Rittenhouse Square for the 3-Year Anniversary of the Riots
May 2023
We got together in Rittenhouse Square at the heart of Philadelphia with some friends—Laura Meirson, Mary-Angela Papalaskari, and Quynh Woodward—to launch the Mending Together community art project, now called Fragments, on the three-year anniversary of the day when several buildings on Walnut Street burned down—the source of our glass shards. It was a way to remember that difficult time for our city, but also to relive the hope and positive energy of the George Floyd demonstrations in the summer of 2020.
We made prints from arrangements of the glass and learned a lot from the experience! We discovered that printing with colored glass wasn’t the most practical approach for a community art project—aside from being messy, it obscured the translucency and beauty we saw in the glass. More importantly, we learned so much through our conversations with passersby—both regulars and visitors to the park.
