This David Bowie-inspired art show is a perfect match for the National Liberty Museum
The museum’s third annual Bowie-inspired pop-up gallery and art sale, which this years runs thru January 23, features 30 Bowie-inspired artworks created by 18 mostly local artists.
For Meegan Coll, curator of artistic partnerships at the National Liberty Museum in Old City — and a nearly lifelong David Bowie fan — it only makes sense that a museum dedicated to freedom would pay tribute to an artist who helped so many find the power of their own voice.
“Freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of a free society and we honor Bowie every year for his work advancing the freedom of people to be themselves,” Coll said of the museum’s third annual Bowie-inspired gallery and art sale. “He was a future thinker and not afraid to voice his opinions. He truly put liberty into action.”
Last Friday’s official opening night kicked off an expanded show (which runs through Jan. 23) and art sale that features over 30 works, including paintings, drawings, embroidery, mixed media, and woodworks, from 18 mostly local artists. (A portion of all proceeds go to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.)
The popular art show has been a staple of the Philly Loves Bowie Week events since its founding in 2016 by some of the original “Sigma Kids” like Patti Brett, owner of Doobie’s Bar. These were the young fans Bowie befriended outside Sigma Sound Studios on North 12th Street in 1974, when recording his classic album, Young Americans. Shedding his spacey Ziggy Stardust persona and sonic sound for some Philly sound, the album represented a turning point in Bowie’s career. (He had first come to dig Philly while recording a live album at the Tower Theater.)
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Coll, 56, a respected painter, was too young to join the Sigma Kids in the street but can remember first hearing Bowie’s song, “Golden Years,” as a 9-year-old riding through Center City in the backseat of her father’s Chevy Chevelle.
Soon, she was robbing her father’s album inserts for posters of the androgynous rock star with an alien alter ego.
“I really connected so early,” said Coll. “He was the champion of the outsiders and people that didn’t fit into the mainstream. Just the way he looked — the fashion, the music, the lyrics. That image of him with the bright orange hair, all sticking out. It was great.”
Three years ago, as the Bowie art show began to outgrow its original home at the Ruckus Gallery in Old City, Coll jumped at the chance for the National Liberty Museum to play host.
“It would be the perfect match,” she said.
For this year’s show, the museum asked artists to explore Bowie’s persona and various artistic output within the themes of sci-fi and fantasy — and to ask the question, “What if?”
The surreal landscape of Heather Rinehart’s painting, Time Evicted, pondered the question of, “What if we could see our time on earth as a snapshot?” It also included lyrical references to all 26 of Bowie’s studio albums.
Jolene Frechette, a Native American artist, who described her embroidered artwork as a “mash-up of pop/trash culture detritus with Native American imagery,” embroidered a banner showing a Philly-era Bowie and the lyric: “Moondust will cover you.”
“It goes without saying, I love Bowie and believe in flying one’s freak flag, so this banner marries these two impulses,” she said.
Mur Hayman’s powerful mosaic features a Bowie-esque quote from French writer, Andre Malraux: “All art is a revolt against man’s fate.”
For her part, Coll said the art is just proof of the creative force of freedom that was Bowie’s music and lifework.
“I feel love,” she said, standing amid the gallery. “The togetherness, the passion, the fandom, but also a desire to come together and talk.”
Philly Loves Bowie Pop-Up Gallery & Art Sale at the National Liberty Museum, 321 Chestnut St., https://www.libertymuseum.org/