[*Warning! Your eyes might glaze over!]
Beth Uzwiak, PhD (she/they) is an artist, ethnographer and writer with a PhD in cultural anthropology.
Her work as an artist ranges from community-engaged projects to writing, and includes painting, book- and print-making, and assemblage. She writes reviews and essays with a focus on how photographers, artists, and activists (especially feminists) use images and text to represent violence and its survival. She has also written about the resonance between participatory art and urban ethnographic methods, the value of community integration to advance racial equity in public memorial projects, and ways that sensory and art-based methods can enhance joy in creative placemaking.
Along with organizing participatory projects that bring art to less traditional spaces such as historic houses and vacant lots, Beth has exhibited work in numerous galleries, including Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Delaware Contemporary, University City Arts League, Woman Made Gallery, and The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
Some of her art draws inspiration from historical events and archives—from the 1876 Centennial Exposition and 1900s circus culture to the avant-garde milieu of the 70s and 80s. She received a Leeway Art & Change grant with fellow anthropologist Laurian Bowles to support a project that delved into the archival histories of queer and feminist social movements in Philadelphia.
Her project Nights at the Circus, a multiform collaboration with artist Elysa Voshell installed at University City Arts League in Philadelphia, began with a deaccessioned copy of Djuna Barnes’s classic lesbian novel Nightwood (1937). Taking its inspiration from Nightwood itself, the installation set hand-pulled screen prints of the 1900s circus—its dandies, charlatans, and coquettes—with text pulled from the novel to celebrate the carnivalesque.
Her long fascination with the bawdy and irreverent continues in a current assemblage project titled Shebang Shebang, a series of headdresses that honor various drag, cabaret, and theatrical performers.
Other work is community-based. For example, Beth was awarded an Ecotopian Toolkit grant (UPenn) for a participatory art project that explored Philadelphians’ fears of (and hopes for) local rivers which resulted in an artist book. For this project, she also received a Mellon Research Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia to support archival research about the ecological, industrial, and recreational histories of Philadelphia’s waterways.
She is a former resident of the 40th Street A.I.R program in West Philadelphia, which awards studio space to community-engaged artists. During that time, she collaborated with formerly unhoused people on a series of art expression groups. Art from one group culminated in Gerry’s Book, an artist book of watercolors in remembrance of a participant who passed away.
More recent work explores the hauntings and dystopian realities of our present ecological moment, mostly through quickly rendered watercolor paintings including a series called Rising Seas, painted at various points along the eastern seaboard, and Heat, a series painted during a heatwave in the summer of 2022.
In addition to her obsession with making, thinking and writing about art, Beth is a community-based researcher and specializes in ethnographic and artistic methods. Her consulting portfolio includes projects in participatory public art and memorials, place-based arts and culture, civic engagement, environmental justice and stewardship, equitable development and community-led design, and museum engagement and exhibition.
For example, during a Community Catalyst Residency at Hatfield House in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia, she collaborated with artist collective Amber Art & Design and Fairmount Park Conservancy to steward a cultural asset mapping process which culminated in the production of a community-designed deck of playing cards celebrating local musicians, athletes, artists, and activists.
Other collaborations include Spit Spreads Death (Mütter Museum and Blast Theory), an interactive parade and exhibition commemorating 100-year legacy of the 1918-9 influenza pandemic in Philadelphia, and Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge (Mural Arts and Cohabitation Strategies), an action research and social practice art project that piloted civic experiments to discuss land occupation, gentrification, environmental restoration, and housing in South Philadelphia.