Featured Events
Filmmaker, writer, actor, and musician Terence Nance’s first solo exhibition will shed light on his interdisciplinary film and media work including Random Acts of Flyness—the Peabody Award-winning HBO series that examines contemporary Black life in America—and semi-animated feature film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. This exhibition is curated by Maori Karmael Holmes, artistic director and CEO of BlackStar Projects.
This exhibition marks the first US solo museum presentation of the work of New York/Philadelphia–based artist and writer Carolyn Lazard (US, b. 1987). Working across disciplines and mediums, Lazard explores the social and political dimensions of care at the intersection of race, gender, and disability. Focusing on accessibility and dependency, their artworks and published writings center illness as a site of abundance and collectivity.
Exhibition - Minerva Parker Nichols - The Search for a Forgotten Architect
Minerva Parker Nichols (1862–1949) was the first woman in the US to practice architecture independently, with press coverage and commissions nationwide. Yet only a handful of her drawings survives, and she is rarely included in the story of Philadelphia’s built environment or broader historical assessments. Capping off a decade's research by architectural historian and preservation planner Molly Lester (MSHP'12), Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect features a new series of documentary photographs by Elizabeth Felicella documenting over 30 of the architect's extant buildings and raising timely questions about who, in the history of the built environment, is remembered, who is forgotten, and why.
In 2019 the Ashley Bryan Center donated the archive of the renowned artist, author, and humanitarian Ashley Bryan, who died last year at the age of 98, to the Kislak Center at the Penn Libraries. This exhibition explores his century-long story, the story of one man—seeking his place in a world that did not always welcome him, finding himself through observation and expression, and using his creative gifts to make sense of his life and to help others to do the same.
Beginning with the story of Minerva Parker Nichols (1862-1949), an architect whose story has been lost to history, this program features several broad-based case studies that explore gaps, silences, and imbalances in the historical record and brings together archivists, curators, artists and activists to discuss the potential of archives as sites of community building and creative imagination.
Panelists include John Anderies, director of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia; Katherine Sarwopeni Antarikso, an architect, activist-researcher and poet; Monet Lewis-Timmons, English PhD candidate and African American Public Humanities Fellow, University of Delaware; and Carol Stakenas, an independent curator, educator, and culture worker. The discussion is moderated by Heather Isbell Schumacher, a community organizer, and archivist at the Architectural Archives.