The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation 2024 Project Grant

Flow

The Netter Center for Community Partnerships and Shelley Spector are collaborating on a community-engagement public art project that works with the Andrew Hamilton School’s art, science and garden programs. Spector is an interdisciplinary artist who works with underutilized materials to produce project-specific bodies of work. The Andrew Hamilton School, located two miles West of Penn’s campus, is a K-8 school and one of the Netter Center’s university assisted community schools. This grant provides support for a year-long first phase of a two-phase project. It will include hands-on workshops for Hamilton students with themes such as sustainable building, hydrology, waste management, decomposition, siphons and similar devices, forces of nature such as gravity, and kinetics. This will result in a collaborative final design based on collective input and experimentation. This phase of research and collaboration with the teachers and students of the Hamilton school will be documented to help raise money to build and install a permanent piece for the garden.

before the hill
The Mildred Complex(ity)

before the hill is a gathering of works by Shelley Spector, a multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia and Dingmans Ferry, PA. In this show, her first in six years, she presents a selection of sculptures and installations made between 2007 and 2016 exploring themes common in her work that include time, systems of measurement, the environment, and human connection. In the years since she made these works, Spector has been deeply engaged in the deconstruction and reconstruction of a cabin property in the Pennsylvania mountains, working it into a sculpture, a future studio, and a site for interdisciplinary, creative and environment-focused practice. The cabin, it’s outbuildings (a shed and outhouse) and surrounding property are The Nowadays—a developing sculptural ecosystem made from underutilized and discarded resources. The project is inspired by excess, need, and the effects of human impact on our natural world.

Included in before the hill are works made with fabric and wood acquired through the deconstruction of clothing, furniture, and other discarded and collected objects that employ sewing, woodwork, and home-making techniques. In varied forms such as wallpaper, embroideries, and a motorized sculpture, this presentation of work is a reflective launch point for new work to be made in the soon-to-be-completed cabin studio.

Spector’s work is part of many public and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which presented her solo exhibition Keep The Home Fires Burning, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. Spector has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Leeway Foundation. 

37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY 12764

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mildredslane@gmail.com or 413-652-1838

Wood For Wooder

Six prints from the Five and a Half By Forty (inches) series are available for a special price till 9/30/22. They will support the costs of bringing a waterline into The Nowadays cabin, an environment focused studio/project that Spector is reconstructing in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The addition of running water is key to kickstart the sculptural ecosystem that is from and devoted to keeping in use, underutilized and discarded resources. 

The cabin and the objects in the six prints are all made from wood. This link will take you to more information about the project, Wood For Wooder. Thank you!