Project Overview
The Friends of the Tanner House (FOTH) and its project partners are leading an arts-rich participatory planning and preservation visioning process that invites community voices to provide input into the rehabilitation and proposed re-use of the Henry Ossawa Tanner House. This project centers the specific ways Black folks have shaped Philadelphia. The FOTH intends to grow and sustain a transformative community cultural platform for and by the heart, hands, and imagination of Black folk’s everyday lives.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, FOTH, Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS), and local partners will create a community-centered platform for a collective vision for the Tanner House. FOTH will assemble a cohort of Philadelphia cultural workers and community partners to participate in the art-centered participatory planning process, emphasizing design justice principles and community-centered inquiries in its execution. FOTH and partners plan to host five (5) artist-led creative community events around Tanner family themes and additional community workshop sessions (estimated for early 2024) that are more directly tied to larger preservation outcome goals informed by the neighborhood engagement process.
Our Inspiration from June Jordan:
FOTH has drawn inspiration from poet and activist June Jordan’s process for a Harlem housing and community redesign project in the 1960s. As a way of eliciting community opinion, she asked: “What kind of schools and what kind of streets and what kind of parks and what kind of privacy and what kind of beauty and what kind of music and what kind of options would make love a reasonable, easy response?” We’ve remixed this insightful inquiry to reflect our contemporary desires for community cultural organizing in North Philadelphia:
“What kind of community invitations (to collectively gather) and what kind of heritage preservation practices (to collectively reflect) and what kind of educational spaces (to collectively study) and what kind of healing narratives (to collectively spread) and what kind of beautiful experiments (to collectively organize) make love an easy, reasonable public response?”
A year-long joint effort between The Friends of the Tanner House & The Center for Preservation of Civil Rights Sites to uplift the Henry Ossawa Tanner House
Artist Partnership Event Series
Friends of the Tanner House partners with a local artist to lead a series of multigenerational, interactive, arts and culture activities that uplift Tanner family legacies, spread awareness of our preservation goals, and invite rich community wisdom to inform the ongoing revitalization of the Tanner House.
Community Collaboration Event Series
With the Friends of the Tanner House Community Partner Network, supports collaborations from community-centered groups, organizations, and collectives across themes of faith, family, freedom, health, arts, and education in the 19121 + 19132 zip codes for expanding the vision of Tanner House programming.
Design & Preservation Workshop Series
A community-based workshop series led by Architecture, Design, and Preservation professionals exploring concepts, ideas, and experiments to further Black heritage preservation in the region and deepen a preservation philosophy and design approach for the Tanner House.