Context and Trajectory: the Spark Behind BYOP – Fleisher Community Programs

By Jose Ortiz-Pagán
Fleisher Art Memorial Exhibitions Manager

Context
As one of the oldest community art schools in the country, Fleisher Art Memorial has, for more than 120 years, offered countless people the opportunity to create art through low-cost classes and workshops. Fleisher also offers its students opportunities to show their work in a traditional gallery setting in a number of exhibition opportunities. However, most of the techniques and practical workshops offered at Fleisher have long stemmed from a Western approach to visual art, limiting the institution’s ability to explore other possibilities and the larger ideas of cultural practices.

Fleisher’s exhibitions are pivotal moments for students to celebrate their work and share it with the public, often for the first time. Their experience as a student becomes even more relevant when their work can be showcased, giving them a deeper sense of ownership that often spurs continued participation in Fleisher’s art education programs. Fleisher also makes it a point to extend the exhibition experience to its teaching artists as a way of further developing their relationship with the organization.

More than a decade ago, supported by The Wallace Foundation, Fleisher embarked on a re-examination of the role it plays in Philadelphia and its embrace of the shifting demographics of the neighborhood surrounding it. Bring Your Own Project (BYOP) is in many ways the culmination of that long process of reflection.

Fleisher sits in a residential neighborhood in Southeast Philadelphia, a region that, according to the Brookings Institution, has been a longstanding hub for immigrant communities from within Continental Europe. However, since the late 20th century, the region has seen a dramatic increase in Latin American and Southeast Asian immigrants.

For Fleisher, this changing demographic was crucial to consider. Through The Wallace Foundation’s support, Fleisher conducted a study to better understand our immediate constituents and how we might better serve them. The study showed that most of the people coming to Fleisher were, at the time, from Philadelphia’s suburbs, and indicated that our neighbors were often hesitant to visit. To change this, Fleisher began a number of new initiatives, such as bilingual studio art classes and the development of partnerships with community liaisons, but the exhibitions program did not immediately respond to the diversity reflected in the community.

Prelude
In 2012, I accepted the position of Fleisher’s exhibitions manager to oversee nine exhibitions: three juried contemporary art shows featuring artists from the Mid-Atlantic region, three student-related ones, and three faculty exhibitions.

To better understand the dynamics of Southeast Philadelphia, I began asking questions, both within Fleisher and beyond our doors. One of the first surrounded South Philadelphia’s Mexican community. Due to the particularity of Fleisher’s historic Sanctuary space — a deconsecrated Episcopal church — and its location, I decided to investigate whether there was a possibility for Fleisher to partner with the community to honor the Día de los Muertos tradition. That investigation has blossomed into a vibrant celebration of the holiday, and Fleisher is a part of a team comprising Latinx and allied community members that develops a robust program and constructs an Ofrenda de los Muertos every fall.

Since then, our fundamental understanding of the way partnerships can evolve within our exhibitions program has continued to develop. For instance, instead of Fleisher designating a space for the Ofrenda and inviting an artist to intervene, we remain intentionally flexible in order to guarantee a true sense of partnership. We have become comfortable with leaving the gallery space behind, no longer needing a designated space to partake in or collaborate on cultural expression. Not only was that a sign of Fleisher’s intent to be flexible, but it also allowed us to understand the complexity of meeting everyone Fleisher serves on neutral ground.

This idea of shared ownership has opened the door to a vast number of participants, continuing Fleisher’s long-standing role as a safe space for conversations and possibilities.

Trajectory
An early partnership trial presented itself when a group from Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) asked Fleisher if it could host a basic painting workshop as a way to explore the role art can play in the process of healing. The group thought the workshop could potentially spur a case study into how alternative methods of healing could dissuade local health agencies from pursuing medication as a sole therapeutic method. Six weeks after the workshop, all the participants had created several paintings that focused on a number of topics, from landscapes resembling their place of belonging to images that evoked possibilities of a healthier future.

It is important to mention that the group drove this experience, and everything that happened did so because their needs and ideas were at the core. After the workshop ended in the summer of 2016, Fleisher held an exhibition of the work the participants had made. This small experiment aided Fleisher in two key ways. First, it helped us understand what it meant to facilitate a group of people’s ideas. Second, it showed us how to facilitate group aesthetics by consciously eschewing a leadership role as an institution.

In this process some important question arose for us:

How can we create a process that allows us to see differently as we move away from our current institutional model?

We recognized that cultural institutions often, intentionally or not, hold the power and control access. By understanding this fact, we pushed ourselves to enter a realm of fluid creativity. Institutions can often fear fluidity, especially when it comes to measuring the success of a project. By only serving as technical advisors, mostly on how to present and install work, for this exhibition, we could base our process on inquiries made by the group and a conscious, context-based exhibition implementation. In short, the process that arose was constantly in touch with the group’s idea of creating.

In 2015, Fleisher’s Community Partnerships in the Arts program (CPA), which places teaching artists in residence in Philadelphia public schools and community centers, responded to a request from Boat People SOS — which later became VietLead — that asked us to host a program around food culture within the Vietnamese community. Ensuing workshops focused on teaching young people to create plates and ceramic containers that could be used to host a community dinner party. The project also responded to a long-term process VietLead had begun to collect recipes from the elders in their community.

In both of these early initiatives common questions kept rising, and we mulled over the roles art can play within the long-standing practices of these two different communities. These efforts also left us at an ethical juncture that became the hypothesis for BYOP. If we wanted to understand our role within these specific communities, we could no longer dictate ideas or processes. Fleisher would have to become active listeners to outside ideas and understand that, ultimately, we would become facilitators.

As facilitators we probed areas we had not explored before, and the hiring of artists to facilitate each partner’s ideas proved to be challenging. Working with both partners, we drew a map of the values we expected in the individuals that were going to interact with participants and help guide the process. Critical aspects such as language, gender, ethnicity, and relevant experience became crucial but did not guarantee success. Once hired, the artists would have to engage with both groups and allow other aesthetics and processes to emerge.

These artists needed to be comfortable in territory where things were not always clear and exist in a constant state of transition. This fluidity nurtured the process of creating within the participants and gave them the freedom to explore and define what pathways they wanted to take and what outcome they ultimately wanted to achieve.

BYOP also comprised an extensive list of advisors that were crucial to its success. Many layers of people came to the table, including Fleisher staff, an advisory committee, a think tank committee, and a media production team. Through quarterly meetings we shared our vision of the project with our partners, and these energetic and introspective conversations helped us understand how to best move forward. In some instances, a unanimous conclusion could not be reached, but the questions raised were so vital that they were often revisited in later meetings.

WOAR’s group relied on the expertise of the organization’s counselors, since most of the women were still undergoing their healing process. The relationship between the participants and their counselors often helped the group articulate topics that became part of their project. Unfortunately, midway through the process, WOAR’s representative transitioned from the organization, leaving Fleisher’s staff and the artist as the main drivers for the project. Despite WOAR’s absence, the group’s confidence was reassured. Previously, one of the main ways in which women would become part of the group was by seeking WOAR’s counseling services. Once in this situation, the participants invited more women from the Latinx community to become part of the project, and many more came.

A similar situation arose in the project we developed with VietLead. Part of their initiative revolved around the idea of an urban garden at South Philadelphia’s Horace Furness High School. It was informed by two key constituent groups, high school students that were part of a group called Philly/Viet- Roots and urban farmers, a number of whom are elders in the community and parents to Furness students.

Fluidity became a highly important asset for this project as it hit a major roadblock. While discussing cleaning up the garden’s site, concerns about the possibility of lead paint were raised. Later, after an off-the-shelf testing kit indicated the presence of lead paint on a flaking staircase that led to the site, the project experienced a radical shift. Rather than focus on the development of a garden and the ensuing producing of cookbooks, shirts, media, and more, VietLead refocused its efforts on raising awareness of the situation and holding the School District of Philadelphia accountable for the contamination. June 3, 2018, during a World Refugee Day celebration, was the day VietLead was supposed to inaugurate its garden. Instead, it invited community leaders, the press, and members of city council to tour the site. Through this action VietLead, the students, and farmers were able to ensure a cleanup of the garden space.

Conclusion
As of February 2019, great progress has been made. The group from WOAR decided to create a large curtain using recycled soda tabs as a platform to tell their stories. It is almost complete. For them this piece holds great power and is an opportunity to honor themselves and those who are no longer present. The group has also discussed using the dynamic piece as a platform for activism, too. The curtain, which measures nearly 9 feet by 15 feet, is a large crochet net that holds approximately 60,000 soda tabs. Using recycled materials was not only a way for them to comment on environmental issues but also a way to talk about dispensability of life. It will be exhibited at an outdoor venue per the group’s request. Fleisher has continued to meet with the group to talk about constructing a permanent maker space for its use as a way to nurture our relationship.

VietLead is finalizing its garden and the school district has removed the lead paint from the space. The garden celebrated its first growing season in the spring of 2019. Despite the difficulties, VietLead was able to implement many of the items built during the process, and the growers even began farming in temporary containers in front of the school while a solution for the garden area was developed. Fleisher and VietLead continue to explore new ways to collaborate, especially through CPA.

For Fleisher, this opportunity has demonstrated the ways in which a cultural institution can play a larger role in a civic idea. Navigating a plan that has not been fully developed allowed everyone involved to generate a unique equity trust. BYOP helped us understand what it truly means to give and be given access to creative expression. We now understood what means to meet partners, collaborators, and participants where they are as we develop ideas and traverse a creative path together.