Opening May 8, InLiquid presents a group mural show featuring four artist members in the Hall at Crane Arts. This exhibition will include murals by Donna Backues, Joe Brenman, Delia King, and Shira Walinsky, with each artist incorporating different materials and textures such as glass, paper, and acrylic to construct their large-scale works.
Donna Backues is a practicing studio artist, freelance designer/illustrator, and currently works as a teaching artist for the Village of Arts and Humanities, Spiral Q Puppet Theatre, and the Philadelphia Art Museum’s Art Futures program. She has a BA in Graphic Design from Southern Illinois University and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She exhibits frequently, accepts public and private commissions and continues to work in her studio. Backues was recently one of three winners of the 2013 American Batik Design Competition, organized by The Embassy of Indonesia in Washington, DC. Backues writes of her work: “I have always had a love for landscape – from all angles & distances – even aerial. Maybe it’s because of travel and having a geologist father who would tell me about how the land was formed and why it looked a certain way. So I seem to approach most subjects in light of place. Since living in Philadelphia, my new landscape is the city and I find myself working more and more with squares and rectangles.”
Joe Brenman graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1978. His sculpture and mosaic murals are in numerous public and private collections and have been widely exhibited. In 2009 he completed an on-site, marble sculpture in Phu Tho Province Vietnam, and in 2010 he was commissioned to create a mosaic mural for the Germantown Jewish Center in Mount Airy, PA. He has held numerous residencies and been awarded grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Past public work includes SEPTA’s Art in Transit, an installation in Los Anonas, El Salvador, and Bar Ferdinand in Philadelphia. Brenman, describing his work, shares: “My mosaic murals are a progression from [my] ceramic sculptures; there is a similar use of design, color, and texture. I began to use collage as a way to design my mosaic murals … [and] collage like mosaic has a rhythm to it. … The images created are clear and organized from one view and broken and jagged from another. It’s similar to how I see the world [when] focusing on a face, the side of a building, a bird on a wire, all in the same frame.”
Delia King has a BA in Humanities from Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey and has been a glass artist for 17 years and a muralist for 12 years, creating a variety of work for both the public and private realm. She employs numerous skills to complete the works including painting, light carpentry, glass mosaic, and glass laminate and reverse painting on glass. King has completed nearly 30 large-scale mural/mosaic projects that have included the local community in design, conception and execution and can be found across the country at schools, prisons, and community centers. King writes: “I have developed a way of working that stresses community involvement and a style that favors narrative abstraction. Most of my projects have a basis in Euclidian geometry that ties simple mathematic principles with broad human experiences. With every project I attempt to invoke a mood that is appropriate to the space, even in spaces that people might not think of, like, underpasses or prisons.”
Shira Walinsky received a BA from Sarah Lawrence in Fine Arts and Film Studies in 1995 and an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. She has designed and painted eighteen murals in Philadelphia through the City of Philadelphia’s Mural Art Program, and co-teaches an interdisciplinary mural class with Mural Arts Director Jane Golden at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also co-taught mural classes at Bryn Mawr College and Princeton University. Walinsky shares: “The network of family, neighborhood, immigrants and teachers are some of the subjects of my murals. By exploring lives which are either marginalized or often simply forgotten by society we represent and affirm a sense of identity and a place in history within these people. Within each network exists the individual story.”
The public hours for the Crane Arts Building are noon – 6 pm, Wednesday – Saturday, and until 9 pm on the Second Thursday of each month.
