HIGHLIGHTS
I always love that Earth Day is situated right when the city is exploding with new flowers and life. These spring exhibitions show appreciation for our planet by working with found and repurposed materials, honoring their origins while building something new. At the Museum for Art in Wood, Katie Hudnall constructs delightful and “mechanically improbable” animals and curiosity cabinets of found objects in her show, The Longest Distance between Two Points. Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery showcases CONTEMPORARY RUIN future visions, a collection of work that meditates on the realities of decay in our cities, offering both a poetic reflection on our everyday lives and practical approaches toward building a more resilient future. South of the city, Lavett Ballard’s solo show at Rowan University, The People Who Could Fly, features striking mixed-media collages that recast stories of African-American folklore and history using layers of imagery.
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Katie Hudnall: The Longest Distance between Two Points at the Museum for Art in Wood
Featuring: Katie Hudnall
On view through: July 20th, 2025
Curator: Jennifer-Navva Millken
Peering through the expansive windows of the Museum for Art in Wood, you will spot a small herd of wooden creatures. They have sturdy little bodies balanced on slender, spindly legs. Imagine what would happen if rickety piers and boats were transformed by a child’s daydream into elongated gazelles and giraffes. Hudnall has an intuitive approach combined with exceptional craftsmanship, defying the precariousness of her materials and, seemingly, of gravity. Her work sparks fantastical Miyazaki-style stories where wondrous beings and magical objects lead you on a transformative and symbolic journey.
Take, for example, a gentle beast made of numerous jewelry-sized boxes that open and close through the manipulation of levers on the opposite side of its body (though you cannot touch the exhibits). I pictured myself frantically running back and forth, trying to operate the entire contraption alone to see inside the boxes. However, like other iterations of Hudnall’s, this piece is intentionally designed to be experienced collaboratively. Titled “Intermediary” this machine is a go-between, mirroring the intricacies of relationships, where seemingly disconnected mechanics and roundabout paths complicate communication.
The centerpiece of this exhibition is “A Cabinet for Lost and Found Things,” a wide-scale dresser connected by drawers and strings to small wooden boards scattered across the open wall above. Inside each drawer is a collection of small found objects that the artist collected on city walks. Lighters, seeds, fragments of sunglasses, trash—each item is carefully arranged within its drawer. Each drawer is then linked by a string through a pulley system to a wall-mounted lever, in turn lifting a small wooden cover to reveal a carved, piercing eye. Hudall honors these small objects to highlight the everyday magic of chance encounters.
Throughout Hudnall’s constructions, one can see her love for what she describes as “absurdist logic” and the “inefficient beauty of roundabout function.” Her creations feel like the fascinating and unexpected offspring of a Rube-Goldberg machine and a cabinet of curiosities, blending playful mechanics with a collector’s zeal for elevating the seemingly ordinary.
CONTEMPORARY RUIN future visions at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery
Through: May 22, 2025
Featuring: Michelle Marcuse, Tim Portlock, Yannick Lowery, Mia Fabrizio, Emily Erb, Terri Saulin, Sophie C. White, Julia Way, Joseph E.B. Elliott, Jennifer Johnson, Kelsey Skaroff, Daniel Van Dyk, Refugia Design, and a landmark work from the Harrison Studio, courtesy of The Helen and Newton Harrison Family Trust.
Additional projects: Drexel University Master of Science in Interior Design students
Curated by: Nancy Agati
Philadelphians are intimately familiar with the decay and ruin woven throughout our city. For a visual artist, decomposition is fascinating. The flaking paint, splintered wood, and tenacious grasses pushing through cracked pavement all create tantalizing textures while emphasizing the impermanence of our endeavors. Even more revealing is the underlying story of each structure. Situated both in the past and the present, these works underscore the complex economic, social, and environmental forces that shape our cities and what our collective choices say about our priorities.
At Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery, Curator Nancy Agati presents a selection of local artists who confront “ruin, not as a relic of the past but as a present-day reality.” While some artists delve into the histories of their own communities, others find personal metaphors within decay. Still others imagine hopeful futures and potential paths toward renewal. Despite their distinct aesthetic approaches, Agati has curated a show with clear visual coherence. Common elements include textural assemblages of cardboard, porcelain, wood, and grasses, ranging in size from intimate wall hangings to massive room-sized installations. Artists explore mapping, photography, paint, and audio-visual elements to tell the story of the cities we inhabit and our ever-evolving relationships within them.
Adding another layer to this exploration, Drexel University Design graduate students showcase imagined urban scenarios from a Speculative Futures course. Through architectural models, drawings, and videos, these emerging designers present urban scenarios that envision alternative political and economic structures that might arise in post-capitalist societies. Their work investigates how hypothetical communities might be reflected and supported by their interior architecture, offering a glimpse into potential futures shaped by alternative values and systems.
Lavett Ballard: The People Who Could Fly at Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum
Through: May 24, 2025
Featuring: Lavett Ballard
Curator: Mary Salvante
In The People Who Could Fly, artist Lavette Ballard presents an exhibition of new work—the central metaphor is a tale of Africans who were enslaved and remembered they could fly. The show as a whole is organized as a “visual timeline wrapped up in African American folklore.” Creating large mixed-media collages on panels and repurposed fence slats, Ballard’s work incorporates imagery from her own life, historical events, iconic figures, symbology, and patterning. Each piece tells its own story with an impressively intertwined volume of images and patterns. The collages on reclaimed fences have a visceral impact when confronted directly. You are immediately pulled into the deep eyes of people (often women) as they emerge from a haze of feathers, dots, and gold leaf. The softer texture of the weathered wood amplifies the ephemeral composition and speaks to the complexity of human experience. Ballard layers old photographs with flowers, patterns, and tribal markings, collapsing moments across history into her compositions. Several of the sculptures are freestanding in the gallery, revealing on the back of each piece what Ballard calls their shadow figures, “the idea of what we could have been.”
Her deliberate use of color and patterning extends to the gallery walls, including the sky blue, referencing the show’s title story. Recurring motifs such as wings and feathers represent literal flight and the yearning for liberation. The fences represent the barriers we construct to both include and exclude people and ideas. Ballard creates pieces of interconnected history and memory, invocation and invitation. She connects us with stories that cannot be forgotten.
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About the writer: Claire Haik is a Philadelphia artist and educator whose work explores the hidden processes of nature. Using oil, acrylic, and hand-crushed, locally sourced pigments, she creates abstracted representations of landscapes and scientifically inspired imagery. Her work has been featured in SciArt in America and Issues in Science and Technology, and she was awarded the Lois and Charles X Carlson Landscape Residency and Experience Economies: Landscape Experience residency at Mildred’s Lane. Haik holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Pulse Miami and at galleries throughout the Northeast. See her art and learn more about her here.