First Person Arts Blog

Phil Jackson will present a selection of photographs from of his life-long documentary of the people surrounding him in the subculture of skateboarding. As a child he was drawn to skating by its lack of rules and authority figures.  This attraction, combined with the fact that skateboarding is outlawed in almost every major city, has led to a scene made up of freethinking and often delinquent youth who have all learned to run from cops at an early age. Skateboarding served as a raw, bloody escape from the trite banality of a suburban upbringing. Having spent over half his life as a skateboarder, he has earned the respect of his peers and acquired the skills to chronicle the lifestyle that comes along with it.  His work illuminates an alternative way of life to that of mainstream America.  You can see more of his work here and hear from the man himself at the July 8th Salon!  (Buy tickets here, the fees are on us, so it’s just 8 bucks.)

He’ll be joined by these three artists, presenting unique projects of memoir and documentary art:

Poet Lynn Levin who will present a reading entitled For Better or For Verse, a series of reflections on 29 years of marriage. (More about Lynn Levin)

Writer Jeff Bender will read from his newest memoir writing, La Reforma. (Jeffbender.net)

Writer and Photographer Ellie Brown will share her collaborative work on a short-duration conceptual relationship. (sevendayrelationship.blogspot.com)

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St. in the Philadelphia Arts Bank) on July 8th and runs from 7:30pm to 9:30pm.
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out.

Please buy your tickets in advance!

At the July 8th Salon, Poet, writer, and translator, Lynn Levin will give a spoken-word performance entitled For Better or for Verse: Poems, Comic, Romantic, Dramatic about her 29 year marriage.  Though not self-evidently love poems, they cover a spectrum of emotional tones – tart, comic, passionate, affectionate, anxious.

Levin is the author of three collections of poems, Fair Creatures of an Hour (2009), Imaginarium (2005), and A Few Questions about Paradise (2000), all published by Loonfeather Press. Imaginarium was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. Lynn Levin’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, 5 AM, and Boulevard. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and at Drexel University, where she also produces the award-winning TV show, The Drexel InterViewTM.

You can see Levin read on July 8th along with three other incredible memoir and documentary artists:

Photographer Phil Jackson will show work documenting his lifelong love of skateboarding and his engagement with its robust and creative subculture. (PhilJacksonPhoto.com)

Writer Jeff Bender will read from his newest memoir writing, La Reforma. (Jeffbender.net)

Writer and Photographer Ellie Brown will share her collaborative work on a short-duration conceptual relationship. (sevendayrelationship.blogspot.com)

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St. in the Philadelphia Arts Bank) on July 8th and runs from 7:30pm to 9:30pm.
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out.

Please buy your tickets in advance!

“Ten Days in the Capsule”

It all started, as some of the best stories do, with a Craigslist advertisement.  Zach Webber and Ellie Brown embarked on what they called a capsule relationship: meeting, courting, marrying, having a child and divorcing in the space of less than two weeks.  Though fictional at its core, the performance blends into real life–kind of a reverse-method-acting or method living?–resulting in real emotional attachments:

Ellie Brown will share photos and writings about her conceptual relationship at the Salon on July 8th.  You can read about her experiences and the project more broadly here.

Brown will be joined by these three incredible memoir and documentary artists for one night only!

Photographer Phil Jackson will show work documenting his lifelong love of skateboarding and his engagement with its robust and creative subculture. (PhilJacksonPhoto.com)

Writer Jeff Bender will read from his newest memoir writing, La Reforma. (Jeffbender.net)

Poet Lynn Levin will present a reading entitled For Better or For Verse, a series of reflections on 29 years of marriage. (More about Lynn Levin)

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St. in the Philadelphia Arts Bank) on July 8th and runs from 7:3opm to 9:30pm.
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out.

Please buy your tickets in advance!

There is, of course, a story behind Nathan Manske’s founding of Imfromdriftwood.com, a collection of “true stories by gay people from all over”:

The morning after I watched the Gus Van Sant-directed, Sean Penn-starring, Dustin Lance Black-written Milk, would you believe I was inspired? But funny enough, what inspired me was Milk more so than Milk. An image I recalled wasn’t even in the film. It was a photo of Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., riding on the hood of a car in a San Francisco Gay Pride march, holding a sign that reads, “I’m From Woodmere, N.Y.” The sign was intended to show how far people came to attend the San Francisco rally, but it meant something more to me. It meant that there are gay people in every small town and every big city across America and the world. I was thinking about that photo in between assaults on the snooze button and I responded to Harvey’s sign. I’m from Driftwood.

An accomplished copy-writer for some of the biggest companies in the world, Manske is indeed from Driftwood, Texas, but has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 2003. Imfromdriftwood.com recently attracted it 100th submission!  Add your own story to the site and then join us on June 10th for a reading by Manske and friends of some of the most compelling work.

Manske will be joined by these three incredible memoir and documentary artists for one night only!

Sarah McEneaney shares a series of thoughtfully rendered personal narrative paintings covering the flux of human experience ranging from the mundane to the acutely traumatic. (Salon Preview)

Stephanie Yuhas reads from “American Goulash,” a collection of stories about growing up a first-born American daughter to an all-Transylvanian family. (Salon Preview) American Goulash website.

Michael M. Koehler shares PARADE, a photo essay exploring his relationship to Philadelphia, mediated through images of this city’s iconic Mummers. (Salon Preview) Michaelmkoehler.com

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St.) and runs from 7:3opm to 9:30pm
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out!  Please buy your tickets in advance.

At the June 10th Salon, Stephanie Yuhas will share “American Goulash”, a series of humorous stories about her childhood as a first-born American to a Translyvanian family.  “American Goulash” is a written self-exploration that preserves old stories, tales, and idiosyncrasies from her own past.  Her work is, more broadly, an encouragement to all people to speak to their elders and learn from and share their family histories. You can read some of the stories at the American Goulash website.

Stephanie Yuhas is an award-winning writer, producer, and artist whose films have been featured on the front page of sites like YouTube, MySpace, CollegeHumor, and in dozens of international film festivals. She works with several productions companies around the Greater Philadelphia area to produce and market film and animation, including Shinygrape Studios, Cinevore Studios, and Crystalline Studios. Her last project she worked on was a musical that involved a girl rolling around in raw meat, and in addition to her current project, “American Goulash”, she is developing a feature film involving robotic uteruses. Needless to say, she leads an “interesting” life. You can see some of her work by visiting Shinygrape.com.

Yuhas is also the Executive Producer of Project Twenty1, an organization dedicated to networking, inspiring, promoting and exhibiting artists from all disciples through film and animation. To find out more about Project Twenty1, visit NotJustAFilmFestival.com.

Join us on Wednesday, June 10th for Yuhas’ Salon presentation along with three other artists exploring facets of memoir and documentary art:

Sarah McEneaney shares a series of thoughtfully rendered personal narrative paintings covering the flux of human experience ranging from the mundane to the acutely traumatic.

Michael M. Koehler shares PARADE, a photo essay exploring his relationship to Philadelphia, mediated through images of this city’s iconic Mummers.   Michaelmkoehler.com

Nathan Manske will present selections of “true stories by gay people from all over” collected on his website Imfromdriftwood.com

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St.) and runs from 7:3opm to 9:30pm
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out!  Please buy your tickets in advance.

You may recognize Michael M. Koehler’s name from his extraordinary photo essay documenting a canoe run down the Schuylkill River on the cover of the City Paper in April.  He’ll show a different side of his work with PARADE at the Salon on June 10th at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St.).

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Michael M. Koehler started photographing on the streets, in local barbershops, churches and other community establishments where he learned that making photographs was based on the relationship that he shared with his subjects.  After receiving a B.F.A from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2005, he traveled the country and abroad to photograph, interacting with both the people and the landscape. He has worked as a photojournalist for the Philadelphia City Paper and the Philadelphia Tribune. His work has been published in numerous magazines, such as American Photo and Complex Magazine and he has shown his work in galleries and museums, such as the Leica Gallery in New York, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, Subliminal Projects Gallery in Los Angeles and the Sandro Chia Studio in Rome. Most recently, Michael was awarded a Jurors award at Perkins Center for the Arts.

PARADE is a selection Black and White Gelatin Silver photographs that focuses on human nature and the relationship people share with each other and there landscape, both urban and rural. The way the story unfolds is in the mutual way we see each other, the teller and the listener, the parade and the viewer. The honoring and witnessing that the viewer gives to the characters in the parade and the honoring and witnessing that comes back is a way of life. I have paraded, joined parades, and people have joined my parade. When we are authentically, naturally engaged with another human, we are at our most vulnerable state and mutual trust evolves. The experience is the true gift. For this exchange to occur, we both must become open, a gentle process that sometimes is questioned and denied. The photograph is the evidence, the data of this exchange. In this ritual, life becomes a parade of human engagement. We are nothing without each other.

See more of his work here: MichaelMKoehler.com

Join us on Wednesday, June 10th for Koehler’s Salon presentation along with three other artists exploring facets of memoir and documentary art:

Sarah McEneaney shares a series of thoughtfully rendered personal narrative paintings covering the flux of human experience ranging from the mundane to the acutely traumatic. Read more here.

Stephanie Yuhas reads from “American Goulash,” a collection of stories about growing up a first-born American daughter to an all-Transylvanian family.  American Goulash

Nathan Manske will present selections of “true stories by gay people from all over” collected on his website Imfromdriftwood.com

The Salon takes place at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St.) and runs from 7:3opm to 9:30pm
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out!  Please buy your tickets in advance.

Sarah McEneaney’s arresting autobiographical narrative paintings rely on a variety of sources for their inspiration: drawings, memories, photographs, and imagination and by the sheer range of perspectives they control tend to read less like memoir and more like creative non-fiction.  She turns this creative documentary lens equally on the mundane activities of daily life–napping, reading, bathing–and the moments of acute horror–surviving an illness and the trauma of violent crime.  An activist–she was directly involved in the efforts to keep the baseball stadium out of Philadelphia’s China Town–her work dwells on individual experience but never loses sight of its resonance with a broader community.

Dog Heaven

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Sarah McEneaney, born 1955 in Munich, Germany, attended The University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art) and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Primarily a painter, McEneaney lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her autobiographical work has been  exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York and throughout the country for more than 25 years.  In 2004, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia presented the first museum survey show of her work. Recent solo exhibitions include Mills College Art Museum, Oakland CA (2008) and The Chinati Foundation, Marfa Texas (2009)  McEneaney’s paintings are in  many public and private collections including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson and Johnson and Microsoft Corporation.

McEneaney is currently represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York and has had  solo exhibitions there in 2006 and 2008. Additionally in 2008 she had solo shows at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland CA and Locks Gallery in Philadelphia PA

See McEneaney share and discuss her work at the June 10th Salon at the Laurie Beechman Cabaret (601 S. Broad St.).  She’ll be joined by three other artists producing memoir and documentary work in a variety of media:

Stephanie Yuhas reads from “American Goulash,” a collection of stories about growing up a first-born American daughter to an all-Transylvanian family.  American Goulash

Michael M. Koehler shares PARADE, a photo essay exploring his relationship to Philadelphia, mediated through images of this city’s iconic Mummers.   Michaelmkoehler.com

Nathan Manske will present selections of “true stories by gay people from all over” collected on his website Imfromdriftwood.com

The Salon runs from 7:3opm to 9:30pm.
Admission is $8, seating is limited, and we typically sell out!  Please buy your tickets in advance.

Michael M. Koehler, Nathan Manske, Sarah McEneaney, Stephanie Yuhas.

Get your tickets here.

Hope you can join us for the next First Person Salon tomorrow night.  We’re very excited to welcome three artists, all new to the Salon stage:

Mark Rudd

Gabrielle Revlock will perform an excerpt of SHARE!, a collaborative dance piece that will debut at the nEW Festival in June. SHARE! is a collage of honest biographical text combined with the natural dishonesty of theatre.

SHARE! from Gabrielle Revlock on Vimeo.

Also Featured on May 13th:

Mark Rudd

Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie, Shannon Kane-Meddock

The Philadelphia-based filmmakers will show scenes from a new documentary, MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER, the story of a young mother’s quest to keep her baby daughter healthy and whole.  See the film’s website here!