Staying Power is the stunning new outdoor art exhibition and program series curated by Monument Lab and hosted here at The Village, exploring the questions: What is your staying power in this neighborhood? What is your staying power in a city and world that are rapidly changing? The exhibition is open from now until July 10, 2021.
What Is Staying Power?
Over the last two years, our teams invited artists and neighborhood curatorial fellows to reflect on central questions driving the project: What is your staying power in this neighborhood? What is your staying power in a city and world that are rapidly changing?
Staying Power features prototype monuments by outstanding contemporary artists Sadie Barnette, Black Quantum Futurism, Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, Ebony G. Patterson, and Deborah Willis that each respond to these questions.
The resulting exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculpture, photographic installations, storefront activations, and research and performance engagements, presented alongside The Village’s existing public collection of legacy artworks on the Germantown Avenue corridor of North Central Philadelphia.
Read more about Staying Power in the New York Times. (Article title taken from a poem by Ursula Rucker.)
Event Calendar
Now – July 10, 2021 Tour the Exhibition in Person
The exhibition runs May 1-July 10 and is fully outside and available for viewing online. Free, timed tours of the exhibition on site will be open for all Thursdays–Sundays, 12-6 p.m. You can register for your tour here. Select a date for an in-person tour.
May 22, 2021, 2-4 p.m. Staying Power – Creating a Visual History through Philly-Sound[s]
From the sonic to the visual, few cities have captured and impacted America’s cultural imagination longer than Black Philadelphia. Creating a Visual History through Philly-sound[s] features the Ambassador of African-American Music, Dyana Williams, radio host, cultural historian, and Black music advocate; award winning actress Anna Maria Horsford who played the role of “Thelma” on the popular sit-com Amen set in Philadelphia; and musician and scholar, Dr. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania will discuss the unique combination of creative, social, cultural, and political elements that create that beloved cocktail of Black creativity known as Philly-sound[s]. The panel will be moderated by Deborah Willis whose memories of growing up in North Philadelphia are shaped by a narrative of ‘staying power’ through listening to WDAS and WHAT while completing chores on Saturday morning, visiting the Uptown Theater, and attending church services on Sundays.
- Limited Tickets for In-Person Attendance (Registration Link)
- Online through Instagram and Instagram Live @TheVillagePhilly @Monument_Lab (Registration Link)
- Limited In-Person Attendance with Advance Registration [Registration Link]
- Online [Registration Link Forthcoming]
June 12, 2021, All Day Staying Power Performance Festival
Gather with us online and in person for a day-long festival celebrating Black performance as staying power. Engaging site specific monologue series, a fashion show, a youth performance, poetry readings, panels and three headlining performances, this festival celebrating the history of Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center and its contemporary legacies makes space for collective dreaming about the futures of staying power. Featured performers include: Staying Power artists Black Quantum Futurism, ursula rucker, Angela Davis Johnson and muthi reed of Hollerin Space: HOLD ON (Philadelphia/ the Delta/ Burkeville/ Bulbancha), Paul Perc, a youth performance led by Kim Gadlin of Philadanco, local performers in collaboration with Theatre in the X, Germaine Ingram and the Yoruba Project, Aisha Fukushima and many more.
- 11:00 am-5:30pm: Online through Zoom [Registration Link Forthcoming]
- 7:00-10:00pm: Limited In-Person Attendance with Advance Registration [Registration Link]
- 7:00-10:00pm: Online through Instagram and Instagram Live @TheVillagePhilly @Monument_Lab [Registration Link Forthcoming]
June 26, 2021, All Day Staying Power Civic Fair
The culminating public event of the exhibition is our Staying Power Civic Fair. This space is an in-person and online gathering for power and analysis building with and for community members of the Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood and beyond. Join us for workshops and discussions on maintaining property, tenants rights, fathering and fatherhood, home schooling (in a pandemic and beyond), gentrification and youth voice. This fair features events led by many of the Staying Power Curatorial Fellows including; Ms Nandi Jackson, Natasha Mosley, Frederick Harris and Aisha Chamblis. The event will also feature an artist talk about the role of Black private and home spaces in cultural production featuring Staying Power artist Sadie Barnette and Tiona Nekkia McClodden in conversation.
- Limited In-Person Attendance with Advance Registration [Registration Link]
- Online [Registration Link Forthcoming]
Staying Power Gallery
