Update (03/20): Roxy has been adopted!

Roxy is a 2-3 year old female American Bull Dog mix weighing 55lbs.

Roxy was found running around at 53rd and Walton a couple of weeks ago. She has had a rough life thus far. She was taken away from her owner as part of a cruelty case earlier in the year by the SPCA. She was fostered, somehow ended up on the street, and is now in stable foster care. Despite her past experiences she is an amazingly loving dog and deeply appreciative of every bit of affection and care given to her.

Roxy is very responsive. She is crate-trained, knows sit and come, and would learn other commands quickly. She is very playful when outside, but around the house she is very mellow. She has never chewed anything. She has done well meeting other dogs on leash, but would do best in a home with no cats. Roxy is spayed, up to date on shots, and ready to find a permanent home.

For more information, or to set up a meet-up please contact Rob at 267-968-5687 or RSPetraitis [at] gmail.com.

 
University City Arts League brings us West Philly Abstraction, presenting eight West Philadelphia artists whose works have been exhibited internationally and are part of major museum collections, and who all participate in the abstract tradition.

The opening will be held this Friday, March 9 from 6-8 p.m. at 4226 Spruce Street.

From UCAL:

Marina Borker began as a painter but moved into the realm of stained glass. Focusing on the leading of the glass, perhaps more so than the colored glass itself, Borker’s recent pieces exist in space like transparent line drawings. Borker holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and her work has been exhibited at Vox Populi, Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, and Fleisher Art Memorial.

Robert Goodman‘s densely painted works pull the viewer into a swirling vortex of color and gestural energy.  Currently teaching at Moore College of Art, he holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and was the recipient of a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Painting.

Paul King takes a contemporary yet unabashedly expressionist approach to abstraction. His gestural canvases nevertheless show a firm devotion to the sensitive and disciplined painterliness of Cezanne. Paul King’s work has been shown regularly in the Philadelphia area for the past two decades and is in the permanent collection of the Woodmere Art Museum. He teaches at The University of the Arts.

Alice Oh, winner of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, makes paintings that are built up from small color shapes and components. They evoke natural growth and progression as a metaphor for contemporary human living. Alice Oh’s works are in the collection of The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University. She holds an MFA from Yale University and currently teaches at Moore College of Art.

Caroline Letham Santa traverses a territory somewhere between painting, drawing, and arguably, sculpture. Her recent works made of paper that has been found, aged, distressed, folded, and, as the artist states, “stored” and “transported” result in visual experiences that exist outside a realm of verbal definition. Caroline Letham Santa received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania She has exhibited in curated group shows regionally and has had two solo exhibitions with the collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid.

Tremain Smith makes hybridized oil/encaustic paintings whose imagery and color hang together in building-block-like structures. She interprets the lines and planes she creates as bridges or passageways; doors, walls and floor plans to inner realities. Smith’s work is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.

Todd Keyser collides strategies of abstraction with the ultimate form of illusion: photography. Layering abstract painting actions upon found photographs of caves, Keyser chips away at the perennial conceptual dichotomy of seeing versus belief. Keyser holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Recent exhibition venues for his work include Rebekah Templeton Gallery (Philadelphia) and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington.

Douglas Witmer takes an intuitive approach that combines simple geometric imagery, emphatic color, and subtle manipulation of surface physicality. It is an inquiry into the materiality of seeing, perception, feeling and memory. Douglas Witmer holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work has been the subject of 10 solo shows nationally and curated group shows internationally, including such venues at MoMA PS1 in New York.

– Emma Eisenberg

Jazmin Idakaar, founder of the charity group Sweet Charity Sundays, has sent word that her group has got quite a few new members since our first publication about it, but more new members are welcome. The group meets every Sunday at The A-Space and knits, sews or crochets for those in need.

The group donated 28 items in February and 50 items in March and is always in search of new contacts for shelters in need. Also, once the cold weather is over, they will be reaching out to hospitals to make chemo caps and items for preemies, so contacts at hospitals or similar organizations would be most welcome.

If you would like to join the group or have ideas for places where the group can donate their handmade items, please email: sweetcharitycrafts[at]gmail.com. For more information, visit their website or Facebook page.

In November 2010, over beers in Kensington’s El Bar, West Philadelphia resident Jesse Montgomery and friend Alex Shephard, two bibliophiles and voracious cultural consumers right out of Oberlin College, surveyed their options as literary career hopefuls in the uncertain world of publishing and literary criticism. Instead of accepting the dark pronouncements on how books and literary culture are dead among young people, Montgomery and Shephard set out to craft their own online community, Full Stop, that would be committed to “an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture.”

Montgomery and Shephard brought on as editors former Oberlin classmates Max Rivlin-Nadler, Amanda Shubert, and Eric Jett (who also designed the sleek website look), partnered with Google Ads (later replaced by Lit Breaker), and hit the ground running in January 2011. Starting out by publishing reviews and interviews and later expanding to include features and a daily blog, Full Stop “aims to focus on young writers, works in translation, and books we feel are being neglected by other outlets while engaging with the significant changes occurring in the publishing industry and the evolution of print media.”

In December 2011, in response to what the Full Stop editors characterized as “a year of global unrest,” they launched a new series called “The Situation in American Writing” inspired by a 1939 Partisan Review questionnaire that asked leading writers of that time about literature, politics, and the intersections between the two. “The Situation” spoke with prominent contemporary writers including George Saunders, Marilynn Robinson, Steve Almond, and Aimee Bender, and was picked up by such publications as The New Yorker, The Millions, The Rumpus, The LA Times, HTMLGIANT, and The Daily Beast.

When asked what was on the horizon for Full Stop, Montgomery wrote, “We just launched a new series called “Thinking the Present” that focuses on contemporary political questions and current non-fiction. Expect a series on pedagogy soon as well as more puns about birds and basketball.”

Despite the scattered locations of the other editors (New York City, Northampton, and Charleston, W.Va), Montgomery says he’d like to give Full Stop more of a local Philadelphia focus and was excited about running more content specific to Philadelphia readers.

If you’re interested in contributing to Full Stop, contact Jesse Montgomery at: jesse [at] full-stop.net

– Emma Eisenberg

This week’s featured adoptable cats are Chewy and Roy.

West Philly resident Gina and her roommates have been taking care of the cats, but they are all going to graduate next month and need to find them a new home.

Roy and Chewy are brother and sister black and white cats. They are medium sized, very lovable, neutered, with updated shots, and can be adopted together or separately. They were victims of a break in at their old home, so they get very scared of plastic bags and loud banging noises. They are good with other animals and kids as long as you give them a week or so to get used to their new surroundings.

Here are their photos:

 
If you’re interested in adopting one or both of these cats or would like to meet them, please email Gina at: ginapiccari [at] gmail.com

 
A growing number of West Philly residents are trying to get “The Fuzz” back online.

Resident Amara Rockar has started an online petition aimed at persuading police Commissioner Charles Ramsey to allow Detective Joseph Murray to start tweeting again. Murray’s Twitter account, which has provided timely updates on crime and public safety for several years, has been offline since Jan. 11.

“Detective Murray’s use of Twitter is exactly the kind of useful and positive police-community interaction that the Philadelphia Police Department should encourage, not silence,” the petition reads. “Please approve his Social Media use under his official title immediately so that his updates to our community may resume.”

Murray’s Twitter account fell victim to the police department’s skittishness about its officers using social media publicly.

Murray’s updates on crime were invaluable for citizen awareness.