The Geometry of Light & Time: HanHo, Terry Adkins, Amanda Williams

What if light wasn’t just illumination—but memory made visible?
What if color wasn’t just surface—but archive?
What if sculpture wasn’t just form—but breath held across time?

In The Geometry of Light & Time, I found myself drawn into a trio of works that use the visual not just as spectacle, but as structure. HanHo’s pulsing light beams stretch across space like memory itself—luminous, rhythmic, holding silence and intensity in equal measure. Terry Adkins’ monumental Klein-blue steel feels less like a sculpture and more like a signal—rising like a sentry of ancestral knowing. And Amanda Williams? She quite literally grounds it all: reviving George Washington Carver’s forgotten Alabama soil pigment, transforming the wall into a living, chromatic archive of Black innovation.

Together, these artists push me to ask:
What if duration isn’t the best measure of importance?
What if vibration is? Exploring memory through color, light, and form.

Light and structure here don’t just show—they testify. Adkins, Williams, and HanHo each use their materials like time travelers, encoding stories into pigment, steel, and illumination. The result is a geometry where memory isn’t just remembered—it’s refracted.

These works let us stand inside history reimagined. They explore how attention and memory can live in the blue of soil, in the pulse of a light fixture, or in the bold stillness of a steel form.

This isn’t just “pretty” light. This is architecture made from reclaiming what’s been buried or forgotten. You don’t just look at this work—you feel it glowing under your skin. Time bends. Memory shines. And blue becomes a portal to presence.

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My First 100 Days as Director

This week marked my first 100 days as the Director of Temple Contemporary!

From day one, I’ve been committed to listening—deeply and widely—to the Temple community and our neighbors along the North Broad corridor. As both Director and neighbor, I wanted to hear your vision for the future of arts and culture in our area.

So I asked two simple but expansive questions:

1. How should Temple Contemporary make the public feel—including you?

2. What would make this place an unforgettable destination for Temple University and North Philadelphia?

If folks were already familiar with the gallery, I added a third:What have you loved about what we’ve done in the past?

To make space for these conversations, I offered a variety of meeting times—afternoons, evenings, mornings, even select Saturday slots. Beyond those scheduled chats, I had dozens of impromptu dialogues with artists, students, faculty, and community members, both in Philly and beyond.

I traveled to Los Angeles for Frieze to reconnect with personal influences and soak in how contemporary art functions in other cities. I visited regional institutions like Haverford College and Fleisher Art Memorial to see how other teaching-based galleries are building public engagement.

Meanwhile, I began seeding new initiatives:

• WE MAKE: Emerging Heritage, Forgotten Futures – a public history workshop to preserve Temple Contemporary’s archival legacy

• A short introductory video, now available below, offering a glimpse into who I am and what drives this next chapter.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

• Joy, justice, and genius are shared values across faculty, staff, and neighborhood audiences.

• The vision for a cross-disciplinary, integrative gallery space resonates widely—but making it real will require shifts in practice and investment.

• Themes of public memory, play, and wonder offer strong connective tissue between our values and our future programming.

More to come soon about how I’ve arrived at these insights—and what they may mean for short- and long-term goals.

Until then,
Dr. Matt
Director, Temple Contemporary

01.23.19 - My First Course Lecture at Penn!

Gave My First Lecture for New Course at Penn on Placemaking

CPLN 582: Place, Taste, and Urban Change: Frameworks for Integrating Aesthetics, Equity, and Creativity

On January 23, 2019, I gave my first lecture for my new elective class at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design called ‘Place, Taste, and Urban Change’. Wonderful to have a class full of curious, thoughtful students in fine arts, historic preservation, city planning, architecture, and design; some even from outside of Penn. I’m right where I need to be! Thankful for everyone who pushed and prayed me to this point.

I did my best to channel the affirming, thoughtful energy of all my favorite teachers and professors who inspired my path - my high school teacher Anne Duff, my undergraduate thesis advisor Allyson Hobbs at Stanford, my USC doctoral chair Lisa Schweitzer, my intro to city planning professor Xav Briggs at MIT, Bruce Lenthall at Penn Center for Teaching and Learning, and so many more unnamed, amazing communicators and mentors who have taught me.

For the class, I’m centering the subject of neighborhood identity, and arts role in changing or preserving it through placemaking. It is an expanded field of practice that needs to integrate the best science behind aesthetics and social equity. Here’s my first crack at how we can do that, particularly for evaluating it! Hoping the learners who signed up find it valuable.

For the fellow nerds out there, my reading list includes:

• Cara Courage’s Creative Placemaking: Theory, Research, and Practice.

• Gordon C.C. Douglas’s The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy & Inequality in the DIY Urbanism

• George Lipsitz’s Footsteps in the Dark: Hidden Histories of Popular Music and How Racism Takes Place

• S.G. Gabrielle’s Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experiences.

• Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project

• Michael Agar’s The Professional Stranger: An Introduction to Ethnography.

• (Probably too) many articles in the journal Cultural Geographies.

Shoot me an e-mail if you want a copy of the syllabus! It’s honestly a class I wish I had been able to take when I first began my journey into urban studies.