reading the same book, or writing poems."

Brown says the next step is determining which cultural activities to engage, and how.

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Jane Irish's early paintings are elaborate French baroque interiors, with furniture, wall moldings and vases. Her "aha" moment came when she decided to actually make the things in her paintings.

Irish: "I wanted to take the leap to making it rather than paying homage to it. It's a wonderful form because it's 3-D, you can present three or four ideas on a work of art."

(Pictured above is Irish's Connolly Long Bien Bridge Vase)

Irish's boldly colored, French Baroque-style vases are part of the Dirt on Delight clay show now at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The vases look messily handmade.  On them are written poems that relate to wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Having received a masters in fine arts in painting, Irish used to consider herself a painter.  But artists have been veering away from the categories art schools use to sort them.

Marincola: "I think for myself, I became aware of it in the early 80s, when I noticed that young artists they used was the appropriate medium to embody the ideas in their work."

Paula Marincola is director of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. She says when French-born artist Marcel Duchamp famously included a urinal in an art show in 1917, he gave artists permission to make work about ideas, rather than physical objects.

Marincola: "Sometimes you didn't even make an object. So I think those factors have contributed to this sense that contemporary artists have that any tool they want to use to communicate with is available to them. And often what we find is a set of ideas that are consistent across an artist's practice rather than a particular medium."

Getting conceptual and following creative yearnings might feel great for an artist.  To audiences, though, it's not always an easy sell. Andy Fife is director of Shunpike, which provides marketing help to artists.

Fife: "If you are an audience member and you're thinking, what do I want to do this weekend? I want to see some theater, or look at some paintings in a gallery, there's a certain expectation that you're going to have a defined experience. So when people break out of those traditional engagements, it tends to lead to a challenge in terms of how you're expecting to engage with them."

Fife recalls working with a group that wanted to use a public space for a month for a piece that wasn't exactly a sculpture, or a theater performance, or performance art. Fife couldn't get them any sponsorship. Paula Marincola says, what inspires an artist to experiment often conflicts with the public's expectations.

Marincola: "There's always a tension between what the market wants, which are 'saleable' items, and what artists want to do, which is explore creative expression. And it's up to us as viewers to meet the artist half way and try to understand what it is they're trying to tell us or comment on."

Not all artists are on fire to combine different media. Philadelphia artist Kevin Finklea calls himself a painter. He says he's in no hurry to join what he sees as the fad of multidisciplinary art.

Finklea: "For instance, if we see people making work and they feel they have to include a videotape with it, it's almost as if this is an enforced idea, when their work may be sculpture, painting drawing. But it becomes a requirement of the style of exhibiting now. That makes me question it, whether it's valid, or 'le dernier cri,' the thing that everyone's doing at this moment.

If sales are any indicator that multimedia artists are here to stay, Finklea may have his answer: Jane Irish's vases are selling just fine.

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No school was safe as this horse at the University of the Arts demonstrates. Photo credit: theartblog.org

Transcript:
The question following the attacks is whether the four targeted schools will retaliate. If incensed blog comments and rumblings among students are to be believed, the Trojan horses are just one battle in a much wider war. Rose Crook is a third year painting major at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Cook: "There are millions of artists and we all have this competitive, egotistical drive to us. At the Academy we feel like we have this name to uphold, with Eakins and all these famous people that we feel like we should knock the socks off of everybody. We wanna feel like we're the best, just like Tyler would wanna feel."

PAFA assembled a school-wide meeting to determine their response, and students at other schools are reportedly discussing their own plans. All are staying mum on what – and when – those might be.

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