Arlene Love, *Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades*, Installation View, Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), Philadelphia, 2024, © Amie Potsic 2024

February 14, 2024

Amie Potsic interviews the legendary artist Arlene Love about her current solo exhibition in Philadelphia and the many highlights of her 70-year-career.

Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades is a solo exhibition by the renowned Philadelphia artist, Arlene Love, presented at the Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition will feature Love's pioneering sculpture in resin, feminist works in leather, figurative drawing, and photography spanning an accomplished career over 70 years. Love's fascination with the figure and how it articulates the physical, erotic, and political, has held her attention since creating her very first sculpture. Inspired by the language of feminism as well as her own challenging life experiences, Love's work reveals strength and vulnerability through the depiction of the corporeal in the throes of intimacy, violence, joys, and sorrow.

Arlene Love is an award-winning pioneer in resin sculpture and accomplished painter and photographer with numerous public art installations. For forty years, Love focused on sculpture, with solo shows from New York to California. Her work has been included in juried exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Boston Museum of Art, Sculpture Center (NYC), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University, among others. Love’s sculpture is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, James A Michener Museum, the University of Scranton and Franklin & Marshall College. In Philadelphia, her bronze Winged Woman is in the garden of the Dorchester facing Rittenhouse Square. Eight Figures, life size bronzes reside permanently in the Kimmel Center. The gold leafed Face Fragment is in front of the Monell Chemical Senses Center at 3500 Market Street.

Love’s focus began shifting toward drawing during the dozen years she and her husband lived in a tiny mountain village near the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. Her drawings, etchings and encaustics were exhibited in Oaxaca galleries and in exhibitions of Oaxaca artists. While in Oaxaca, she also worked in a print taller and created a portfolio of etchings which is in the Linda Lee Alter collection at PAFA.

Meanwhile, Love began taking photographs in her village and in neighboring markets. She loved taking pictures, but hated the darkroom, so she filled old shoe boxes with negatives, wondering why she kept taking pictures. In the year 2000, Love saw the words digital darkroom. Until recently, street photography and candid portraits were her sole passion. She never asked permission. She wanted the person without his or her mask. The present is just an illusion. As soon as the shutter snaps it's past. Her photograph of Old Lee is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Love has had more than thirty solo shows of sculpture, drawings and photographs, and is the recipient of awards and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Temple University.

Love has now returned to drawing. She wants the feel of pencil and crayon in her hand making tangible marks. Drawing is the magic of discovery.

ARLENE LOVE

SELECTIONS FROM SEVEN DECADES

On view from February 9 - March 10, 2024 at the Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA)

Arlene Love, *Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades*, Installation View of *Saint Sebastian*, Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), Philadelphia, 2024, © Amie Potsic 2024

Left, Arlene Love with *Rosey Crucifixion* sculpture circa 1972
Right, Arlene Love with *Rosey Crucifixion* sculpture 2024, Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
© Arlene Love, *Rosey Crucifixion*, resin/fiberglass and leather handbag, life size, 1972

Click here to visit Arlene Love’s website.

Banner Image: Arlene Love, Arlene Love: Selections from Seven Decades, Installation View, Interactive Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), Philadelphia, 2024, © Amie Potsic 2024