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Post-modernism is defined
by the need for engagement, reinterpretation, and -- in the case of the
inventive installations of “Hidden
City Philadelphia” -- regeneration. Peregrine
Arts, the not-for-profit organization, selected ten sites,
if you include the bus tour itself, which it paired with contemporary
visual artists to energize by revisiting and reimagining some of the beautiful,
monumental, and evocative landmarks in the city of Philadelphia. Enlivening
the conceptual underpinnings of "The City of Brotherly Love"
is suggested in the Mother Bethel AME Church, an underground railroad
site, and the well meaning but skewed philanthropy of Stephen Girard in
his school for orphan Caucasian boys, countered by the Philadelphia
Inquirer’s longstanding hiring of women reporters and its coverage
of women’s accomplishments in its 180 year history. In Newsroom
2009 by Aleksandra Mir at the Philadelphia Inquirer Building, one
can pick up a six-page newsprint supplement documenting women’s
sports and intellectual accomplishments, timely aesthetic and style dilemmas
of a certain era, and women’s political and business acumen -- including
a photograph of teenage Nancy Pelosi. The supplement is part of the social
processes Mir focuses on in her varied work.
 Hidden
City Philadelphia is both a visual arts set of exhibitions and three performing
arts events taking place in the abandoned Metropolitan Opera House on
North Broad Street, at 23rd Street Armory, and at The Royal Theater on
South Street during the month of June. All the sites appear as intellectual
excavations examining past histories and imagining new futures. The visual
arts installations can be seen during Saturdays and Sundays while the
performing arts events are in the evening on various dates (see
www.hiddencityphila.org for complete details). More immediately,
the multiple sites from the Disston Factory site on State Road in the
Northeast to the Shiloh Baptist Church on 20th and Christian Streets extend
the idea of First Fridays, so that the pedestrian traffic throughout the
city and the human interaction from this treasure hunt engenders community.
A sense of discovery, rewarded by the friendly Hidden City receptionists
and guides at each location, is not dissimilar to locating performances
at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the International Film Festival,
and past Book and the Cook events. The success of Hidden City Philadelphia
stems from its ability to create a nostalgia for the ‘faded glory’
of the City and a reinvention of the historic sites to accent their original
meaning with post-modern perspectives.
Founder’s Hall at Girard College (2101 S. College
Avenue) with its Pantheon-like central dome and peeling green paint along
its interior pendentives is the space for Steven Roden’s installation
nothing but what is therein contained. It is constructed of wooden
boxes stenciled with the names of Stephen Girard’s numerous ships
(one of the sources of his personal fortune) appearing as buoys in the
vacuous space. Black and white designs with colored pencil lettering,
spelling out the names of the ships, are displayed in propped-up framed
pictures which lean against the wooden boxes on the floor and/or the walls.
In the adjoining domed room with its oculi is an over life-size colorful
pick-up stick sculpture that spells out the names of Girard’s ship
when the colored wood sticks are flattened onto the floor. The expanse
of the sea is suggested by the voluminous space and the green peeling
paint with its white underside reflecting light dappled waves. The soundtrack
from a glass harmonica and the Amish simplicity of the boxes -- contrasted
with the marble edifice including the marble steps at the entrance and
three-story marble spiraling staircase as well as honeybees -- all have
direct references to Philadelphia’s stature, wealth, and environs.
 On
entering the beautiful second story library in the German Society of Philadelphia
(611 Spring Garden Street), Stan Douglas has installed the video Der
Sandman. In the two-story library with its dark wood framed book
shelves and cabinets, a large screen projection of Douglas’ black
and white video of a terrifying fairytale links memory and history. Two
fairytales are seen on the split screen as one sits in the wooden chairs
with an emerging understanding of the terror of the fables. The dark woods
of Germanic fairytales are echoed in the under-lit library and the secrecy
of the important trove of documentation in books behind glass cabinet
doors. Accusations of dual patriotic allegiances during WWI and WWII,
perhaps, were the inspiration for the evocative art installation. The
initial function of the Society was to assist German immigrants sold into
servitude; however, local economic changes and community building in the
surrounding neighborhood are also reasons to revisit the site.
Videos and installations imbued with sound both humanize
and electrify several of the installations. The paradoxical essence of
the upstairs sound installation in Shiloh Baptist Church (2040 Christian
Street) is a gunshot dispersed into computer-generated components ultimately
dissipating into thunder, then rain. The red and white patterned brick
walls with dark wood slatted ceilings and partial walls was chosen by
Inigo Manglano-Ovalle in Sonambulo (“sleepwalker”
in Spanish) to counter the rise in street violence in the area of the
church. Downstairs, in his installation Like Lambs, Steven Earl
Weber re-envisions the large high-ceiled Victorian wood framed space with
two red walls, by installing silver and red rams’ horns protruding
in divergent directions. The idea of sacrifice pervades the work, with
a large video image of a nursing mother and baby, a baby lamb with a cut
in its upper chest spouting blood into a chalice, and two sets of three
baby lambs balancing broken loaves of bread and a glass of wine on their
backs. The artist provides his own questioning of evangelism and issues
surrounding faith and doubt, good and evil, and sin and redemption as
a starting point to understand this piece. Again, sacrifice is emblematic
of both artists’ work at Shiloh Baptist Church.
 Impressive
in the cumulative and relational energy of the placement of objects and
a fertile sense of purpose evoked from the soundtrack of the saw making
and steel file making factory, the site specific multimedia installation
Running Time by Carolyn Healy and John Phillips is a nostalgic
peek into Philadelphia’s industrial past. The urban blight that
surrounds Disston Saw Works (6795 State Road, Philadelphia), which today
occupies only a portion of the once vast factory complex, is an unfortunate
remnant of the ideal working community that Disston founded with its own
library, water supply, and housing. At one point 7,000 workers made very
high quality steel saws used for factories all over the world. The fascinating
installation within one of the large factory spaces includes altars to
Greek and Indian gods of metal making, a suspended path of facsimile molten
steel, intricately piled small circular grinding and cutting gears linked
together as if they were a child’s toy, with an enlivening soundtrack
of the factory at work and projections on several walls and surfaces.
For this creative, highly inventive and well researched installation,
the husband and wife team carefully scoured through old floor plans and
diagrams and collected hammers and saws left in the factory. The molecular
components of steel, and the way this molecular structure changes under
pressure, is depicted with groups of hammers posed upside down on round
steel discs placed in one area of the factory installation. Metal boxes
stacked in a crenellated pattern, original white graffiti tags on the
brick walls warning of pigeons that still encircle the building and fly
into the space, and large leather bound ledger books all were scavenged
and incorporated by the artists into the installation. Light and suspension
animate this otherwise very dark factory space.
 Embracing
of its history, Mother Bethel AME Church (419 S. Sixth Street) has a museum
honoring its founder Richard Allen, a Methodist minister. At first, it
was a mutual aid society that also helped African American education;
it later became an institutional center of the African American community.
The vibrant congregation of this beautifully constructed wood detailed
church has preserved artifacts from its history as a well-known underground
railroad site. Augmenting the objects in the museum that document the
founding of the church and its struggles in harboring runaway slaves and
moving them to safe houses further north, Mother Bethel is displaying
Constellations by Sanford Biggers, an exhibition of quilts that
hang from the balcony for the entire congregation to appreciate. One can
see the monkey wrench motif that turns the wagon wheel towards freedom;
one can follow the bear’s claw trail to the crossroads; and one
can then follow the flying geese north, staying on the drunkard’s
path following the stars, all of which were well-known quilt patterns
inventively put to use to help slaves escape capture. Quilts pointed the
way to safe houses, indicating the best time of day or night to depart
and the paths north to Ontario, Canada. The Little Dipper, North Star,
and Birds in Flight are motifs of the Underground Railroad quilts included
on view here. Biggers’ signature print of a star shape within a
quilt square, composed of the elongated oval floor plan of ships -- where
people were imprisoned and taken to the Western Hemisphere in chains,
shackled to wood planks, and stacked as close together as possible on
the long journey across the ocean -- are selectively sewn onto the exhibited
quilts. A ‘star’ shaped print is a souvenir for visitors to
this site, recognizably placed on most of the quilts on display.
What is visually readable? What do we not know
about our city? Are artistic installations an exploration into the future
or an act of reminiscing about the past? Who chose the artists and who
chose the sites and who did the pairing for Hidden City Philadelphia?
The gracious Hidden City volunteers at each site asked for suggestions
of other sites for upcoming installations in the following year. Can we
look forward to a trick and treat adventure every year -- with the trick
to locate the site (except when you take the bus ride) and the treat to
learn about the site and the artwork? Should Hidden City be more pedestrian
friendly with only sites within walking distance from each other? Should
a ‘greener’ trail be established, so one does not pass Dollar
Stores and check cashing store fronts as well as uncollected garbage on
many corner lots, so the deterioration of the city is not on full view?
Reused and reclaimed is environmentally correct, so perhaps that is the
next horizon, seeing Hidden City Philadelphia as a ‘green effort?’
In marketing our city to ourselves and others, should Hidden City Philadelphia
be part of the Fringe Festival, of a revitalized Book and the Cook, of
a local film festival???? We are off to a very good start!
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Laura Fattal, Ph.D. is an independent writer, art
historian, and an instructor at Tyler School of Art.
© 2009 Laura Fattal and InLiquid.com |
