Stretching the Canvas

THE BRIGHT IDEA: South Street's Nangellini is all about being colorful and loud, says owner Nancy Nagle. "This is my space."
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Industrial gets intimate in NoLibs, while pop chaos reigns on South Street.

by A.D. Amorosi

As they should, art galleries continue to expand from the confines of Old City into unestablished territories like Northern Liberties and South Street, where artists can show off their wares on a more personalized basis. This is gratifying — not only to come face to face with artists in a studio or gallery setting, but to hope that they will buy and serve a far higher quality wine than most Old City galleries do on First Friday.

It might burn my feet to walk the scorched earth of NoLibs, purchased up and parcelled out by developer Bart Blatstein and his Tower Investments. It's been said he's the devil, turned painters into mall rats, has taken up the time and energy of our brightest and hippest in the arts, marketing and more and turned them into networkers for his dream. (I think I said all that.)

But I'll give Blatstein this: it's a damn spiffy dream — a gleaming industrialized area made of stone, glass and steel. Tower has been dropping artists into Liberty Walk's landscape since November: launching Megan Brewster and Erin Waxman's Art Star (1030 N. 2nd St.) and DS Gallery (1040 N. 2nd St.); turning his Investment offices at 969 N. 2nd Street into a sanctuary for artists like metal maven Leo Razzi's corkscrewy assemblages.

On a construction-filled street (North Hancock) with the all-glass Cashman & Associates at one angle, apartments atop that and the still-developing piazza and NoLibs Performing Arts Center within eyesight, live-work lofts will open next Wednesday under the auspices of Bruce Reinfeld's High Fidelity Inc., which produces everything from large scale photos, silk screen art and funky-ass clothing. Along with his gallery/shop/living room, Reinfeld will host 17 High Fidelity Live Work Lofts; industrialized glass-and-metal-fronted spots — from 1,300 to 1,500 square feet, with 22 feet high ceilings — with open kitchens, two full bathrooms and smoothed concrete floors; all with a different battered Razzi oxidized-metal sculpture atop each door to earmark your studio or coffee shop.

"I convinced them to make these destinations as opposed to just another loft," says Reinfeld, whose Hi-Fi will have a performance stage in front. Reinfeld, who'll keep his gallery in Manayunk, isn't looking for another store. "This'll be open by appointment-only via e-mail or according to posts on my Web site, so to maximize potential customers. I don't want another 11-8 store. But I do want a cool place to live. And anyone hip to the area, any people who decide to work and live here, will make for each other's best clientele." In that respect, the groovy bleak grayness of the area becomes intimate.

Right down the block from the Abysinnia Ancient Society II on South Street is the doubly colorful, bi-level gallery/studio space, Nangellini. Philadelphian pop painter John Stango's work is a boldly colored world of dastardly humorous mash-ups where Bond, Sinatra and McQueen come face to face with Smurf, hillbilly women and local mob types in a dizzying clusterfuck of cultures. His equally-colorful fiber-artist friend Nancy Nagle, along with fashioning her own quirky one-of-a-kind knit works, has represented Stango, while watching him trying to run his own gallery and store. "For three years, he tried to do both — run the gallery and paint," says Nagle, who, after having just closed Stango's short-lived Manayunk gallery, opened Nangellini. "This is my space. I can sell the shit that I make. But he can just concentrate on painting gorgeous things."

As bright and open as a bay window in Sag Harbor, you get hit with double bubble bursts of color from the second you peer into Nagle's wide-windowed white shop; its itsy-bitsy hand-dyed crocheted bikinis and floppy hats, an array of differently colored hundred dollar Stango-bills. As the room expands onto its bevel tile-filled second level — with glass-block throughout to maximize light — you find a courtyard that Nagle had decorated with a wall of wonkiness that is the mirror-and-broken-tiles of mosaic muralist Isaiah Zagar, an artist whose work refracts even more light in pretty prism fashion. As coolly light as Reinfeld's lofts are dusky, Nagle's bi-level store and studio space feel open, with high faux-tin-ceiling, fans and comforting matronly rugs with each of the artist's vibrant works acting as decoration; long strands of expensive billowing nylon skeins of hand-dyed ribbon, yards of bold-toned recycled silk and cotton that sparkles from its glitter within. "So many artisans have never even seen these sorts of yarn," says Nagle, who not only imports the colorful collection of material from Turkey and Italy for a multi-national feel to her fiber art tops and bottoms and beyond, but sells the material and plans to teach others her fine art.

"This place is as colorful as we are," says Nagle. "What I do is loud. What John does is loud."

High Fidelity Gallery, 1021 N. Hancock St., www.highfidelitydisco.com. Nangellini, 832 South Street, 215-413-5001, www.nangellini.com, www.stango.com.