Andrew Christman, Veronica Bowlan & Morris Jones

Andrew Christman has over twenty years experience as a museum educator, teaching artist and public school teacher in Philadelphia and New York. Veronica Bowlan uses poetry and writing to treat trauma in prisons, rehabilitation centers and psycho-therapeutic communities. She has hosted Poetry Night at the Mermaid Inn in Chestnut Hill for over a decade. Morris Jones is a visual artist, educator, muralist and community organizer. Way of Words is a collaboration between poet Bowlan and visual artists Jones and Christman. All three have been associated with Herman Street Studios in Germantown, Philadelphia.

Way of Words has engaged diverse audiences in public spaces throughout Philadelphia since 2015, facilitating the creation of spontaneous collage art and poetry through the use of large scale "community" accordion style books. During each residency or event, bystanders, passers-by and groups formed in varying degrees of randomness to contribute to a book by cutting writing, drawing, pasting and arranging words and images presented as operations of chance by poet Veronica Bowlan and visual artists Andrew Christman and Morris Jones. The ongoing process often takes on the characteristics of a performative spectacle drawing in curious viewers. At the end of each residency the completed book is read accompanied by a musical performance.

In 2018's Art in the Open residency, our books and installations have expanded their focus beyond Art, Memory and Nature. We have intentionally created new art activities, fun frameworks for community dialogue, creative writing and research so that the subjects of each book are more authentically generated / determined by participants. Rather than simply providing materials, images and pre-collected words for playful use in operations of chance, we aim to encourage participants to seek their own words in song lyrics and poetry they know by heart or are inspired to write in the moment, stories they tell each other, architectural drawings, polaroid photographs, etc. 

We have found the outcomes of this new approach to be a more surprising, diverse, dynamic, challenging and rewarding. The collective ownership of these books and projects are emphatic, celebratory and at times healing documents of a moment shared in community. 

Way of Words proposes to once again engage the public by producing a panel accordion book in the open. However, this time we would like to produce lighter, more portable cardboard panels that can be carried away from our table and taken to be worked on along the river trail if participants wish. Prompts and examples will encourage visitors to our table to find a spot immediately surrounding the table or further down the trail. Participants may work on the panels individually or in groups to draw, write and collage at their leisure. We will encourage them to come back to the table to share and add the panel to the community book before we leave each day. There will be a station for display and installation and book construction at the table, which will act as a studio "home-base." We hope to conclude each day with a reading of the book and musical accompaniment. 

If participants wish to use a panel as a "make and take" project, this is also OK. We will make efforts to document and include as many shared panels as possible. 

We will choose a loose theme prior to the Art in the Open weekend through a process by which we will ask folks on the trail what the river, or the path "means to them" or ask them to share their reflections about the space and its environment. The prompts used to inspire work on the panels will encourage more personal reflections and observations. 

We hope that our table / station / installation will have the feeling of a hive where folks are bringing back their collected and created reflections and contributing them to build our poem / book. We will post the completed book and documentation of the process on our website as we did for AiO in 2018.