“I’ve been working with immigrant populations for 10 years now, and they are so ready to talk about it. It doesn’t matter what age group you belong to. It’s like being invisible most of the time, yet you have a story–a very important story–to say, to talk about. So once you open that door, it comes right out.”
–Nora Litz

FringeArts has had the opportunity to meet and hear about the amazing work that many different people and organizations in Philadelphia are doing to support their neighbors. On the latest Happy Hour on the Fringe, our hosts sit down with members of two organizations dedicated to improving the lives of Latinx men, women, and children living in Philadelphia.

Nora Litz with a young artist

Located in South Philly, Puentes de Salud (Bridges of Health) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that promotes the health and wellness of Philadelphia’s rapidly growing Latino immigrant population through a wide variety of programs. Their services range from providing high-quality and culturally competent healthcare, innovative educational programs that support young children through adults, legal support and community building, and the organization supports community members regardless of immigration status, race, and class. Nora Litz, as Director of Arts and Culture, guides children, adolescents, and adults as they use mixed media to recount their own personal immigration stories. The artists’ work has culminated in projects such as Las ligas que nos unen (“The Ties that Bind Us), which tells the stories of children from Puebla, San Lucas Atzala, San Andrés Calpan, and San Mateo Ozolco whose parents left them in order to find work in the U.S. and El viaje de los niños (“The Children’s Journey”), which was brought to FringeArts this November and tells the stories of Mexican immigrant children who have crossed the border to come live in Philadelphia. Although, Nora does not consider her work “art therapy,” it’s undeniable the overwhelmingly powerful effect telling their own stories through art have had on the participants. She lets us in on the process behind Salud de Puentes’ beautiful and meaningful projects.

“They see it [the LGBTQ community] as entertainment and forget that the entertainers you see go home at the end of the day. They don’t go home as this person. They’ve had coming out stories. Some of them have been homeless. Some of them have been in hiding. Some of them look for acceptance. Everybody. All of us look for acceptance because it’s not always given…They have to go other places to find acceptance. That’s exactly where this scene that everybody loves so much, that everybody is so interested in comes from.” – Tori Gillis

Dating back to the early 1900s, balls and ball culture came to prominence between the 1960s and 1980s as largely Black and Latino LGBT youth in New York used it as a place and way to express their creativity and build community and family. The culture remains alive and well in its birthplace of course, but has spread to cities across the country including Philadelphia and world. With the popularity of documentaries like Paris is Burning (1990) and television shows such as My House and Pose, more and more people have fallen in love with the art of voguing and ballroom.

Everybody has a story, and First Person Arts Festival is back with a line up of personal stories that will make you laugh, cry, and reflect as well as workshops to empower you to tell your own. Jamie J. Brunson stopped by our podcast, Happy Hour on the Fringe, to give us a preview of this year’s Festival and an inside look into what the Festival seeks to represent.  FringeArts is excited to be partnering with First Person Arts to bring several shows to our own stage including:

Felonious Monk

Wed, Nov 7 to Fri, Nov 9

You may have seen Felonious Munk as the “resident blegghead” on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, but now Felonious Munk has updated his smash-hit Second City performance and is bringing it to the First Person Arts stage. This is a hilarious yet harrowing first-person story of how one black man went from six years in a state prison to a six-figure job in corporate America. Felonious then transitions to a new life as an activist and satirist in his one-man show debuting at the First Person Arts Festival.

Within the last twenty years, technology has changed every facet of our lives, and art has not been immune to the technological revolution. The computer and internet have given rise to an entirely new medium with which artists, whether they self-identify as one or not, can experiment and play.

In Philadelphia, the digital art community may still be a bit “underground”—some people may say non-existent multimedia artist and founder of CRUXspace Andrew Zahn notes, but they would be mistaken. The community of people using technology creatively is growing, and three very different institutions are at the center of that growth: CRUXspace, FringeArts, and Philly Game Mechanics.

Many galleries, like Philly’s Vox Populi, show digital and multimedia art, but few are dedicated solely to the medium. Bitforms in Manhattan comes to mind, but a comparable space does not exist in Philadelphia. Enter Andrew Cameron Zahn. Zahn, who started experimenting with online art and design applications like Photoshop and Quark as a kid, sought to fill that void with his new media art gallery CRUXspace in 2014. Growing out of art exhibitions for “hackers” that he organized as a student at the University of the Arts, CRUXspace found its first home at 7th and Master in Ludlow. Andrew and lead curator Kim Brickley have collaborated with the likes of Mural Arts, University of the Arts and FringeArts and have presented artists such as G. H. Hovagimyan and Molly Soda. Earlier this year CRUXspace moved out of its original location and found a new home at the WeWork in Northern Liberties, but its purpose, to provide a space for creators experimenting with technology in art and design has moved with it. In its new space, CRUXspace will be presenting a new exhibition featuring the digital media artists Swoon, who makes use of stop-motion animation, installation, and video techniques and Eric Westray, who employs cutting-edge 3D modeling techniques to bring to life impossible humans and environments. The Swoon/Westray exhibition opens October 26.

Past CRUXspace collaborator FringeArts seeks to provide digital artists with a platform of their own as well but in a very different way. FringeArts has maintained a mission “to present world-class, contemporary performing arts that challenge convention and inspire new ways of thinking” for decades. In 2015, the organization’s Fringe Festival was already 19 years old, but the team recognized that much of the art that aligned so perfectly with their mission was being created digitally but not presented nor seen. With about 15 digital art pieces, FringeArts launched its first Digital Fringe, a platform that allows audience members to experience the work of digital and multimedia artists for free, as part of the annual festival.  Three years later, Digital Fringe has grown to 26 pieces with an additional two digital works, R&J and SPIES!, featured in the traditional Fringe Festival. Digital Fringe artists provide a URL or another method (app, text message, etc.) to access their technologic creation on the FringeArts website and in the Festival Guide. This year, you were able to cook with drag queens, outsmart the undead, and escape-the-room (chatroom that is).