HIGHLIGHTS
Since the beginning of time, artists have drawn inspiration from and found it within the natural world. This month, Philly boasts a variety of work where artists are going deeper to discover what can be imitated and learned from the evolutionary beings around us. Some artists take direct motifs like coqui sounds or daffodil patterns, while others venture into new utopias or dreamworlds to live in as the real world diminishes underneath their feet. Studio 105 at RAY presents a bold reimagining of electrical current and vibrations that echoes the power of communication and sound. Philadelphia Magic Gardens reframes the purpose of the mushroom not just as a decomposer but as a symbol of rebirth and perseverance. The Arts Leagues suggests a world where the organic is depleted and society must build again. Arch Enemy Arts throws logic out the window as they find mercy in the mystical realm.
Raúl Romero: Sound Check at Studio 105 at RAY Philly @studio105atray
On view through August 22, 2025
Featuring Raúl Romero
Raul Romero’s Sound Check transports you to an oasis cut off and inverted from the outside world. This exhibition interchanges the audio to the visual and the musical to the functional, all to recreate a space and inspire visitors to think differently about their environment. As an artist inspired by the organic and his Puerto Rican heritage, his references can only be understood through the exhibition’s sound design and the feeling of coming home to a place you are unfamiliar with.
Although the exhibition is rooted in his distinct sculptures and aluminum spectrogram prints, the faceless hero of the exhibition is the coqui, playing on a loop in the gallery space and referenced visually throughout. With his sculpture, Romero translates the coqui as a symbol of persistence and survival, even when his surroundings are in flux. His labor-intensive treatment of sound and its amplifiers paint a landscape of Romero’s motherland: communicative, proactive, vulnerable, calling out to anyone who stops and wants to hear.
Of Earthen Kin: Works by Katie Kaplan at Philadelphia Magic Gardens
@phillymagicgardens
On view through August 10, 2025
Featuring Katie Kaplan
In her solo exhibition, Kaplan orchestrates a fantastical call to action with her mystical fabric works and collection of hand-crafted social activist posters. She layers screen prints and monoprints with quilting patterns to create psychedelic and stimulating works that leap off the walls. With piercing pinks, highlighter yellows, and technicolor greens, Kaplan’s colors capture the feeling of experiencing the organic at work, like when you come across fields of daffodils or observe lichen growing on bark.
Kaplan employs different perspectives from the bird’s-eye view to the forest floor and swirling compositions as a queering of nature: a non-binary honoring collectivism, rejecting hegemony, and in constant transformation. The exhibition calls not only to be one with the natural world, but to imitate it. As the mushroom can grow from the ground, so too can liberation movements grow during times of political turmoil. To echo her message of promoting community, Kaplan’s textile works are accompanied by an archive of painted posters from various social reform events. Her process-focused work throughout and outside of the exhibition feels apt as it continues the historical traditions of using quilts and printmaking methods to spread messages of queer liberation and gender equality for all.
What World? at The Arts League
@artsleaguephl
On view through July 30
Curated by Azsaneé Truss
Featuring Destiny Crockett, Doriana Diaz, Jonny Echevarria, Jillian M. Rock
Curator Azsaneé Truss presents a world where the analog, digital, and artificially generated can coexist in an effort to raise questions on the imagined futures we collectively share. The exhibition champions collage as both an expansive medium and a politically-charged act that addresses the triumphs and pains of the past as the artists look forward. There is an invitation for unencumbered theorizing connecting the abstract moments constructed by the artists, allowing visitors to dive in and out as they desire. Through the exhibition, Truss, Crockett, Diaz, Echevarria, and Rock become holistic architects as they cut, sew, assemble, and record their hopes and experiences in the present-day United States while carrying the knowledge of erasure and injustice throughout history. Although the five distinct viewpoints are presented, the works speak to each other in an ongoing conversation about the new worlds they are building, real and imagined.
Echevarria masterfully composes an original score to fully immerse visitors as they view the exhibition. Rock’s mixed media and paper assemblages serve as counterpoetics against the dominant systems of oppression while employing graceful methods of creation. Diaz’s intimate installation gathers personal and found ephemera to create a new archive that blends time and location. Crockett skillfully employs pattern and color to give voice and life to silhouettes stuck in time. With Truss’s curation and additional exhibition engagement, What World? presents itself as a safe space to reimagine, inquire, and build a new collective future.
Beatriz Bradaschii: The Seasons in Between at Arch Enemy Arts
@archenemyarts
On view through July 27
Featuring Beatriz Bradaschii
Sometimes, when you are wandering around an art gallery, a work whispers out to you before you even see it. The work of Bradaschii watches you from afar, patiently waiting to tempt the eyes with its dreamy imagery and chilling characters. This cohesive collection of oil painting and clay wall-hanging sculpture presents like theatrical chapters under the same sickly green or wine-drenched sky, embellished with fantastical creatures or chilling witchcraft: The viewer is in a trance from conjured visions of a mandrake sleeping with a pair of pruning scissors, fire tornadoes touching down in a field, or a girl’s sweet face growing from the roots of a cut tree stump. Brasashii’s feathery touch evokes a dreamscape always commanded by a solitary heroine, reveling in the beauty and chaos in the supernatural world. The intensity of the works is underlined by Bradaschii’s attention to detail, from perfecting the doll-like sheen on her character’s faces to sculpting the smallest mushrooms clinging to the insides of a tree knot. As an artist balancing between the fantasy world and the real world, Bradashii reminds us to find the beauty during times of limbo.
About the writer: Jessica Aguilar is a writer and arts professional from Hyattsville, MD. She holds a BA in Art History from Temple University where she fell in love with the murals, mosaics, and wheatpastes of Philadelphia. She was a 2023-2024 participant of the Arts Writing Incubator at The Black Embodiments Studio, in Seattle, WA and has been published in several art publications across the U.S. Guiding both her writing and creative processes are interests in nostalgia, identity, and gender expression through Latine perspectives. She aims to make the art world accessible to all communities while working at Paradigm Gallery + Studio. @jesswiththe_mess