First Friday find: Excursion to Fishtown

Old City's First Friday art gallery showcase event is by now a well-established item on any Philadelphia cultural agenda. But a few minutes' drive in a northeasterly direction, or a few minutes on the Market-Frankford line, will take you up to my old neighborhood and Frankford Avenue's First Friday, where the art is sometimes rougher and less polished but the event is intensely local, looser in spirit than Old City's slick, pricey scene, and notable for its free-wheeling, come-as-you-are vibe.

Frankford Avenue was designated a Philadelphia "arts corridor" by the city in 2004. Its First Friday is organized by the arts leg of a nonprofit community booster organization, the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, which seeks to revitalize Fishtown, Port Richmond and Kensington. So it's an arts event with a mission, and maybe even an inferiority complex; it seems to be wrongfully shunned by art lovers outside the neighborhood. But those who miss it are missing out.

After attending both the Old City and Fishtown events many times, I suspect that more people actually buy art as a result of Old City's event, but those who attend the Fishtown First Friday have a much better time. The 20 participating venues for the September 3 Fishtown event included not just galleries and studios but pubs, bookstores, a theater, a salon, a coffee shop, a vintage clothing store, a real estate office and an Argentine Tango School.

Fishtown, whose artists are sometimes derided as scruffy, tattooed hipsters lacking the crucial grains of ambition and chops, buzzes with enough energy to warrant its reputation as a vibrant scene unto itself. How many artists featured in Old City galleries actually live in Old City? Fishtown's ratio is high (although many of its galleries also feature artists from far and wide).

Geared to my students

Last Friday night, I took a self-guided multi-stop tour of the Fishtown festivities. I watched a very good rock band playing outdoors on a lawn, and then wandered into Part-Time Studios, a collective run by nine local artists.

I mentioned to the fashion designer working the room that I was encouraging my Temple University humanities seminar students to attend the October 1 First Friday event. I wanted to warn her up to 50 extra college-aged bodies might be rolling through her space next time.

"That's OK," she said sunnily. "There are nine of us, and we're all under 26, so…" She left the sentence unfinished, but the implied conclusion was: "Your students are actually in our age group, and we'd be way more comfortable around them than around your 35-year-old ass."

The art on the walls by Philadelphia's Keith Warren Greiman was cartoony and expertly inexpert. I suspect people say the names "Red Grooms" and "Philip Guston" to him all the time. Greiman's work exuded the kind of wild energy that fires you with the urge to make art yourself, even if you can't.

A singer's holy trinity

I slunk out of Part-Time Studios feeling pretty ancient and stopped in at Germ Books and Gallery, whose owner, the well-known singer-musician David E. Williams, once tried without much success to sell some of my sculptures. The gallery in back offers a rotating series of art exhibits that mostly connect to the sci-fi, alternative, UFO and conspiracy themes of the books on the shelves. Germ's First Friday events usually offer the holy trinity of good art, live music, and free refreshments.

The art at Germ is versatile. Throughout September its show is "Curious Creatures and Archons of Alternate Dimensions," while October's show will feature photography. On the night of September 3rd I found David E. wryly debating a request of one of that night's musicians who wanted to set up a table of yard-sale junk to sell. I checked out the art in the small, elegant gallery— loony, but somehow ultra-serious images of bizarre creatures— and ducked out before the junk-table issue was resolved.

Beer and vodka punch

If you hang a left off Frankford onto Dauphin and walk a few blocks, you'll hit another must-visit stop on the tour. Both Proximity Gallery's featured art and the party that kicks off the show are consistently top-notch (and I'd say that even if they hadn't displayed a sculpture of mine last year).

If Old City's refreshments are epitomized by some miserly harridan doling out thimbles of warm Chardonnay, then let Fishtown's scene be typified by Proximity owner Janel Frey's omnipresent beer on tap, cheese and fruit platters, vodka punches and thoroughly decent wine.

Last Friday Proximity's walls were covered with the vibrant Crayola-hued dreamscapes of Benjamin Howard's mostly-great Asphalt Ascension paintings. I contemplated a chaotic, problematic piece called Bottled at the Source (above), which features a green creature filling a plastic bottle with water that flows from his trumpet-like nose. I don't mind fantastical subject matter, but something about the brushwork and composition seemed haphazard.

An imposing gray-haired gent with a very serious digital camera sidled up and loudly announced, "His stuff is simply great, but some of it is unfinished. What is this doing on the wall? He should be working on this. It isn't finished."

That's about right, I thought. Thanks, loud stranger, for completing my thought.

That's one of the many reasons I come to these events. Fishtown's First Friday might be sprawling and sometimes uneven, but something compelling is always going on. And if you're a collector in these awful financial times, you'll be pleased to note that the art is most often priced within the realms of sanity, and even reality.