PHILADELPHIA, PA (PNAN) – Art and the Invisible City goes on display Thursday, September 30 and runs through November 30, 2021 at Slought gallery at 4017 Walnut Street, featuring work by Trenton-based artists: Leon Rainbow, Jonathan “Lank” Conner, C.a. Shofed, Habiyb Ali Shu’Aib, Jeff Stewart, Qaysean Williams, Khalilah Sabree, Tamara Torres, Eric Schultz and Passage Theatre.
The exhibition confronts the innumerable ways that different forms of racism marginalize, hide and exclude entire communities; thusly making them invisible. It seeks to offer a means and an aesthetic vocabulary for countering this racism.
Moving beyond the assumption that so-called “inner” cities are not sites of creativity, the artist’s present works generally remains unseen. Not yet overwritten by gentrification, Trenton, as one of Philadelphia’s “sister” cities, offers a chance to rethink the kinds of artistic placeholding that can resist the overwriting of a city by unrestrained development.
From the outside, a city like Trenton is largely hidden, illegible and even cryptic to its neighbors. In many ways, it presents itself as a kind of crypt: sealed off, unknown, protecting those outside it from those within. But from within the city, these artworks create a record of what is invisible, what might have been forgotten, what was important, and will be again.
They form a collective archive that preserves conditions of deprivation and trauma that may be formative; they also enclose and protect initiatives that resist the endless, recurring narrative of the inner, cryptic city as nothing more than a site of trauma. Each of the works in Art and the Invisible City imagines the shape of the city to come, a place of potential and possibility, not yet commodified in the atmosphere of gentrified neighborhoods, no longer constrained within the imaginary city policed by those who live close to but not in it.
For more on this show and Slought, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, their programs are presented in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, see: https://slought.org.