Big Ramp

Big Ramp Contemporary Art Gallery in Kensington, Philadelphia 19134

Thank you to everyone who joined us for last night's opening!Smokesignals is on view until April 25. Gallery is open Sat...
03/29/2026

Thank you to everyone who joined us for last night's opening!

Smokesignals is on view until April 25. Gallery is open Saturdays 2-4 and by appointment


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BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce Smokesignals, featuring new work by Diego Juárez and Gianna Santucci, curated by Macy ...
03/23/2026

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce Smokesignals, featuring new work by Diego Juárez and Gianna Santucci, curated by Macy West.

Smoke signals are a highly effective means of visual communication across vast distances. The signals are tenuous and susceptible to breakdown, quickly dispersing as they reach a higher altitude, if the wind blows, or if the fire below is extinguished. A shape with no outline, they are an unbounded temporary density, the redistribution of matter from one form into another. A signal begins with clear intent, but as it continues to fold and shift, so does its meaning. Its success is dependent on the precise convergence of time and place.

Smokesignals, a two-person show of Gianna Santucci and Diego Juárez’s recent work, is a temporary density, a record of survival communicating across vast distances of time, material, and memory. Smokesignals circumvents broad universalities and the impulse toward substantive meaning in favor of passing motion, process and discontinuous partialities. It’s an acknowledgment of now, and yesterday, and tomorrow held together in a sort of singularity.

Thanks to all who came to the opening of Nick Carter’s Inner Monologs. It was cold but not so cold with all of you ther...
02/04/2026

Thanks to all who came to the opening of Nick Carter’s Inner Monologs. It was cold but not so cold with all of you there! Gallery will be open Saturdays 2-4 and by appointment.

Dearest friends and colleagues,It’s beginning to look a lot like... the apocalypse, everywhere you go. Hmm, that’s not r...
12/03/2025

Dearest friends and colleagues,

It’s beginning to look a lot like... the apocalypse, everywhere you go. Hmm, that’s not right. We’re dreaming of a white...crypto-fascist takeover of our democracy… NO!! Not dreaming, more like feverish nightmaring. And yet, we can already hear those jingly-jangly sleigh bells curling our scowling mouth skin into unsteady smiles, softening our haunted thousand-yard stares into twinkly-eyed cheer. Ho Ho Ho? Who’s ready for the Gestapo? This tingly numb feeling can only mean it’s time to shop! So we jiggle our jolly bellies on down to the mall to feed the empire’s insatiable economic furnace…just as sweet little Baby Jesus intended.

Yes, that’s right, the holidays will soon be upon us and this year at Big Ramp, we hope to put the “más” back in Christmas. We want more, more, more!!! More time with you, more merriment, more art! So here we are announcing our inaugural pan-holiday-detournement-spectacle-freak-out, A Very Big Ramp Xmas on Saturday, December 13. This is a party, a fundraiser, AND an art swap rolled into one pine-scented yule log! And we’re inviting you—our beloved community of friends, collaborators, and collectors—to help Big Ramp deck its halls this December! We’ve called on dozens of our most talented and cunningly transgressive artist friends to fill Big Ramp to the gills, floor to ceiling, cheek to jowl with artwork—each piece designed to fit cozily inside a classic red Christmas stocking, like the ones your parents pull out of the attic every year still smelling faintly of mothballs and forgotten candycanes. Each artist is “exhibiting” two works stuffed into stockings: One “foot” in the pair is auctioned and the other is exchanged. One stocking will be sold to help Big Ramp’s 2026 programming, and the other will be exchanged with another exhibiting artist to support…the gift of friendship.

Part art auction, part Secret Santa, and part drunken holiday party for you and your estranged family, this is the event of the season before the foretold prophecies mark the end of days.

Closing reception for this amazing group show by .free and this Friday 6-9pm! Join us for some hot whiskey cider and...
11/19/2025

Closing reception for this amazing group show by .free and this Friday 6-9pm! Join us for some hot whiskey cider and maybe some kind of space martini. Don’t miss it!

Another fantastic opening for BIG RAMP and .free and sharing with us so many thoughtful and playful new works. Thank...
10/26/2025

Another fantastic opening for BIG RAMP and .free and sharing with us so many thoughtful and playful new works. Thanks to all the friends and animals and animal friends who joined us for the reception…if you missed it we will be open Saturdays 2-4 or by appointment.

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce I Drilled a Hole and Stared at the Sun, a group exhibition by four Philadelphia artists...
10/17/2025

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce I Drilled a Hole and Stared at the Sun, a group exhibition by four Philadelphia artists: Amanda Crain-Freeland, M. Fernanda Nuñez Alzate, Mika Obayashi, and Heather Swenson. These artists share an interest in the infinite potential for intimacy generated by fleeting moments, provisional materials, and vernacular architecture. Each artist looks at the absurd yet poetic experience found in urban and industrial objects, while considering how to recognize and articulate the tensions that produced them.

When looking at the built environment, certain structures seem to fall outside the logic of capitalism’s seductive veneer. Broken or incomplete corners in public spaces marked with temporary repairs feel possessed by the marks of accidental interactions. A wall outlet, layered with so many years of paint is rendered useless. A stairway to nowhere still maintained by an unknown laborer. These things, moments, spaces, show us a potential not apparent in that which appears complete. (Insert Heidegger quote here…something about hammers). The thing that breaks or is stuck in a state of becoming, shows us our desires differently, right?

Mika Obayashi stacks, balances, folds, and suspends ordinary things as new arrangements, revealing the poetic potentials they occupy. Heather Swenson studies the ad-hoc problem solving found in vernacular architecture, creating miniatures as sculptural re-enactment of provisionality. Amanda Crain-Freeland employs diagonal sciences to reveal failures and contradictions of our mediated environments. And M. Fernanda Nuñez Alzate uses materials that welcome transformation such as wax, plant fibers and food matter, working to interfere with expected boundaries and orientations.

Each artist asks in different ways: Is there a correlation between intimacy potentials and encounters with incompleteness? When you encounter something broken or precarious, something folded not meant to be folded, something stacked not meant to be stacked, or something suspended with a tenuous relationship to gravity…is it desire or failure that makes it seem untethered to systems that seem now more clearly revealed?

Our closing reception for Cecilia McKinnon’s solo exhibition at Big Ramp will coincide with a pay-what-you-can fundraise...
10/06/2025

Our closing reception for Cecilia McKinnon’s solo exhibition at Big Ramp will coincide with a pay-what-you-can fundraiser for Vamos Juntos. Juntos is a community-led, Latine, immigrant organization in South Philadelphia fighting for our human rights as workers, parents, youth, and immigrants. We believe that every human being has the right to a quality education and the freedom to live with dignity regardless of immigration status.

Proceeds from the event will go directly towards Juntos. If you are unable to attend let us know and we will save you one! And as always you can still donate:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/juntos2025appeal

Limited Edition 4 color RISO prints by Cecilia McKinnon will be available for purchase, as well as Chinga La Migra T-Shirts, and as always…some fancy tequila cocktails. Come check out the show before it goes! 5-7pm October 11th at Big Ramp!

Another pic of too many people cramming themselves onto the big ramp always means another awesome exhibition opening at ...
09/16/2025

Another pic of too many people cramming themselves onto the big ramp always means another awesome exhibition opening at BIGRAMP! Thanks to the amazing .fortress for creating such a delicate, subtle, thoughtful, and interesting installation. Thanks to the pals that stuck around til the end! Come see us Saturdays 2-4 for open hours!

Sneak peak of "Is it still a river when the water is gone?", a solo show by Cecelia McKinnon. Please join us for the ope...
09/11/2025

Sneak peak of "Is it still a river when the water is gone?", a solo show by Cecelia McKinnon. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 13 from 6 to 9pm.
fortress

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Cecilia McKinnon.  With sculptural insta...
09/04/2025

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Cecilia McKinnon.  With sculptural installations primarily composed of biomaterials, McKinnon’s work pairs the codes, tools, and signals of human labor with the cycles of entropy, degradation, and renewal within a conception of geological time.  

This summer the Rio Grande river ran dry, exposing the clay riverbed for the first time in 40 years. The absence of water has sparked legislative battles as to what constitutes a river. What is worth protecting when an ecosystem is depleted? Where have human tools of language and categorization failed to measure our impact on the natural world?

Central to McKinnon’s practice involves a questioning of tools and their intentions for the organic world.  McKinnon’s process involves experimentation with new and invented casting methods for organic materials, where familiar objects such as hand tools and architectural fragments are cast in crushed eggshell, algae, sugar, coffee grounds, and gelatin - transforming them into objects resembling cement, stone, and bone. Copper wire traces the walls in delicate lines as though a crude circuit is being assembled, suggesting a machine interface between fossils and architecture.  Objects repeat, such as the head of a broken hammer, becoming an emblem of labor, of tools that assemble and demolish.  Bricks cast with building debris become signifiers of our fragile built environment.  Lying static in a litter of other castings, one can imagine encountering these fragments excavated from an archeological site or scattered amongst shells on a riverbank, left to become sedimentary layers of earth.

McKinnon works with these materials like an assistant tasked with accelerating their petrification, transforming the familiar into fossils, and finding the poetics of longing and lamentation in our human relationship to the sedimentation of things.  These fragments—static and scattered—evoke the sensation of archaeological finds unearthed from a distant past.

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Philadelphia, PA

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12pm - 4pm

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