Bradley N. Litwin is a Philadelphia based, multi-discipline artist, born in 1955. Primarily self-trained, his career as an artist has taken a serpentine path through craft, manufacturing, multimedia production, music, and the fine arts. Through it all, he has been making machinery of one kind or another for over thirty-five years.
Beginning with model-making as a child; then teaching himself guitar making as a teenager, Litwin has always asserted his destiny as an unconventional independent. Despite not following the well-established school and career paths, taken by most, he has none the less succeeded in various professions, without benefit of formal credentials. Instead, he’s relied on the merits of demonstrated skills and knowledge, gained through a continuing practice of self-directed, conscious observation, and synthesis.
That unique career path has included: medical product manufacturing design, museum exhibit design and fabrication, electronics manufacturing equipment design and prototyping, 3D animation, graphic design and interactive multimedia production.
Today, as a sculptor of kinetic automata, as well as a singer and guitarist, performing interpretations of 1920s era, ragtime, jazz and blues; and as an arts educator, working with students of every description, Litwin continues to redefine himself as an artist. His most recent projects have involved community outreach and residency programs, sometimes combining both visual and musical arts, throughout the mid Atlantic and Midwest region of the US.
Artist’s Statement
I never know what’s coming. A project begins with a confident first draft, then the slow revelation of what the design can’t yet do. A second draft. A third. Then the making itself, where almost every time, new mistakes surface—in the parts, in the mechanical concept, in assumptions I didn’t know I was making. By the time the piece finally works, it feels less like achievement than miracle: the thing arriving hopefully in its simplest possible form, working and appearing as if it had always known where it belonged.
But where do these quasi-anachronistic provocations come from? It is a question that defies rational explanation. Every once in a while, the mind goes quiet for just long enough for the juxtaposition of a contradiction in acceptable idioms to settle onto my prospective visual cortex—not exactly seen in the imagination as much as felt in a visual space that doesn’t translate as an image so much as a tactile concept that stimulates the entire perceptual scape.
My fascination begins with the machine idioms most are familiar with—wheels, screws, and linkages, the kind found in steam locomotives. What draws me is not merely the autonomic attraction of moving parts, but the geometric relationships between them, the way assembly and juxtaposition are dictated by function within a system, and how those conventions have built a great library representing the arc of mechanical design language.
When these systems move, I follow the curves drawn out by the paths of links; the growth and recession of shapes that emerge and dissolve; the interplay of negative and positive space; light and shadow negotiating with surface, texture, finish. The eye finds paths it didn’t know it was looking for.
But watching was never enough. I am compelled to demonstrate—not merely to know that a body falls at 32.2 feet per second squared, but to build objects that crucially and continuously depend on that fact holding true. My work doesn’t represent physical law. It instantiates it. The piece either works, or the universe has declined to cooperate.
And in that refusal to merely represent—to insist instead on the real—I find that mechanism becomes metaphor almost in spite of itself. A wheel illustrating that what goes around comes around. A lever mediating the balance of opposing forces. An obdurate piston that only moves under pressure. The machine as understudy for the human condition, with all the same unpredictability—and musicality.
When I do utilize electrical components such as motors or sensors, it is only in service of mechanical function, rather than controlling virtual events. The work remains physical in its logic, its demands, and its rewards. It obeys laws that cannot be reprogrammed, and offers what cannot be simulated: the tactile joy of a thing moving in actual space. Not stated. Demonstrated.
Recent Projects & Honors:
2014 Cross Pollinaton Collaboration Project, Swim Pony, Philadelphia, PA
2014 New Courtland Fellowship, Philadelphia, PA
2013 Gallery Exhibition with Jon Eckels at the Mount Airy Contemporary Artists Space, Philadelphia, PA
2012-14 Fellow of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA
2011 30 piece commission, Neo Pangea Surprise Box, Reading, PA
2011 50 piece commission, Roche Diagnostic Laboratories, Indianapolis, IN
2011 Artist in Residence, Common Ground, Westminster, MD, week-long kinetic sculpture workshop, and festival stage performance
2010 Four touring kinetic pieces commissioned for the stage performance by Squonk Opera, of Pittsburgh, PA
2009 “Brad Litwin: A Collection of Mechanical Conundra” solo exhibition at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
2009 “Collision 14” group show at Axiom Center for New & Experimental Media, Jamaica Plain, MA
2008 “Re.Action,” Merit Award for “The Rotapult,” inaugural exhibit at Annmarie Sculpture Garden, Solomons, Maryland (4 works selected for this exhibition)
2008 Hatboro-Horsham Education Foundation grant, Artist in Residence – Kinetic Sculpture Project, Hatboro-Horsham High School, Horsham, PA
2008 “Kinetic Image” Director’s Award for “The Sway of Public Opinion” kinetic sculpture exhibited at the Torpedo Factory – Target Gallery, Alexandria, VA
2007 Collaborative Kinetic Sculpture Project: a community outreach arts residency with Project H.O.M.E. residents, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA (PNC Bank grant)
2007 Combined Music and Kinetic Sculpture Exhibition: arts residency with the Southern Ohio Museum, Portsmouth, Ohio (PennPAT matching fund grant)
2006 combined music and sculpture community arts residency with the Springfield, Ohio Arts Council (PennPAT matching fund grant)
2005 sculpture kinetic installation commissioned by the Merion Elementary School Home & School Association, Merion, PA
Commonwealth Speaker for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council 2004 – present
Adjudicated roster member of the Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour 2003 – present
Adjudicated roster member of Young Audiences of Eastern Pennsylvania 2005 – present
Roster member of Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership 2005 – 2008