How do you define care? What systems of care do you enact? What communities do you feel supported by?
Last summer, Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy. Located on Broad Street between Vine and Race, this Center City teaching hospital had become a care safety net for those in need. Many of its patients were below the poverty line, on Medicaid, unhomed or uninsured.
On September 6, 2019, after 171 years of practice, the doors to the hospital closed forever. In the wake of that event, I spent a great amount of time thinking about community care and the life span of such work. As a patient affected by the closure, and as an artist whose practice often explores disruptions to health and wellness, the news was of particular concern. Although indirectly related to the closure, the collaborative Moore-based project Levels of Care: Micro, Medium, Macro project became a way to process this news, acting as an investigation into the concept of care through the use of art, curation and organizing.
A SERIES OF EVENTS
A weeklong series of happenings, Levels of Care sought to reevaluate what we view to be an action of care or community maintenance. The project was a convergence of workshops, performances, mindful practices and digital communications. Its audience was a mixture of Moore students, staff, faculty, and local community members who all gathered together once a day. Together, we meditated, stretched, made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and sat in telephone booths, all in investigations of how we enact care for ourselves and others. Our experiences were registered in a curatorial booklet of the same name that documented our inquiries.
Care is a complex word. What it is and how it’s enacted varies by who you ask. An act of care can be interpersonal or intrapersonal, meaning that one can care for others as well as for oneself. Such a topic has become buzz worthy as of late, with a variety of people weighing in on the nature of care in the contemporary world. Phrases such as self care and holding space are often associated with mental health and community or social practice. But what do these words really mean and how can they be applied to the arts?
The etymology of the word curate comes from the word Latin cura, which means care. Synchronistically enough, I happened to be enrolled in Curatorial Studio, a course that explores the use of curatorial practice as an art form, when Hahnemann’s operations shut down. The semester’s class was a crossover of graduate and undergraduate students: MFA candidates Sara Kleinert and myself; and BFA students Deanna Emmons and Courtney Warren, all of whom had a personal practice that involved care in some way. I had already been planning some form of wellness skills workshop with the staff counselors and MA graduate Kristen Shahverdian when it was made known to me that the course required students to create and then manage the planning of an event. As all of our practices had this overlapping topic in common, it felt natural to combine efforts to create a piece of programming that would enact community care as an event. In the true spirit of community collaboration, we each shaped the project, merging our interests into a week of events that covered how care is performed personally, communally and systematically.
AN ACT OF CARE
Without the project’s content being directly linked to Hahnemann’s close, its ghost still hung over me, contextualizing my motivations for the work. Throughout the semester, the Curatorial Studio class delved into various notable projects, durational and temporary, that affected the art of curating and left their marks in the art world. Our cohort felt motivated to examine the lifespan of the project past its week of happenings. The curatorial booklet was our solution to this inquiry.
Within it, we placed an editorial essay that summarized the work. It tracked the wellness workshop, which taught skills for care that can be enacted without money or equipment; a performative group exercise led by Emmons that examined the daily maintenance of care through making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; the meditative space Kleinert created in the Sarah Peter second floor empty telephone booth; as well as the Instagram account spearheaded by Warren, which housed documentation photos and fliers for the various forms of programmings.
The booklet also detailed the trajectory that the Curatorial Studio class had taken, including the plethora of curators, artists and organizers that we met throughout the semester, all of whom contributed to our outlook on art and curatorial practice as caring for communities. It was assembled as a group with the help of Graphic Design Professor Gigi McGee and Graduate Program Director and Curatorial Studio Professor Daniel Tucker. Then it was distributed to interested parties, whether it was someone who had shaped the project, the Curatorial Studio class, or those involved with care in some way on the Moore campus.
Care is a complicated word. It holds within it both a necessity as well as a complexity; the sites of helpfulness as well as sites of lack; simple interpersonal and intrapersonal gestures of care as well as complex structures that dictate who is cared for, how they are cared for, and where gaps of care exist. The booklet was an act of care as much as the other programming events. It registered how those here at Moore care for ourselves, for one another, for the larger community surrounding the school, as well as how systems shape the nature of care within these communities. By documenting our experiences, we hope to further the conversations around this topic.
The Levels of Care: Micro, Medium, Macro curatorial booklet is currently being processed as a new addition to Connelly Library and will be available to view in the near future.
