Cultural Reclamation Works Opens at Tissue Farm in Time for PumpkinFest
A new exhibition of digital art by Jeffrey "Pope" Pankey opens Oct. 1 at Tissue Farm, just in time for Confluence PumpkinFest, and runs through Nov. 22.
If you come to Confluence for PumpkinFest, Friday through Sunday, Oct. 2 to 4, leave room for one more stop. Cultural Reclamation Works, a new exhibition of digital art, opens Thursday, Oct. 1, at Tissue Farm, 446 Latrobe Ave., and stays up through Sunday, Nov. 22.
In the interest of full disclosure: the artist is Jeffrey “Pope” Pankey, publisher of News & Views and co-owner of Tissue Farm with Suzanne Ragan Lentz.
The show borrows the look of the last century: vintage government seals, WPA posters, public service signs, advertisements and product packaging, along with a few civic institutions that never existed. Pankey uses that familiar visual language to picture a country where empathy, public service, environmental stewardship and human dignity became ordinary civic values, promoted with the same confidence once spent selling soap and savings bonds. The question behind it, in the gallery’s words: “What if our nostalgia wasn’t for the world that was, but for the world that could have been?” Tissue Farm calls the result equal parts satire, design history and optimism.
Pankey says the early reactions have been great.
PumpkinFest brings the parade, the car show, the largest pumpkin contest, the garden tractor pull and the rest of a full weekend. The Trail Town Quilt Show runs the same three days at the Confluence Creative Arts Center, 533 Williams Street. Tissue Farm is right in town, and the coffee is on.
Come for the pumpkins. Stay for the future that almost was.