Jacob (Video Detail of the Installation reForm)
Artist: Pepón Osorio
Category: Video Detail of Installation
Location: Cicala at the Divine Lorraine, 699 N. Broad St
Date & Time: Thursday July 24th - Sunday, August 3rd
Pepón Osorio will present, Jacob (2 minutes 9 seconds; loop) a site specific video detail of reForm (2015), which is based on a real-life experience by a student who participated in the project.
reForm (2015) is an exhibition and community project that became a testimony of collective frustration experienced by many after the abrupt closing of Fairhill Elementary School. As a participatory project, the artist Pepón Osorio with students, teachers, parents, and administrators of the Fairhill community placed chalkboards, desks, chairs and mementos left behind by the Philadelphia School District onto the bed of a truck and moved these items into Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture where they repurposed a university classroom with the relocated material. The exhibition intended to kick off a whole new wave of community gatherings on the subject of the closing of Fairhill Elementary. The video, titled Jacob, is a detail of the exhibition and a provocative reflection of a student writing on an actual Fairhill Elementary school blackboard, concerned with the after-effects of this educational epidemic.
Cultural Workers
Pepón Osorio
Best known for his large-scale installations, Pepón Osorio merges conceptual art and community dynamics. Osorio’s work emphasizes the exhibition space as an intermediary between the social architecture of communities and the mainstream art world. He has worked with well over 25 communities across the U.S. and internationally, creating installations based on real life experiences. For almost three decades Pepón Osorio has been presenting work in unconventional places prior to exhibiting in a museum setting, thus exploring the subjectivity of meaning in art and the multiple meanings that these installations achieve depending on their location. Osorio is Carnell Professor at the Tyler School of the Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. His work has been exhibited in El Museo del Barrio, New York (a retrospective); 1993 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela; Africus Institute for Contemporary Art, Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Santurce, PR; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Santurce, PR.; PS1, NYC; Menil Collection, Houston Texas; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, Bienal de Cuba, Habana, Cuba; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia PA.; the 27th. Sao Paulo Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art in NYC, New Museum in New York City, and storefronts, department stores and homes in many locations throughout the world. Osorio is the recipient of numerous distinctions including the 2001 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, an Alpert Award in the Arts-Visual Arts, 1999; and a John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2018 United States Artists Fellowship and 2022 Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures Artists Fellowship among others.