Barnes West Announces Artists Selected for Fourth Annual Everyday Places Artist Partnerships
Four West Philadelphia–based artists to create participatory activations engaging community members and local businesses
Philadelphia, PA, June 26, 2024—Barnes West, a collaboration between the Barnes Foundation and community organizations in West Philadelphia, has announced the four West Philadelphia–based social-impact artists selected to participate in its fourth annual Everyday Places Artist Partnerships initiative: Irene Osorio, Lori Waselchuk, and Qiaira Riley & Yannick Lowery, who are participating as a pair.
Barnes West is supported by the William Penn Foundation, PECO, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Spark Therapeutics, Inc.
Barnes West conceived Everyday Places Artist Partnerships in 2021 to provide West Philadelphia residents with spaces to engage with multidisciplinary artistic projects offering inspiration and promoting hope and healing. This year’s cohort of artists will again partner with “everyday” locations in the neighborhood—including local businesses and community organizations—to build interactive, participatory projects that engage with the site and residents. The projects will begin rolling out in July and continue through September. At a launch event on June 28, the community will be able to meet the artists and learn more about their projects. More details will be announced on social media.
“We’re excited to present the fourth annual Everyday Places Artist Partnerships with a new roster of four talented artists, Irene Osorio, Lori Waselchuk, and Qiaira Riley and Yannick Lowery,” says James Claiborne, deputy director for community engagement at the Barnes. “This initiative builds on the Barnes’s historical connections to West Philadelphia, where Dr. Barnes first introduced his method of art appreciation as a vehicle for critical thinking and civic engagement to his factory workforce. The Everyday Places Artist Partnerships initiative was conceived to create space for West Philly residents to engage in community building through creative expression and art making right in their own neighborhood. This year’s projects have the shared goal of connecting people through art.”
The 2024 Everyday Places Artist Partnerships include:
Irene Osorio at Dyke+ ArtHaus
Throughout summer 2024, artist and graphic designer Irene Osorio will lead a series of sustainability-focused workshops at Dyke+ ArtHaus. These workshops will allow community members to drop in with clothing, fabrics, and other items they want to fix or restore. Osorio sees fabric mending and repair as a way of extending the lives of garments that hold personal and family meaning, which are often passed down for generations. “Fabric wears, seams fray, and bodies change,” Osorio says. “Yet our desire to stay connected to the clothing that holds so much meaning to personal and family traditions persists.”
Lori Waselchuk at Writers Room
Building upon her existing community-centered project “Them That Do,” photographer and educator Lori Waselchuk will partner with Drexel’s Writers Room to organize and facilitate community workshops and a photo walk that highlights neighborhood leaders, amplifies local knowledge, and documents community-building. Waselchuk describes “Them That Do” as a multimedia project that “challenges ideas about cultural production by supporting people to become producers of art.” As an Everyday Places Artist Partnerships artist, she will explore hyperlocal mutual aid projects and work alongside community organizers to document ongoing grassroots efforts in West Philadelphia to bring about social change.
Qiaira Riley & Yannick Lowery at The Arts League
Multidisciplinary artists Qiaira Riley and Yannick Lowery join Everyday Places Artist Partnerships as an artist collective, using their respective practices to provide a series of workshops titled “Shaking the Table” at The Arts League. These interdisciplinary workshops and community meals will explore the collective and personal relationships people have with Black ephemera and popular culture through art making and food. The series is designed around questions like: How can Black folks, especially Black femmes, rectify and reclaim narratives about themselves found in popular culture? What do these depictions and our fascination with them reveal to us about our ideas around gender, beauty identity, and community? Riley and Lowery hope to highlight and honor Black food traditions by using communal cooking and eating as a medium that encourages care, vulnerability, and storytelling.
Further details about all projects and locations are available online.
The 2024 artists were selected by the Barnes West leadership team and participating neighborhood sites. Each artist will receive a stipend and an Art for All Community Pass, which provides one year of unlimited admission to the Barnes for up to four people.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Irene Osorio
Irene Osorio (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer with a focus on visual communication in a variety of media including print, digital, and fabric designs. She grew up in Bogotá, Colombia where she cultivated her curiosity for making things with readily-available materials from a young age. Her formal training includes a BA in graphic design in her native Colombia and a master’s in visual design from the Polytechnic School of Design in Milan. Since 2017, Irene has lived in Philadelphia and worked as a freelance designer and an active community member sharing her passion for designing, tailoring, and mending clothes while helping people preserve treasured garments and fabrics that hold unique personal and family meanings. Irene also is a language justice worker and one of the creators of Compa, Language Justice Cooperative. She is also a member of the collective Voces Latinoamericanas, a Philadelphia-based gathering of immigrants from Latin America who shared their love for literature, poetry and storytelling.
Lori Waselchuk
Lori Waselchuk (she/her) is a documentary photographer whose work explores the lived experiences of human beings and the systems we inhabit, contest, and construct. Her photographs have been published and exhibited internationally. Waselchuk also curates and coordinates projects that prioritize creative engagement and social change, including the Women’s Mobile Museum, co-created with South African photographer Zanele Muholi, and Grace Before Dying, a collaboration with incarcerated hospice caregivers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Waselchuk has received numerous honors for her work, including an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photography Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a Leeway Foundation Transformation Award.
Yannick Lowery
Yannick Lowery (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia, PA. Inspired by the cultural dynamism of his native New York and present hometown, his work explores the creations of illustrated proverbs, portents and historical souvenirs to guide the viewer through cultural introspection and responsible, imaginative perpetuation. He parallels archival imagery and his own photography to employ world-creation and compile instigative and investigative way-making devices through collage, animation, and sculptural works. Ultimately, his works are allegorical tools for his true medium: the robust ecosystem of community that inspires him becomes central imagery for his work and participates in the concepts that inform his oeuvre.
Qiaira Riley
Qiaira Riley (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker born in Chicago and based in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in socially engaged studio art from Moore College of Art & Design. Riley is a founding member of 2.0, a Philadelphia-based collective that curates free experimental offerings for Black femmes and women. Her 2021 zine, “How Tiffany Pollard Built the Internet: Representations of Simulacra, Virtuality, and Black Women and Femmes on the Internet and Its Art,” is a part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s book collection. Riley also hosts “Something You Can Feel,” a podcast about Black art history. Her creative practice shifts between painting, ceramics, artist books, video, and alternative photography and transfer techniques. Her work is influenced by the visual language of Chicago’s South Side, Black vernacular interiors, and reality television.
ABOUT BARNES WEST
Serving West Philadelphia with artistic programming and opportunities since 2018, Barnes West—a collaboration between the Barnes Foundation and neighborhood community organizations—is designed to enrich lives and communities through shared art experiences and access. Building upon the Barnes’s previous community engagement work with HopePHL’s (formerly, People’s Emergency Center) LoLa 38 creative placemaking initiative, Barnes West presents multifaceted arts programming to connect West Philadelphia residents with art in their own neighborhoods. This collaboration brings West Philadelphia residents, business owners, and artists together in celebrating culture, creativity, and community voice—highlighting lifelong appreciation of, and participation in, the arts and cultural life of our city.
SPONSORS
Barnes West is supported by the William Penn Foundation, PECO, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Spark Therapeutics, Inc. Lead support for community engagement and family programs at the Barnes is provided through the Comcast Center for Community Engagement at the Barnes. Generous endowment support for community engagement programs is provided by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), and additional annual support for these programs comes from generous individual, corporate, and foundation donors.
ABOUT THE BARNES FOUNDATION
The Barnes Foundation is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution that shares its unparalleled art collection with the public, organizes special exhibitions, and presents programming that fosters new ways of thinking about human creativity. The Barnes collection is displayed in ensembles that integrate art and objects from across cultures and time periods, overturning traditional hierarchies and revealing universal elements of human expression. Home to one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings—including the largest groups of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne in existence—the Barnes brings together renowned canvases by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Vincent van Gogh, alongside African, Asian, ancient, medieval, and Native American art as well as metalwork, furniture, and decorative art.
The Barnes Foundation was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” A visionary collector and pioneering educator, Dr. Barnes was also a fierce advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, women, and the economically marginalized. Committed to racial equality and social justice, he established a scholarship program to support young Black artists, writers, and musicians to further their education. Dr. Barnes became actively involved in the Harlem Renaissance, during which he collaborated with philosopher Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, the scholar and activist, to promote awareness of the artistic value of African art.
Since moving to Philadelphia in 2012, the Barnes Foundation has expanded its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice, teaching visual literacy in groundbreaking ways; investing in original scholarship relating to its collection; and enhancing accessibility throughout every facet of its programs.
The Barnes Foundation is situated in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. Read our Land Acknowledgment.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Deirdre Maher, Director of Communications, The Barnes Foundation
215.278.7160, press@barnesfoundation.org
Online press office: barnesfoundation.org/press