Philadelphia’s International Print Festival Philagrafika 2010 opens january 29

WHEN: Opening Weekend is Friday, January 29 – Saturday, January 31, 2010 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m).
Philagrafika 2010 runs through April 11, 2010.
WHERE: Participating Philagrafika 2010 venues are located throughout the city (full list of participants, locations, and the opening weekend schedule included below)
INFO: Admission ranges from free to $16 and can be purchased at each venue (most venues are free). For more details, please visit www.philagrafika2010.org or call (215) 557-8433.
WHAT: The inaugural year of Philagrafika 2010 (January 29 – April 11, 2010), the largest international city-wide art festival celebrating print as a vital role in contemporary art, is set to commence on January 29 with a full schedule of Opening Weekend events.

Showcasing the work of more than 300 artists in nearly 90 Philadelphia art institutions, Philagrafika 2010’s kick-off will include a weekend of exhibition openings, gallery talks, public receptions, artist meet & greets, and other special festival events, throughout the city of Philadelphia. Philagrafika 2010 will offer audiences the opportunity to see contemporary art that references printmaking in dynamic, unexpected ways and to experience Philadelphia’s rich cultural life in the process.

The majority of Philagrafika 2010’s Opening Weekend events center around the festival’s core exhibition, The Graphic Unconscious, which includes 35 artists from all over the world represented in five major venues: Moore College of Art & Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Print Center, and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. The Graphic Unconscious explores the ubiquitous presence of printed matter in our visual culture, exposes the print component in sculptural, environmental, performance, pictorial and video works, and highlights their relevance to contemporary art and society.

The public opening begins Friday, January 29, as Moore College of Art & Design hosts a meet & greet reception and brunch with select artists including Gunilla Klingberg, Virgil Marti and Regina Silveira whose works are on view in the Galleries at Moore. Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, at Temple University continues opening day with a public reception, beginning with a panel discussion with members of the core exhibition’s curatorial team. Later that evening, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a scheduled curator talk with Philagrafika 2010 Artistic Director José Roca and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Shelley Langdale, followed by a conversation with artist Óscar Muñoz

On Saturday, The Print Center will host an open house featuring artists from the Philadelphia collective Space 1026, who have transformed The Print Center into a multi-use space with modular systems for Philagrafika 2010. Members of Space 1026 will also give a workshop on creating origami forms using prints made by the artists. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) hosts a public reception later that evening. Sunday concludes Philagrafika 2010’s Opening Weekend as PAFA presents a discussion with Israeli artist Orit Hofshi, who has created a large-scale woodcut on interlocking vertical and horizontal pine panels and Japanese paper, and PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art Julien Robson. All galleries included in The Graphic Unconscious are open from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. throughout Opening Weekend.

During Philagrafika 2010’s inaugural Opening Weekend, guests are also invited to a wide variety of events hosted in conjunction with the festival’s Independent Projects, organized individually by nearly 80 additional cultural institutions throughout the Greater Philadelphia region. Additionally, the Out of Print projects, which pair five of Philadelphia’s esteemed historic archives and collections with five artists to create a series of public programs that link history and contemporary art, will occur over the course of the festival.

Philagrafika 2010 has been curated by Artistic Director José Roca, an internationally recognized Colombian curator who co-curated the 2006 São Paulo Biennial. Roca, in turn, assembled the integral curatorial team who has collaboratively organized The Graphic Unconscious exhibition, which spans the curators’ five venues. The Philagrafika 2010 curators include: John Caperton, Curator of Prints & Photographs at The Print Center; independent curator Sheryl Conkelton; Shelley Langdale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Lorie Mertes, Director/Chief Curator of the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design; and Julien Robson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.