North Philadelphia History Festival: "reForm"

The North Philadelphia History Festival (NPHF) is a cultural celebration of the African American and Puerto Rican communities in North Philadelphia. Across four days, historic sites along Ridge Avenue, North Broad Street and other locales will be transformed into living exhibits created by artists, historians, curators and other cultural workers. These multimedia projects and events will explore the emergence and impact of these communities in the 19th and 20th century.

PROJECTS:

reForm
Artist: Pepón Osorio
Category: Video Installation
Location: Cicala at the Divine Lorraine, 699 N. Broad St
Date & Time: Thursday July 24th - Sunday, August 3rd

reForm (2015) is an exhibition and community project that became a testimony of collective frustration experienced by many after the abrupt closing of Fairhill Elementary School. As a participatory project, the artist Pepón Osorio with students, teachers, parents, and administrators of the Fairhill community placed chalkboards, desks, chairs and mementos left behind by the Philadelphia School District onto the bed of a truck and moved these items into Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture where they repurposed a university classroom with the relocated material. The exhibition intended to kick off a whole new wave of community gatherings on the subject of the closing of Fairhill Elementary. The video, titled Jacob, is a detail of the exhibition and a provocative reflection of a student writing on an actual Fairhill Elementary school blackboard, concerned with the after-effects of this educational epidemic. The video is based on a real life experience, by a student that participated in the project.