OPENING RECEPTION
Join us on Thursday, August 14th at the Oar Pub at Park Towne Place for the opening reception of Bar None, Nicolo Gentile’s newly commissioned public artwork on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Enjoy complimentary refreshments, hear remarks from the artist, and explore the new installation with us! Free and open to the public with registration.
Bar None was commissioned by the Association for the Public Art (aPA) through Art on the Parkway, a program organized by aPA in partnership with the Parkway Council and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, and generously supported by AIR Communities and Prudent Management Association.
Nicolo Gentile. Photo by Shay Overstone
ABOUT THE ARTWORK: Nicolo Gentile’s Bar None honors the Benjamin Franklin Parkway’s legacy as a site of collective assembly and action. It offers a testament to the overlapping movements and voices that have surged through this civic spine in pursuit of justice, celebration, and change. The installation is interspersed with colored acrylic panels etched with images sourced from historic archives, reflecting moments of protest, pride, and public gathering. A winding procession of transformed steel barricades rise and sink into the earth like a wave, creating a path-like structure that invites viewers to walk alongside it – not solely to observe, but to move through history itself.
NICOLO GENTILE is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Athenaeum, Temple Contemporary, and Automat (Philadelphia); Fragment Gallery and Trestle Gallery (New York); The Vault (Denver); LVL3 (Chicago); Portland Contemporary (Portland); SOIL (Seattle); TSA LA and Last Projects (Los Angeles); as well as exhibitions in Paris and Melbourne. A recent recipient of the Velocity Fund, supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Gentile is currently an Artist in Residence at the Fitler Club. He teaches at Tyler and has lectured at PNCA, Portland State University, and Nazareth College.