Fall 2026 Exhibitions
Jeremiah Chechik is a Canadian-born artist based in Venice, California. Known for
a career spanning fashion photography, music videos, and film and television directing,
his practice consistently explores the shifting boundary between fact and fiction.
In his recent work, Chechik brings together fine art photography and artificial intelligence,
using poetic prompts to generate images that construct speculative, imagined realities. Works by Carolyn Case, Alex Ebstein, Alexis Granwell, and Magnolia Laurie. What does
it mean to know the world through the body? This question, threaded through the works
in TOUCH GRASS, feels both timeless and newly urgent. The phrase “touch grass” is
borrowed from internet slang and is commonly used as a joke or a reprimand, a reminder
to step away from the screen and return to material reality. In this exhibition, the
words become something slower and more searching, a meditation on contact itself,
on the way thought can move through the hand, through repetition, through texture,
through the accumulated evidence of making. An exhibition drawn from the Phillips Museum's permanent collection marks America's
250th anniversary by exploring distinctive currents in its artistic history. Themes
include: Exploration, Expansion & Industrialization / Portraiture and the Rise of
Photography / Realism in the Early 20th Century. Rooted in the deep traditional art of Pennsylvania, the regional collection of the
Phillips Museum highlights the distinctive and colorful ways that immigrant populations
celebrated their native countries’ stylistic heritage. Their unique points of view
are expressed through a variety of materials and forms, including ceramics, glass,
metalwork, furniture, painting, and textiles. Philadelphia—America’s third largest city in the 20th century—was home to a remarkable
range of sounds and artistic movements from klezmer, gospel, and rembetiko to jazz,
punk and hip hop. Deindustrialization in the 1960s transformed cities into landscapes
of abandonment, economic collapse, and human suffering. Against all odds, Philadelphia’s
residents confronted the urban dystopia and found ways to create distinct forms of
music, dance, and visual arts. Operating below the corporate structures of entertainment,
they built underground communities and new cooperative spaces of performance, belonging,
and experimentation.
Jeremiah Chechik, Micrographica
TOUCH GRASS
American Art
Ingrained: Celebrating Pennsylvania’s Cultural Heritage
Philadelphia Underground: Music, Art, Dystopia