Group show curated by Masina Frank and Ella Konefal
My wearable sculpture interpreting/inspired by/in conversation with Um den Fisch by Paul Klee below:
Photos by Mycie Colodny
Show reviewed here by Emily Logan of Space on Space
Statement from curators Masina Frank and Ella Konefal:
Philadelphia, PA — Soul Stake: Degenerate Art Show is a reappropriation and confrontation of the 1937 Nazi propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst that transforms a history of censorship into a catalyst for resistance and collective healing. Through immersive installation, performance, and a wearable sculpture runway, Soul Stake confronts generational trauma, authoritarian resurgence, and the cyclical nature of cultural repression while galvanizing Philadelphia’s artistic community to remember, resist, and reimagine the future.
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) sought to mock and condemn modernist, expressionist, and nonconformist artists by making an example of their work. The Third Reich seized more than 5,000 artworks from public and private collections and displayed 650 of them as examples of decadence, weakness, mental illness, and racial impurity. These works were positioned in direct opposition to those deemed adequately German in their clarity and purity, and the exhibition was held concurrently with in the Great German Art Exhibition. Some artists appeared in both exhibitions, underscoring the instability and arbitrariness of cultural judgment under authoritarian rule. Following the exhibition, the Third Reich auctioned off the confiscated works to fund the war. Thousands of paintings that did not sell were burned on March 20, 1939.
Soul Stake reframes this history through the lens of the present. Drawing from the Bolshevik propaganda flyer Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge by El Lissitzky, this exhibition reappropriates a visual language of revolution and oppression and recasts them as emblems of survival and transformation. The opening reception culminates in a wearable sculpture activation in which artists embody or channel works from the original Degenerate Art catalog, translating archival research into forms that move in living time.
Artists Featured in the Exhibition:
Amalia Wilson, Brothers Sick (Ezra Benus and Noah Benus), Catching on Thieves, Catia Colagioia, China Rain, Ciara DeMelo, Ellen Foster, Emil A. Meal, Eva Wu, Holland Fox, Jenna Robb, Jules Malice, KellyAnne Mifflin, Layla Marcelle, Lily Xie, Micah Lockman-Fine, Rah Gerg, Rob McKinney, Sam Van Pelt, Sadie Rose Smiley, Sasha Rindisbacher, Scratch Williams, Sloane Solley, Thomas Lapine, Thomas Lauria, Vallyn Murphy, Yianni Kourmadas, Zuha Nasim
Wearable Sculpture Activation Live Scored by Chaia
Soul Stake Opening Reception will be followed by a Night of Activation in Body & Sound on March 28 with a closing reception and collaboration with the Shitty Talent Show on April 17. Each gathering expands the exhibition through performance, runway activation, and collective ritual, inviting participants into direct encounter with histories that continue to reverberate.
Running parallel to Soul Stake is GOD’S WORK, a separate but related exhibition by Masina Frank and Ella Konefal. GOD’S WORK is the process and research that undergirds the historical intervention of Soul Stake. Through material experimentation and social practice, Frank and Konefal turn the Degenerate Art catalog, floorplan, and iconography over and over in the strange light of our present moment. Their work digests and decomposes the archive, spiraling around a central question: what is at stake in the practice of facing the past?
Together, GOD’S WORK and Soul Stake position remembrance as an active force. By staging a contemporary response to Entartete Kunst within a warehouse in Southwest Philadelphia, the artists transform a site of industrial residue into a space of reckoning and possibility. The project asserts that creative freedom is not a given but a collective stake, one that must be continually defended, embodied, and renewed.
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