There’s just a little over one month left to catch Zoe Strauss: 10 Years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, closes on April 22, and soon, the Strauss billboards we’ve all spotted around Philadelphia will begin coming down as well.

Strauss recently took to her blog to give us a sneak preview of a new project, “Call and Response,” a website that will host writings in response to some of the photographer’s individual works. Some of the writers Strauss has tapped include Pew Fellows Jay Kirk (2005) and CAConrad (2011), as well as Nick Hornby, Frank Sherlock, Magdalena Zurawski, and Charday Laverty, who we told you about in January’s Center Spotlight piece. Stay tuned to Strauss’ blog for more on this venture, and click through the link below to read Jay Kirk’s piece, originally posted on that blog.

Pigeons on the Grass with Gilbert Vicario, Senior Curator at the Des Moines Art Center. Read his take on what remains of the local, working with artists, and his relationship to patronage>

Hidden Stories, Part 3, by Sebastienne Mundheim. Hidden Stories is HPP and PTI's joint venture in creating a discussion between constituents of both initiatives.  Participants talk about the nature of collaboration, historic object interpretation, artistic responsibility, and much more>

2 decades of design from the Public Theater in 51 seconds, with Paula Scher's bold, urban, typographical designs that have clearly established the theater's position over the years>

Pew Fellows news, with novelists Honor Molloy, Jay Kirk and poets CAConrad and Ron Silliman>

More PEI Braindrops from curators Catherine David and Maia Damianovic>

Information on the quickly approaching First Philadelphia Flamenco Festival, presented by Pasion y Arte in collaboration with artist-in-residence Rosario Toledo>

Kingdom Under Glass, a nonfiction narrative by 2005 Pew Fellow Jay Kirk, is available today! He will lecture and sign books at the Academy of Natural Sciences tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. A book party will immediately follow at the Rose Tattoo (19th and Callowhill Streets, Philadelphia).

From an interview with Jay Kirk on the Macmillan Web site:

What led you to tell the story of Carl Akeley?I first ran across the name Carl Akeley while working on a story for Harper's. It was a piece about all of these inexplicable sightings of mountain lions in the eastern United States. The thing is, the eastern mountain lion (aka cougar, puma) has been extinct since 1888, and yet there were, and still are, more cougar sightings than Elvis sightings. It was the first story I wrote that got me into the whole natural-history thing, however paranormally tinged, but I realized that, for me, here was the really essential story about America that's never gone away, and it's never going away because it's part of our collective national DNA, and that's our relationship with the wilderness. So in addition to spending a lot of time roaming mountainsides in Appalachia with game wardens and amateur cougar experts, I was reading a lot of history about how we had wiped out the cougar, along with just about everything else, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and somewhere in there, I read something in passing about this "famous taxidermist" who had once "Strangled a Leopard with His Bare Hands." It was just a moment of research serendipity. I can honestly say that my first thought was: I want to write a book about this guy.

Jay Kirk
Lecture, book signing
Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
6:30 p.m.

Buy the book and listen to Jay Kirk talk about writing Kingdom Under Glass >
Read an excerpt >
Meet the 12 artists who received a 2010 Pew Fellowship >