God's Work

Masina Frank emerges as a provocative force in contemporary art, particularly through her collaboration with Ella Konefal on God's Work at Vox Populi Gallery. In this exhibition, Frank delves into the chilling legacy of the 1937 Nazi Entartete Kunst show, that infamous propaganda spectacle where over 5,000 modernist works were confiscated, 650 mocked as symbols of decadence, and the unsold remnants incinerated. Turning this history like a multifaceted crystal under today's fractured light, Frank employs material experimentation and social practice to dissect the original catalog, floorplans, and iconography, questioning the stakes of confronting the past in our volatile present. The exhibition's spiral of methodologies finds Frank inviting other artists into SOUL STAKE activations—on March 20, March 28, April 11, and April 17—where participants channel or embody pieces from the Degenerate Art catalog, transforming passive reflection into visceral embodiment. This culminates in a group show within the gallery's echoing warehouse, blending historical excavation with live, communal invocation. Frank's approach rejects sterile commemoration, instead igniting a dynamic dialogue on non-conformism, where the ghosts of suppressed expression haunt and provoke anew. Her practice resonates with broader themes of defiance against authoritarian purity, echoing the original Degenerate artists who appeared in both mocked and 'approved' shows. By digesting these dualities, Frank crafts a space that not only remembers but reactivates the tension between decay and resilience, madness and clarity, impurity and the sacred. In Philadelphia's gritty art ecosystem, her work underscores the enduring power of art to unsettle, unite, and stake claims on history's contested ground.

Ella Konefal, in tandem with Masina Frank, orchestrates the haunting God's Work at Vox Populi, a collaborative excavation of the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition's sordid machinery. This Nazi-orchestrated travesty seized thousands of expressionist and modernist pieces, parading them as emblems of moral and racial rot opposite the sanitized Great German Art Exhibition. Konefal and Frank collaboratively unravel this archive through innovative material play and social rituals, probing what lingers when history is spun through contemporary prisms—culminating in warehouse activations where artists incarnate the condemned works. Konefal's contributions infuse the show with a pulsing inquiry: what risks attend our gaze backward? The SOUL STAKE events transform the gallery into a living catalog, where embodiment bridges 20th-century ashes to 21st-century reckonings. Her methodology dances across disciplines, decomposing propaganda's icons into raw, participatory fragments that challenge viewers to confront complicity, memory, and the body's role in resistance. Rooted in Philadelphia's experimental ethos, Konefal's vision amplifies the original degenerates' irony—artists straddling condemnation and canonization. She forges a communal rite that doesn't merely mourn but metabolizes the past, questioning purity's tyranny in an era of renewed cultural purges. Through this, Konefal positions art as a vital, volatile stake in the ground of history, urging collective embodiment over passive witness.