ART IS BACK.

DON'T BE QUIET.

DON'T BE LONELY.

ART IS BACK.

The loneliness of the pandemic has been, in part, not being able to experience art communally, and to talk about and process our experiences of joy, fear, and wonder. RQ Managing Editor Lauren Earline Leonard produced an entire show about it, The Loneliness Project. It's debuting next weekend and you should not miss it. I'll be there all three nights, so please come join me. The photo above is from the show, by RQ Contributor Joanna Nowak.

Tonight, I'll be at Elizabeth Bergeland's amazing Quiet Boy show closing, so don't miss your last chance to see this impressive show (and don't forget to read her essay "I Am the Sun, or Two People in a Room" in RQ's "Fearful Symmetry" issue.)

At the opening of "Quiet-Boy” at Hot Bed Gallery I huddled in a back room talking Eastern European politics and the war in Ukraine with painters featured in past issues of RQ---Janos Korodi and Sam Nejati. Moments before, I was laughing my head off with Eric Battle, who graced our pages in RQ's "Monsters" issue, and giving hugs to amazing musicians Christine Elise and Kuf Knotz, also featured in our "Fearful Symmetry" issue, who had recently put on a great show at 118 North.

My heart swelled with pride at a Temple University Senior Jazz Recital led by vocalist Fiona Male with Micah Graves on piano, Miles Coulahan on guitar, Matthew Green on bass, Preston Lee on saxophone, and the delightful Bell Thompson on trumpet. Holding it down on drums was my former Jazz Philadelphia intern Maria Marmarou. I also got to see the talented young saxophonist Olivia Hughart at SOUTH and hear some of her original compositions. The ladies are killing it, friends.

I met rising jazz star Immanuel Wilkins (featured in the current "Lions & Lambs issue") at an Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI show where I also got to pay my respects to jazz master Odean Pope before their joint performance at The Ruba Club. It kicked off WRTI's "Dangerous Sounds" project, an eight-episode podcast series that explores some insanely interesting jazz history in Denmark. Absolutely worth the time.

Fleisher Art Memorial hosted one of my favorite experiences in two years: The incredible Ruth Naomi Floyd and her deeply moving and hopeful "The Frances Suite," which honored 19th-Century activist Frances Harper. The performance featured the incomparable violinist Diane Monroe (every bit as much a magician as musician) and the powerful voice of Yolanda Wisher along with a stellar ensemble that included Lauren Blackwell, Kendrah Butler, Eunice China, Val Gay, Erica McElveen, and Marisa Webster. The organic mix of classical, folk, and jazz was as American as music gets, and it deserves to be heard by audiences nationally.

I watched and laughed and wondered at the Wilma Theater's out-there production of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, and celebrated when I heard that artistic director James IJames won the Pulitzer Prize for Fat Ham, a rendering of Hamlet set at a southern barbecue. Brava! IJames will be directing the Wilma's next show, the Pulitzer-Prize winning "Fairview" by Jackie Sibblies Drury. If you missed it the first time around, you still get copies of our "Resilience" issue, which features a profile on the theatre's iconic Blanka Zizka.

I also got to see the amazing throwback country artist Charley Crockett at WXPN during the NonCommvention conference (thanks to Alex Yarde at Live Nation), catch up with my singing buddy Sarah Biemiller, and throw back a shot with Ben Arnold. (Next on the agenda, heading to the Ryan Adams solo show at the Kimmel's Academy of Music, and I'm fan-girling already.)

Lea Bertucci debuted her mesmerizing "Shadow & Substance" show (also with Ars Nova), a gauzy sound bath of feedback, hisses, and barely-contained atomic-like energy in an ensemble with double bassist Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis on cello, harpist Lucia Stavros, and Matt Evans on drums and percussion. It's inspired by the explosion at the Philadelphia Refinery, and it was an impressive exploration.

Bassist and composer Anthony Tidd led nearly 100 musicians in a group improvisation at Cherry Street Pier for the orchestral performance of "Rehearsing Philadelphia," a "meta-score" by Ari Benjamin Meyers, which was just as communal, experiential, and revelatory as music should be. In one of its final movements, Ursula Rucker, who had just lost her mother, grieved openly surrounded by the cast of musicians who held her in their care, breathing and singing with her, and carrying her through a moving performance that also featured celestial saxophonist Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Orchestra, still full of energy at 97.

In another pier performance sponsored by Jazz Philadelphia and OACCE, Matthew Parrish's Philadelphia Express gave a fantastic performance that got a shout out at Jazz Near You and also featured his partner, the class-act vocalist Michelle Lordi, whose "Break Up with the Sound" is a beautiful and genre-defying album. Above us hung the celestial banners of artist Ann Vizcaria Rankin, who is part of the new Rising Wing program at the inventive and fluid Philadelphia Contemporary.

Rankin is represented by James Oliver Gallery. I peeked in on their current Trajectories show featuring Lisa S. Roberts and Matthew Borgan, where I ran into the Inquirer's Inga Saffron and novelist Ken Kalfus. That led me this week to the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his book 2 AM in Little America and was in conversation with Nathanial Popkin, featured in last year's "Truth and Consquences" issue.

Kalfus's prescient novel explores the aftermath of a breakdown in American society and chronicles the story of a refugee who finds himself in a US enclave in an unnamed city abroad. We'll hopefully have an interview with Kalfus in the fall issue, whose theme is "Failure." I hope to talk more with him about the novel, which has hints of Kundera and Murakami vibes, and also put me in mind of the Marilynne Robinson essay "Decline." The book was sold out on its release date, which will surely require another run.

Right now we're hard at work on the Summer issue, "Higher Ground," which will feature the work of visual artists Tim Portlock and Tom Chambers. Very exciting.

Don't forget to subscribe so you can get the blockbuster spring issue of Root Quarterly, our religion-themed "Lions & Lambs" issue that features a look at the community sanctuary of the Colored Girls Museum, blasphemer Coleman Hughes, and heretic John McWhorter, two black intellectuals whose voices can't be ignored. They are both advisors to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, where I'm a new Arts Fellow. Check them out.

Art is back. See you soon.

Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Publisher / Editor-in-Chief
Root Quarterly

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Heather Blakeslee