Emily Brewton Schilling

Emily Brewton Schilling

BSR Contributor Since July 19, 2022

Writer Emily B. Schilling (she/her) moved back to her hometown of Philadelphia in 2022 and is happily exploring the city’s visual arts scene.

Emily B. Schilling (she/her) writes art reviews and essays with emphasis on Philadelphia-based artists and galleries, and provides editorial services for fiction and academic authors. Emily founded and runs a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, the James E. Brewton Foundation, dedicated to locating, preserving, and exhibiting artwork by her father, Jim Brewton.

By this Author

17 results
Page 1
Small but evocative sculpture of wire and found objects. It could be a jaunty, portly humanish figure, or maybe a human heart

Jayson Musson: His History of Art and the Philadelphia Wireman are worth exploring together

Art history as human history
Jayson Musson launches His History of Art at the Fabric Workshop and Museum while the anonymous Philadelphia Wireman’s work appears at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Emily Brewton Schilling suggests visiting both.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Features 6 minute read
A head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman with short dark hair and serious eyes, done in Modigliani’s elongated style.

The Barnes Foundation’s Modigliani Up Close will feature newly examined paintings

Expanding the Modigliani canon?
A new Barnes exhibition detailing the latest scholarship and technology in the world of Modigliani has a big surprise: four previously unverified paintings will be on the walls. Emily Schilling looks closer.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Features 10 minute read
A minimalist wooden table & chair with striking lines & curves sits in warm-colored space with a clay mask & 2 video screens

The Fabric Workshop and Museum presents Rose B. Simpson: Dream House

“The most personal work I’ve ever done”
Internationally known mixed-media artist Rose B. Simpson adds architectural installation and video work to her wide-ranging repertoire for the first time in this special exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Emily B. Schilling visits.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Features 4 minute read
Gallery view: gray floor, a brick column, an orange wall, goofy blue ducks, a bright flower-vase still-life, a collage & more

UArts’s Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery presents Alex Da Corte’s The Street

An enigmatic trip
Expect the unexpected at a colorful and challenging new solo exhibition from internationally known interdisciplinary artist Alex Da Corte, a Camden native and UArts grad. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
A detail of the painting, showing a waterfall coming from a dark cave, is reproduced in large scale right on the gallery wall

UPenn’s Arthur Ross Gallery presents At the Source: A Courbet Landscape Rediscovered

One painting, many stories
A painting by Gustave Courbet, a fascinating 19th-century French artist, was lost in a Philly basement for decades. Now it gets its due at Arthur Ross Gallery. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
Rendered in charcoal, a single flailing human figure falls horizontally through white space, knees facing the viewer.

Twelve Gates Arts presents Numb Images

Undoing the visual tools of oppression
Three artists with roots in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Iran, offer reality checks on the stories we’re told in a powerful mixed-media exhibition at Twelve Gates Arts in Old City. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
Gallery view of Mashrabiya #9: several diamond and rectangular-shaped wooden lattices joined to hang as one large piece.

Museum for Art in Wood presents The Mashrabiya Project: Seeing through Space

New windows of perception
Six international artists explore the mashrabiya, widely used throughout the Islamic world as cooling structures, or boundaries—between public and private life, men and women, women and visibility. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
On a battered field of gray rectangles, weird white mechanical-looking structures of hard-to-identify parts stand and float.

The Print Center presents Rodrigo Valenzuela: Workforce

Machines dream in a post-worker world
The Print Center presents Rodrigo Valenzuela: Workforce, a surreal mixed-media exhibition about work, industry, power, and people. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 3 minute read
Sensitive head & shoulders quilt-like portrait of Tanisha, a Black woman, done in subdued purples, reds, and blues.

MUSE Gallery presents Seeking Freedom: Portraits of Mass Incarceration

Visibility can be a lifeline
Textile artist Carolyn Harper’s Seeking Freedom: Portraits of Mass Incarceration at MUSE Gallery brings us into the lives of the human beings caught in the US prison-industrial complex. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
A shadowy, silhouetted image seen from behind a man regarding a red and white Rothko painting in a gallery.

The heartbreaking luxury of home hospice care

Earthy, real, and worth every moment
Emily B. Schilling cared for her dying mother at home and, about a decade later, she faced a similar goodbye to her husband. Hospice is exhausting and heartbreaking, but she doesn’t regret one moment of it.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Essays 6 minute read
Large rectangular photo of a much-used blackboard covered with abstract-seeming swirls, shapes & numbers in colored chalk.

UArts presents Dan Levenson: SKZ Monochrome Classrooms and L’école at the Philadelphia Art Alliance

Schools of imagination and memory
Kicking off the academic year with two uplifting shows about how we communicate, learn, and teach, the Philadelphia Art Alliance at UArts welcomes SKZ Monochrome Classrooms and L’école. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
The IRC ensemble in 50s costumes, gathered around two mics, scripts, and a table of noise-making items.

Philly Fringe 2023: IRC presents Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall

Theater of the abs(heard)
All That Fall, a hilarious and unsettling jaunt to a train station in 1950s Ireland, is expertly staged by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium in this year's Fringe, offering laughs right up to gut-punch finish. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 3 minute read
A substantial, dynamic yellow-eyed panther in nuanced shades of black collage, with a black bird on its back.

Woodmere Art Museum presents Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision

A pioneering artist, activist, and teacher
Works by Philadelphia artist Barbara Bullock are dancing right off the walls at the Woodmere Art Museum in an enthralling retrospective that explores the intersection of Bullock’s studio art with her work as an educator. Emily Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 4 minute read
On an orange-lit set with neon bars & a Philly skyline backdrop, four actors in orange jumpsuits pose outlandishly on chairs.

1812 Productions presents This Is the Week That Is

Satire wanted
A Philly tradition since 2006, This Is the Week That Is attempts to wring mirth from the news, but this year’s iteration ranges from offensive to baffling. Emily Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 3 minute read
Beverly, an aged Black woman, lies in a hospital bed, talking to Finister beside her, who smiles & wears a blue cardigan.

Arden Theatre Company presents Lorene Cary’s Ladysitting

Hospice, history, and honesty
This triumphant premiere based on Lorene Cary’s 2019 memoir about caring for her 99-year-old Nana explores the burden and privilege of caretaking, interwoven with family stories that illustrate America’s history. Emily B. Schilling reviews.
Emily Schilling

Emily Schilling

Reviews 3 minute read