Today from our friends at Pelican Bomb, we bring you Meredith Sellers’ article examining reForm, Pepón Osorio’s installation project at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Sellers discusses reForm critically in the larger political context of Philadelphia school closures. She states, “The reForm project […] aims to create much-needed public discussion around the fate of the Philadelphia school system and to be a potential catalyst for change. But a classroom, tucked down a labyrinthian hall, inside a building on a university campus hardly feels public.” This article was originally published on October 2nd, 2015.
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Pepón Osorio. reForm, 2015; installation view, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Photo: Constance Mensh.
After about ten minutes of wandering around Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, I saw students emerging from a hallway. No one had been able to tell me the room number or exact location of the classroom where reForm, artist Pepón Osorio’s newest installation project for Temple Contemporary, was located. I slipped past a pair of double doors and had started walking down the hall when I realized I was already inside the work. Brightly colored backpacks hang from a row of wooden cubbies with sneakers, jackets, and stuffed animals stashed inside them. Photos of empty hallways, scattered file folders, and a recent student reunion party are embedded within clunky frames into a false cinderblock wall behind the cubbies. A sullen looking taxidermied bobcat is perched on a massive pile of books inside an antique vitrine.
I turned the corner and entered a classroom. The main exhibition takes place in one of Tyler’s art history rooms, which, the wall text informed me, will continue to be used through the duration of the exhibition. Over a chorus of children’s recorded voices the gallery attendant asked me to sign in the guestbook. The children are speaking about their now-closed school, Fairhill Elementary, from video screens attached onto oversized pencils decorated with chock-a-block assemblages of mirrors, tchotchkes, and loudspeakers. The assemblages are peppered with plastic figurines holding miniature protest signs saying “The Kids,” “SOS,” and “Fight Hite!” The ten young people on the video screens, mostly graduates of Fairhill, form what the project calls the Bobcats Collective, after their former school’s mascot. The students chant lines from a poem one of them wrote, “This time when we speak, you listen,” and, “Jail or dead, dead or jail.”
The students’ concerns are real, yet the classroom installation is filled with cloying surrealistic interventions, like a fake tree sprouting out of a sink and backpacks suspended from the wildly patterned ceiling. There are random assortments of artifacts salvaged from the school—piles of books stacked haphazardly against a wall, teacher’s mailboxes, and a nurse’s vinyl couch that stands in front of a wall with a chalk rendering of Superintendent William Hite’s letter informing parents of Fairhill’s closure. The walls of the room are lined with blown-up prints of essays the students wrote about their feelings on the school’s closure, marked with paternalistic red ink corrections. After a couple minutes the children’s protestations loop and repeat, and by the time I’m leaving the installation, they’ve started to grate.
