$300,000 Grant Awarded to UArts for School of Dance “Pop-Up Performance Experience” at Philadelphia Art Alliance
July 3, 2018
Second consecutive year UArts receives a $300k grant from Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
For the second year in a row, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage has awarded the University of the Arts a $300,000 project grant.
Thanks to the 2018 grant award, UArts’ School of Dance will present The School for Temporary Liveness, an eight-day pop-up performance experience staged throughout the Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, designed to generate new forms of spectatorship and participation.
Reimagining theater through the poetic frame of a school, the project will create a site for the exchange of knowledge through performance, and invite audience members to move between different modes of spectatorship and sociality within three zones: The Library, The Classroom, and Study Hall.
Performances will be presented by two internationally recognized artists: choreographer and performer Nora Chipaumire and interdisciplinary performance artist Isabel Lewis. Chipaumire will stage a “live performance album” inspired by her formative years in Zimbabwe and the energy and rebellion of 1980s punk and New Wave music. Lewis will take visitors on a journey throughout the Art Alliance, moving through spaces designed for specific kinds of sense experiences, in a contemporary social ritual she calls “Occasions.” A “school board” of expert interdisciplinary practitioners offering one-on-one tutoring sessions for amateurs will help audience members connect to the works on view and reflect on their own participation.
In 2017, Pew awarded UArts a $300,000 grant to present Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, which will highlight and explore Philadelphia’s significant contributions to visual culture in the 1950s through the 1970s in an exhibition, a publication and performances. The project will invite audiences to envision Philadelphia as “a city of firsts,” producing the first Pop Art exhibitions, innovations in architecture and urban planning, one of the country’s first rock music magazines, and a substantial post-war growth of art schools.
On view at both the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Invisible City will include works by major architects, photographers, sculptors, painters and conceptual artists of the period, including Denise Scott Brown, Rafael Ferrer (1993 Pew Fellow), Ree Morton, Italo Scanga, and Robert Venturi. The exhibition will be enriched by time-based ephemeral pieces such as posters, pamphlets, and films. In examining the region’s performance art history, Alex Da Corte (2012 Pew Fellow) will reconstruct Allan Kaprow's important “happening” Chicken at the Gershman Y, where it was originally performed in 1962. Invisible City builds on extensive research and website documentation that was initiated by the university’s director of exhibitions, Sid Sachs, and supported by a 2014 Center for Arts and Heritage Discovery grant.