Philadelphia Int’l Airport

Hand-sewn, life-size furniture at Philadelphia Int’l Airport

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Philadelphia artist Kay Healy is known for her hand-drawn, hand-sewn, stuffed fabric cutouts of life-size home furnishings. For the past year she’s been holding community sewing days so that others could help make the hand-sewn elements for Coming Home, a 30-foot long installation of 4 rooms – a kitchen, bathroom, dining room, and living room –at Philadelphia International Airport.

The rooms are highly detailed with more than 50 common household items that include a refrigerator, oven, step ladder, and broom; a bathroom sink, towel rack, and claw foot bathtub; a dining room table and piano; and a chair, cabinet, and antique radio – all realistically arranged atop hand-printed fabrics that allude to patterned wallpaper or a tiled wall.

For this installation, Healy based the contents of the rooms on the recollection of 4 Philadelphians – Leroy, Peggy, Kim, and Frank – who all grew up in various decades and in different sections of the city.

Look for Coming Home in Terminal E.

Lamps made from skateboards at Philadelphia Int’l Airport

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Former skateboard champion Victor Perez now has an art gallery in Philadelphia where he creates and sells Sk8Lamps – lamps made from broken and damaged skateboards.

Part of the ‘upcycling” trends, “the lamps are constructed of used or rejected decks, wheels and trucks that have either fulfilled or cannot fulfill their intended purposes. The electrical pieces are removed from devices no longer deemed aesthetically pleasing and given extended life.”

Sound intriguing? A selection of Sk8Lamps will be on view at the Philadelphia International Airport, between Terminals A-East and B, through September 2012

Tidbits for travelers

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Those colorful puppets on display in Terminal A – West at Philadelphia International Airport are from Spiral Q, the Philadelphia puppet theater well-known for the large-scale, wearable handmade puppets used to gain public awareness of important community issues.

On February 3rd, KLM launched its Meet & Seat program, which allows passenger to choose a seat based on who else is on their flight. The program makes use of Facebook and LinkedIn and was initially only available on flights to and from San Francisco, New York and São Paulo. Now the program has been expanded to ten additional destinations: Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Toronto, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Nairobi.

Willing to give it a try?

New photo exhibit at Philadelphia airport

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Marian Anderson by John W. Mosley

The Philadelphia International Airport has a fine new exhibit up featuring work by Philadelphia photographer John W. Mosley (1907-1969), a self-taught photojournalist who specialized in documenting African-American culture in the city.

According to the exhibit notes, Mosely was a prolific photographer who was known to photograph up to four events every day and whose work was published in numerous African-American newspapers, including the renowned Philadelphia Tribune.

Joe Frazier by John W. Mosley

 

Today, John W. Mosley’s photographs and negatives, estimated to number about 300,000, are preserved in the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection of Temple University Libraries. In 1984, the collection was donated by historian, author, and bibliophile, Charles L. Blockson, who amassed one of the nation’s largest private collections of manuscripts, rare books, sheet music, letters, prints, drawings and objects related to the history and culture of people of African descent.

John W. Mosley: Photographs of Philadelphia’s African-American Community, 1930s-1960s, From the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia” is located between Terminals E and F at Philadelphia International Airport and is open to the public through May 2012.

John Mosely, Self-portrait