Black Like That: Our Lives As Living Praxis (2024)

August 30-December 7

Temple Contemporary, the Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s center for exhibitions and public programs, opened its Fall 2024 exhibition season with the exhibition Black Like That: Our Lives As Living Praxis, a multi-site exhibition that explored the nature of the archive as a living praxis within a Black cultural context. The exhibition, anchored at Temple Contemporary and the Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, included off-site presentations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods central to Black history and Black life in the city: North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia and Germantown.

Funded with a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the exhibition was accompanied by a public program series that articulates the nature of contemporary Black life across multiple sites in Philadelphia and a digital platform that will serve as an interactive map and living archive. Read more about the exhibition and accompanying events.

Seed Packet Project (2022)

Over the course of the past year, Temple Contemporary's graduate assistants collaborated with five local artists to design seed packet illustrations for five different varieties of flowers and herbs sourced from TrueLove Seeds. The five species chosen are Bee Balm, Bronze Fennel, Hopi Dye Sunflower, Feathery Plume Celosia, and Mexican Sunflower, which were picked for their beauty and ease of growing. Truelove Seeds is a farm-based seed company offering culturally important and open pollinated vegetable, herb, and flower seeds grown by more than 50 small-scale farmers committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture.

Click here to read more.