This annual exhibition presents the work of Philadelphia’s contemporary artists. Each year, a different juror prepares a call for artists, soliciting submissions related to a distinct theme or idea. This year’s juror, Doug Bucci, invited artists to submit work that explores novel and infinite ideas and methods of connection.

Fifty-four artists working in sculpture, painting, photography, jewelry, and printmaking address such varied subjects as climate change, materialism, ancestry, and biology, revealing connections on a microscopic to universal level. The spectrum of ideas and processes, including innovative uses of electroforming, computer-aided design, and 3-D printing, illustrates the intellectual rigor and creative diversity that characterize our city’s art community.

Juror bio

Doug Bucci is an artist and educator in the field of jewelry who uses digital processes to explore and display biological systems and the effect of disease on the body. Computer-aided technologies enable him to view and simulate not only data, but also patterns and cell forms, which he transforms into meaningful, personal, and wearable art. Bucci views his digital process as one that allows for creative freedom unfound in traditional handmade methods.

Bucci’s work is in the collections of the Windsor Castle, Berkshire, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Deutsche Goldschmiedehaus Hanau, Germany; Design Museo, Helsinki; and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Bucci is also assistant professor and head of the Metals/Jewelry/CAD-CAM Program at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

Accepted artists