participatory — beth uzwiak

SOCIALLY ENGAGED & PARTICIPATORY COMMUNITY ART

Below are a few examples of art / expression created in collaboration with various communities and initiatives.

FUTURES BEYOND REFINING

I created a public workshop in collaboration with UPenn’s Program in Environmental Humanities as part of their event Futures Beyond Refining. Students spent the semester collaborating with residents and activists who live near the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Oil Refinery Complex, which exploded in June 2019. The 100-year-old complex has produced cancer, respiratory ailments and other health concerns for persons living nearby. During the workshop, participants created ‘visions’ of the area 100 years from now on postcards and mailed them to local officials.

STRAWBERRY MANSION COMMUNITY CATALYST RESIDENCY

I collaborated with artists from Amber Art & Design and Fairmount Park Conservancy as part of an artist residency at the Hatfield House. We worked with residents of Strawberry Mansion (a neighborhood in North Philly) to transform the underutilized historic house into a platform for experiments in civic engagement. Along with ethnography and oral history collection, we activated a cultural asset mapping process which culminated in the design of a deck of playing cards celebrating local people and places.

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MY PARK, MY NEIGHBORHOOD

As part of Fairmount Park Conservancy programming, I developed a curriculum for a summer multi-media (photography and video) camp in Strawberry Mansion. The camp paired local field trips with historic information and offered local youth a chance to learn digital photography and storytelling techniques while exploring the history of their neighborhood. The camp culminated in a youth-curated exhibition.

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RIVER BEASTS AND BESTIES

Philadelphia families created the art in this book during a visual storytelling and myth-making workshop that I created called River Beasts and Besties. We created fantastical beasts to explore our fears about urban waterways. We also conjured besties, or mythical creatures who protect our rivers from ecological destruction. This project was partially funded by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Ecotopian Toolkit grant.

Find the entire book here.

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PLAYGROUNDS FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE

Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge was a community-based experimental urban platform using play, games and performance to reveal, share and celebrate local knowledge produced in South Philadelphia, an area known for its rich cultural and ethnic diversity. A collaboration between Cohabitation Strategies and Mural Arts Project, Playgrounds sought the restructuring of urban spaces by promoting new social relations across cultural and economic divides, with the objective of generating just and sustainable forms of collective inhabiting to confront the pressures of accelerated urban development. As urban ethnographer for the project, I collaborated with Cohabitation Strategies to collect data, create connections and document community concerns through participant observation, interviews, social mapping and creative documentation. The project culminated in a large public fair celebrating local cultural workers, artists, activists and community organizations.

FOR GERRY

Artist’s book created in honor of Gerry Roberts, after his passing. Gerry was a participant in an arts-expression group I co-facilitated with Owen Riordan (then with Project Home) and formerly unhoused persons.

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BREAK MY HEART

Handmade papier-mâché piñata

A long-ago project while resident at AIR studio space in West Philly, in collaboration with Sara Castillo.

Filled with break-up notes collected from 200 participants. Wry, ridiculous, far-fetched, secret and unspoken, haunted, and deadly serious these notes expressed the fury, regret, sadness, and humor of heartbreak. Participants broke the piñata during an exhibit at the 40th Street Gallery.