Sunday, Oct. 7-Sunday, Nov. 19, Multiple sites in Philadelphia
Join artist Michelle Angela Ortiz at the Monument Lab Research Field Office located on the grounds of the The Barnes Foundation this Fall for a series of free paper flower workshops, in conjunction with her Seguimos Caminando (We Keep Walking) prototype monument at City Hall.
Ortiz is making thousands of paper flowers, a tradition passed down by her maternal grandmother, with messages of freedom for the families detained at the Berks Detention Center, a prison outside of Philadelphia for immigrant families. The flowers created here will be assembled in a creative action at City Hall. Below are the dates of the workshops:
- Sat. Oct. 7: 1PM
- Sat. Oct. 14: 1PM
- Fri. Oct. 20: 6PM
- Sat. Oct. 21: 1PM
- Mon. Oct. 23: 12:30PM
- Sun. Nov. 5: 9AM
What Monument Lab Is
“Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project operates around a central guiding question: What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? This line of inquiry is aimed at building civic dialogue and stoking historical imagination as forces for social change.
From September 16–November 19, the Monument Lab curatorial team and Mural Arts have installed temporary prototype monuments by 20 artists across 10 sites in Philadelphia’s iconic public squares and neighborhood parks. These site-specific, socially engaged artworks are presented together with research labs, where creative monument proposals are collected from Philadelphians and visitors.
Michelle Angela Ortiz and Her Work
Throughout her body of work, Michelle Angela Ortiz engages with experiences of immigration in Philadelphia, especially through family stories and intergenerational histories. For Monument Lab, Ortiz’s Seguimos Caminando (We Keep Walking) imagines the gates of City Hall as a space of imaginative projection, juxtaposed with hundreds of sculptures on the building that mark the historic and mythic past of the city. In a series of animated projections held on Wednesday and Friday evenings throughout the exhibition, Ortiz will honor mothers previously or currently unjustly detained at Berks Detention Center, a prison outside of Philadelphia for immigrant families. The animated images in her moving monument originate from compiled writings from two mothers sharing their stories while detained at Berks. Ortiz worked on Seguimos Caminando with the Shut Down Berks Coalition and the mothers detained at Berks, and will organize a creative action with Shut Down Berks during the Monument Lab exhibition” (Monument Lab).
Projections of her work will happen Wednesday and Friday evenings through Nov. 19: 8pm – 10pm, North Apron of City Hall.
For more information on the flower workshops, visit this Facebook page.
For more information about Monument Lab, visit their website.