Amze Emmons: Playing the Grid

Philadelphia-based artist Amze Emmons describes his exhibition Playing the Grid as a “confabulated game room that—along with the accompanying publication A City Guide—is an invitation to improvise, wander and play. It’s a playful love letter to Philadelphia with its complicated history and ever hopeful future.” On view in BWA’s Glass Gallery from January 8 to March 14, 2024, Playing the Grid presents drawings, prints, paper craft, and other elements that invite the show’s visitors into Emmons’ creative process—most specifically, his “decades-long ‘field work’ wandering the city and noticing the public phenomena Philadelphia endlessly provides.”

Emmons created an accompanying takeaway publication, Playing the Grid: A City Guide, with graphic-designer Scott Cole to help exhibition visitors and others pursue their own Philadelphia “fieldwork”—to “invite the reader to wander the city and notice things they hadn’t noticed before,” Emmons explains. Fireball Printing produced several thousand copies, which will be available at BWA and distributed around the city.

Emmons (born 1974) is a Philadelphia-based, multidisciplinary artist. His research interests include waking and noticing; the politics of architecture; vernacular design; everyday evidence of community; games, play, and generative systems; and tracking the ways print and material-culture history inform our current digital age. He received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and is Associate Professor and Program Head of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University, Philadelphia.

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