First Friday Fun

It's the first First Friday of the spring, and the weather today promises to be perfect for walking around Old City. Which means today's probably going to be crowded, so if you want free wine and all the cheese and crackers you can eat, you should plan on hitting the galleries earlier in the evening. That's what we'll be doing, at the places below and other locations. (Free is the best kind of drunk to be...)

Lushes that we are, tonight you'll definitely be able to find Phillyist at Pinot for a good portion of the evening. In addition to their usual First Friday live jazz performance, Pinot will be hosting Cherie Vallance from Napa's Trinchero Family Estates. She'll talk about the wine, but more importantly, it will be there for the sampling, as will yummy treats from Tangerine. Pinot is located at 227 Market, between 2nd and 3rd Streets.

We always enjoy checking out what's going on at the Real World house, aka The F.U.E.L. Collection. Because the artists on display at F.U.E.L. are undergrads (that's what the "u" stands for), the work is consistently different from everything else we see at First Fridays, and this month's installation, May Collective, certainly looks interesting. We're finding ourselves particularly attracted to the string art by Maggie Casey (photo above): that chair looks almost sit-able! The F.U.E.L. Collection is located at 249 Arch Street, on the Corner of 3rd and Arch.

We're also pretty curious about what's going on at the Pentimenti Gallery, this month featuring two solo exhibitions by local(ish) artists Joseph Hu and Margaret Murphy. Both artists' work interested us based on the pictures that Pentimenti has on their website: Hu's very real-looking, but not real, colored pencils, and Murphy's gorgeous, but not at all Degas-like, ballerina studies. It's visual candy if we ever saw it. The Pentimenti Gallery is located at 145 North 2nd Street, just north of Elfreth's Alley.

Image via F.U.E.L..