Course Announcement, Fall 2013

Diedra Krieger Plastic Fantastic (2013), installed at the Rotunda 

Penn community members have, in various ways, been using the arts as a way to bridge the gap between the University and its locale. Examples include Carol Muller and Timothy Rommen’s West Philadelphia Music Project, in which Penn students learned about and documented African musical strains from the neighborhood; Shira Walinsky’s Southeast by Southeast, a storefront art center that serves the immigrant population in South Philadelphia; Herman Beavers’ Literatures of Jazz, which uses Philadelphia’s jazz culture to teach students about modernism in Black literature; and the Rotunda and AIRSpace, two community-driven programs that use Penn-owned buildings to cultivate performing and visual arts, respectively.

While these projects have been running for some time and have shown measurable success, their stakeholders have rarely come together to share best practices and discuss benefits to the community. In light of changes to arts funding in Philadelphia and the desire of the University to position itself as a leader in the arts, it would be of great benefit to study the community-focused arts project, so that partners can foster cohesive operation and better explain their successes to the public. This course, and its related faculty seminar, will be a forum for such study.