In a Ghost School, A Community Comes Alive
By Tina Smith-Brown
Late last summer I spent the evening in one of my elementary school classrooms. I had first walked through the gates of the newly built Fairhill Elementary 50 years ago, at the kindergarten age of four. A lot had changed. Voices and faces of my past mingled with the present, creating both a pathway and a destination. There was aliveness in the preservation, filled with math and science and English and gym — all glued, pasted, molded, welded, painted, sculpted, sliced, designed, sewn and stitched. And then, an abrupt ending. Every piece of the exhibit was from the closed-down school. A community that was splintered yet rebuilt.
Fairhill Elementary, another hapless victim of the SRC’s ruling to close 24 public schools in 2013, had remained empty for more than three years. Its hallways are haunted not only by the imaginary “Green Lady” whose shadowy job was to terrify five-year olds on a trip to the bathroom, but also by the ghosts of students, staff, and the school administration. Once in a while, but less and less as the years passed and memories waned, the occasional “I dare you to go inside” visitor echoed in its hallways, but mostly only dust and community heartbreak remained. That is until Temple University Contemporary commissioned famed Philadelphia artist Pepón Osorio to create an installation specifically addressing the loss of the Fairhill Elementary School in North Philadelphia, not far from the university. From this commission, reForm was born.
On exhibit at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, reForm not only celebrated the thousands of students and teachers who have passed through the Fairhill School, and/or lived in the community surrounding it, but it emboldened the human spirit.
So often our question of safety arises after an event that has generated a sense of fear and bewilderment. We are motivated by these feelings to seek a solution, a place of calm, a sense of reconciliation. That is exactly what Temple University and Osorio created by transporting Fairhill Elementary into a single classroom, bringing back to life a floundering community.
The project started like every project, with an idea. That idea invited a community. From that community a relationship between artist and 10 specially chosen students blossomed and the concept of safety left the intangible realm of possibility and entered into rock hard solid reality. An uncaring decision, a closed school, a community crushed, and the miracle of rebirth. That was ReForm, an exhibit that celebrated the ability of mankind to re-invent wholeness from where there was only a hole.
Tina Smith-Brown is the author of Fish and Grits and Letter to My Father: daughters to daddies, and creator of the Letter to My Father curriculum.
