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Click in any photo for a larger version of the series.
Blaise Tobia
Current Activities
Facciate: Architectural Overlays in Italy
photos by James B. Abbott and Blaise Tobia
This was an extensive two-person show in the upstairs gallery at Cherry Street Pier, in conjunction with the Photo 20/20 (2022) Festival and with Design Philadelphia. It was on display during Septemeber and October, 2023. For more information on the show, see Facciate.
Art/Work
How the Government-Funded CETA Program
Put Artists to Work
This was a two-venue show in NYC's Lower East Side, at City Lore and Cuchifritos Galleries, December 2021 - March 2022. It was dedicated to the history of the CETA CCF Artists Project in NYC, 1978-80. More than fifty photos from my work on the project's documentation unit were included either in print or projected form. This project was the largest single federally-funded source of employment for artists since the WPA. Exhibition Catalog. Some of these photos can be seen on this site at the CCF CETA page. More on the national CETA Arts projects that employed 20,000 artists and arts workers can be seen at CETA-ARTS.COM.
CETA Arts-related Publications
Over the past four years, several of my CETA Arts documentary photographs have been included in online articles, online image features and print books.
The Art Newspaper • Hyperallergic • aCurator
i-D magazine • CreateNYC Cultural Plan (2017-19)
Ellsworth Ausby: Somewhere in Space
catalog for his retrospective at Eric Firestone Gallery.
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures
book published by the Getty Research Institute includes her performance "Cycle" done under CETA CCF.
Architecture of Speed
This exhibition took place at the Arsenale Institute in Venice, December 2021 - February 2022. Based on the visionary designer Paul Jaray, it was organized by Wolfgang Scheppe and contained objects, documents and photographs by twenty artists, including my 1974 series on Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch. Exhibition Webpage,
(Also see the page Cadillac Ranch on this site.)
New Sicilian Topographics
Taking its title from the seminal 1975 exhibition at George Eastman House "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered landscape," this exhibition included work by two Sicily-based photographers (Massimo Cristaldi and Sandro Scalia) as well as myself. On view in September 2021, it was part of the Photo 20/20 festival in Philadelphia. For more on the show see Topographics.
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