Riverfront Residency
2019-2022
Commissioned by the Riverfront North Partnership, Philadelphia, PA
From 2019 - 2022 I worked with the Riverfront North Partnership, an organization building a new riverfront park and 11-mile greenway on the Delaware River in North Philadelphia. Working with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and no nearby riverfront yet accessible, I created a series of projects that developed organically over the two years of the original grant and into an additional commission. My projects and collaborations sought to connect or restablish community relationships with local waterways, build opportunities for RFNP to meet new neighbors, and look for opportunities for connection and healing in scarce public space.
This Pizza is a Park - delivered with waterfront history
A community environmental history project delivered with pizza during the social isolation of COVID-19. Co-artist Mary Rothlisberger and I turned research about the riverfront into a kit of games, trivia, and stories printed on 5,600 cardboard pizza boxes and distributed by a restaurant located near a future Riverfront North park.
Point No Point - storefront photography exhibition
Photographer Jaime Alvarez turned his keen eye for urban life to the hybrid space of a concrete factory reclaimed by nature, creating a document of the place poised for remediation to become a waterfront park. The resulting photographs were shown in the store windows of real estate agents and pizza shops nearby, and printed in a full-color insert in The Bridesburg Bulletin.
Up The Creek - honoring the river’s Underground Railroad history
Walking artist Ken Johnston led a night time lantern parade tracing a route between two historic Underground Railroad stations in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia. For enslaved people, Philadelphia was the threshold of freedom, and the nearby Delaware River was an important escape route, as well as its tributaries like the Frankford Creek. Ken introduced the project and the history of the maritime underground railroad in an online artist talk the week before, led a public lantern-making workshop before the parade, and shared the neighborhood’s historic connections to slavery and freedom along the route of the procession.
Take Me To The River - riverbank youth art workshop
Until the new park is complete, there is no pedestrian access to the Delaware waterfront for people who live in the Frankford neighborhood. This field trip designed with artist Brian Bazemore bused three grades of Frankford Friends School to an accessible area of the waterfront for a hands-on watershed tour and environmental art workshop.
Flow In the Park - outdoor participatory instrument jams
In a community one neighborhood away from the waterfront, this free music program with Jukebox Music School connected neighbors with new instruments and helped RFNP envision wider constituents for their green recreational infrastructure.
River Ways - socially-distanced oral history
An oral history video project conducted over the phone and shared on social media during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. I interviewed residents of the Bridesburg neighborhood who were children in the 1960s and remembered playing in the Delaware River when the neighborhood still had a public waterfront.
River Ways