“New Now IX” at InLiquid Gallery

New Now IX is now on view at InLiquid Gallery, inside the Crane Arts building in South Kensington — the ninth installment of InLiquid’s new member showcase, and the largest one yet. Forty-two artists, working across painting, sculpture, photography, collage, jewelry, and mixed media, come together in a show that InLiquid has been building toward since 1999, when it first set out to connect artists and audiences across the Philadelphia region.

Scale alone makes New Now IX notable, but the real story is in the range. The 42 artist-members’ stories span from Kensington itself to Argentina, Nigeria, Turkey, the Caribbean, and beyond, with work drawing on neighborhood identity, immigrant experience, diasporic heritage, Slavic history and folklore, spirituality, and cultural tradition.

Those threads are just a sampling of what runs through the full exhibition — InLiquid’s own framing is explicit that this is meant to represent the actual depth and diversity of Philadelphia’s contemporary arts community, not a curated slice of it. New Now IX also marks a genuine curatorial first: this is the first edition in the series’ history to include jewelry, expanding the range of disciplines represented alongside the more familiar painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and mixed media.

New Now IX: 42 Artists, One Shared Interest in the Human Experience

The full roster: Elisa Abeloff, Omenihu Amachi, Chad Andrews, Alex Bard, Laurie Beck Peterson, Ernesto Beckford, Alana Bograd, William Bowser, Raymond Carballada, Jake Dombroski, Jessica Doyle, Seher Erdogan, Linda Fernandez, Andrea Finch, Chuck Fischer, Donna Grande, Laura Havlish, Kara Hetz, Carolyn Kline-Coyle, Lupien LaMountain, Niki Leist, J. Rudy Lewis, Zoe Marchiano, Barbara J. Mayfield, Beau McCall, Thomas W. Moore, Nini Mosiashvili, Joann Neufeld, Diane Pepe, Jonathan Porat, Ally Ruff, Amy Salzman, James J Scannell, Linda Schneider, Lynnette Shelley, Eric L Spieler, Michael Stevenson, Krista Svalbonas, Gay Walling, Peggy Washburn, Margaret A. Watson, and Julie Woodward — distinct practices, distinct histories, linked by the same local community InLiquid has spent over two decades cultivating.

Seher Erdoğan’s inclusion is a genuine case study in the exhibition’s thematic range. Turkish-born and trained as an architect at Yale, Erdoğan practiced architecture in New Haven and New York before shifting fully into visual art in 2019. Her sculptural wall pieces pair clay and wool, materials she connects explicitly to the material culture of her native Istanbul, exploring what she describes as the push and pull between following rules and breaking free from them. She now teaches architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and works out of a studio in Germantown — a practitioner moving fluidly between two disciplines rather than choosing one.

Kara Hetz represents the exhibition’s most literal curatorial milestone: New Now IX is the first edition in the series to include jewelry, and Hetz’s work anchors that inclusion. A jewelry artist with a BFA from West Virginia University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, both in studio arts, Hetz trained in metalsmithing at Chicago’s Lillstreet Art Center before developing a practice centered on the sensuality of metal — how a static material can be made to feel fluid. She describes her pieces as external reminders of the things we carry, a framing that positions jewelry as genuinely conceptual work rather than adornment alone.

Jeremy “Lupien” LaMountain and Jake Dombroski both work in collage-adjacent territory, though toward different ends. LaMountain, self-taught and born in New Haven in 1997, works primarily in acrylic paint, collage, and mixed media, drawing on cartoons, advertising, and urban life, with influences ranging from street artists like Rammellzee and OSGEMEOS to commercial graphic design; time spent creating alongside graffiti artists in Baltimore shaped his approach to both traditional and nontraditional materials. Dombroski, by contrast, navigates the space between Dadaism and commercialism, building collage, assemblage, and painting from vintage magazines, discarded packaging, and found objects — work explicitly concerned with the power of imagery and material itself, rather than nostalgia for its own sake.

New Now IX is on view now through August 29, Wednesdays through Saturdays, noon to 6pm, with an opening reception Tuesday, August 13, from 6 to 9pm at the InLiquid Gallery, 1400 N. American Street. RSVP is recommended for the opening. More information is available at inliquid.org.