Community Events

Community art and reflection are at the heart of Fragments. Our workshops, gatherings, and informal art jams are hands-on, interactive sessions. Participants are invited to create with the broken glass—composing designs, writing reflections, or experimenting with various artistic techniques. These expressions take many forms: cyanotype prints created under the sun; glass textures projected onto human bodies; ephemeral installations photographed and filmed; and meditative compositions made from glass, light, and shadow. Through these shared practices, the project weaves together diverse creative approaches into a unified meditation on care, beauty, and repair.

The first gathering took place in Rittenhouse Square on May 30, 2023—the three-year anniversary of the fire that destroyed three buildings on the 1700 block of Walnut Street, where much of the glass was collected. Since then, participants of all ages and backgrounds have contributed to the evolving body of work, taking part in printing, projection, and design sessions across the city.

Originally named Mending Together, the project drew inspiration from Yoko Ono’s 1966 work Mend Piece, which reimagines the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken ceramics are repaired with gold, emphasizing rather than hiding their cracks. Ono proposes communal mending using ordinary materials — tape, twine, glue – as an act of healing. Like Kintsugi, and Ono’s conceptual art, Fragments embraces the world view of Wabi-sabi, centered on the acceptance of transience, incompleteness, and imperfection. In Fragments community art events, the limited quantity of surviving shattered glass, born of this particular moment and carrying its own indelible history, remains tactile and infinitely reconfigurable and the mending takes place in a sphere determined by each one of us. 

As Fragments continues to grow, we plan to exhibit the resulting works — images, prints, and installations — in gallery spaces, extending the conversation and honoring the community that has shaped it.