Neon Museum lights up pandemic days
Neon sign enthusiast creates new attraction in Olde Kensington.
Another museum opened during the pandemic, this one virtual. The Daring Diagonal Virtual Museum is not temporarily virtual but permanently. The museum delves into how artists and designers have used diagonal shapes and angular relationships to transform architecture, art and science and to influence urban design, fashion, jewelry, fine arts, product design and popular culture. Philadelphia Architect Joel Levinson, who resides in West Mt. Airy, created this quasi-fictitious museum online and filled 33 virtual galleries with visual treats and fascinating documentation, which will be especially intriguing to art, architecture and design enthusiasts.
The motif is still alive and vital today and there are many striking examples of diagonality in Philadelphia
— from the way the Benjamin Franklin Parkway cuts a diagonal through William Penn’s symmetrical gridiron for the city’s street layout to the sculptures of people on tightrope in the lobby of the Comcast Center (look up to spot them in the original Comcast building) and throughout the remarkable Wharton Esherick Museum in Malvern. Esherick eschewed parallel lines and right angles, because they’re not found in nature. The home/studio he designed has a whimsical feel with a sloped roof, rounded walls and a floating spiral staircase with cantilevered steps. Diagonality can also be seen in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in artwork at all of Philadelphia’s art museums.