Two months ago we opened a door to a storefront on Market Street in Philadelphia and asked people to come in to experiment with love, connection, creativity and civic engagement. During our time with ArtPhilly from May 27th through July 2, we hosted 23 events and had 38 activations. 

In July, we explored creating space for conversations bubbling over from the digital space. We asked ourselves questions like “what if we take a viral conversation happening online and make it a community discussion?” 

We kicked off that exploration with a little mischief. A South African Netflix series about polygamy had the internet in a chokehold. Everybody had a take, and nobody had anywhere to put it except a comment section built for heat, not depth. So we pulled the conversation off the timeline and into a room. Thirty people showed up, five of them on the panel, Dr. Philip Roundtree, LaNeshe Miller White, Kimberly Rollins, and Kyree Terrell, and what started as show talk turned into something with real teeth, about patriarchy, about exploitation dressed up as tradition, about which of our parents’ and grandparents’ values we actually want to keep. It ended up being a very powerful discussion about love from a unique entry point into the conversation. 

We also hosted a conversation called Same Ground, built around three Black women in Philadelphia who are fighting, actively, right now, to preserve a local slavery exhibit that history keeps trying to quietly let go of. Former City Councilwoman-at-Large Blondell Reynolds Brown, Dr. Cheryl LaRoche, and Sheila Vance came through as authors and as advocates, sharing their books and their fight, in an evening curated by Xina Eiland. The story made national news. Two months old, and this little room in Philly was already part of the national conversation about whose history gets remembered and who has to fight to remember it.

We also spent July on the unglamorous stuff that actually moves people forward. An open grant-writing workshop brought artists, journalists, and social impact entrepreneurs together to wrestle funding language into shape, because too many good ideas die in an application that nobody has the tools to write. Our Growth By Design panel, led by Design Philadelphia and featuring Brian Phillips of Meantime, pulled back the curtain on how pop-up activations have helped bring the Market East corridor back to life, block by block, artist by artist. Different rooms, same instinct, take what a community already knows how to do and hand it back with better tools.

We closed the month our first Poet’s Press workshop led by Ursula Rucker and Yolanda Wisher, led our first Open Poets Press workshop, twenty-five people deep, fed by Atiya Ola’s Spirit First Foods, all of us writing our way through whatever the news had thrown at us that week. These workshops work like a newsroom staffed entirely by people who refuse to just consume the news quietly. Read it, feel it, write it back out. That is the whole craft.

August is already stacked. We are teaming up with the Black Star Film Festival and partnering with Punchline Philly to send our community to comedy shows for free, because joy counts too. On August 18th, content creator Chelsea Cox headlines Content, Context, and Cash Flow, breaking down how she actually keeps the lights on doing creative work, partnerships and all. Another grant writing workshop lands August 20th. On Wednesday the 21st, Seraiah Nicole hosts the Light Lounge, wellness and faith and performance art and sober curious fun all in one room. And we will keep the monthly Poet’s Press workshops going on August 27th with Ursula Rucker back at it, this time alongside former Philadelphia Poet Laureate Kai Davis

Two months in, and the pattern is already clear. This is what happens when you give people space IRL. History, contemporary stories, new skills, processing the news, together, IRL. 

Come see us in August.