Ask Stewart Ebersole four times why he runs around Philadelphia tacking painted plywood fists on abandoned buildings and construction sites, and you’ll get at least five answers. He says it’s to liven up the city, make a statement about urban blight, create a scavenger hunt and just say what’s obviously said by blanketing the city with anarchistic clenched fists branded with the words “LIBER-8 ME.”
But woven throughout all these intentions is the idea that, Ebersole says, the greater portion of the Philly art scene is not hospitable to people like himself. He says the galleries and art spaces have become pompously exclusive with a fixation on financial markup, and the only venue that offered itself to him was the city. What is really being liberated, then, is art from galleries. Continue reading ‘Rise Up With Fists’
