Opened August 25, 2017

With 24 artists from Philadelphia to Brazil and lasting over a year, Nuestro Tema: Llamada y Respuesta (Our Theme: Call and Response), looks at Taller’s community through a sample of its art collection. The works in the collection are the “Call” invoked in the title. In turn, Taller invites outside artists to respond to the work as well as encourages the community to comment – the “Response.”

The third group of artist in this exhibition features work by photographers and fabric artists that explore identity, place, and community in their work.

About the Invited Artists

Heather Raquel Phillips is a mixed race, multi-media artist working in performance, video, text, and photography. As a Philadelphia native & resident, she creates her work with a tight-knit community of friends to develop intimate works & visibility for her subjects. Phillips received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is the recipient of the prestigious Toby Devon Lewis Fellowship, as well as the Stuart Egnal Scholarship Award. She has recently shown work at Mama Gallery, LA, the Ice Box Project Space and Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia and BLAM Gallery In Brooklyn, NY. She is currently lecturing at The University of Pennsylvania and Ms. Philadelphia Leather 2017.

Tim Gibbon is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator. His teaching and studio practices are rooted inthe collaborative production of socially engaged public artwork, in a variety of mediums. Tim holds a MEd from Tyler School of Art, and currently works as Director of PCCY’s Picasso Project.

Melissa Skolnick-Noguera is a multimedia artist, writer, and producer who advocates for social justice and human rights. Since 2010, she has been working with nonprofits and arts organizations throughout Philadelphia, while using a range of tools for community building and storytelling. Her multimedia projects have screened at local film festivals, conferences, and community centers, spark dialogue and action across communities. As a Uruguayan-American, her identity is strongly tied to much of the work she creates, by collaborating closely with Latin American and immigrant communities to document multifaceted stories of arts and culture.

Wit López is a Brooklyn-bred and Philadelphia-based disabled, gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans mixed media creator, performer, and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. With two visual artists for parents, creating has always been a part of López’s world. Their work combines the skills their parents taught them: fiber art, painting, collage, and photography. The work also contains elements of their formal training in theatre and classical music, including costuming, staging, and props. Their visual work and performance art uses their background in Anthropology and Africana Studies as a lens to examine, decolonize, and reconstruct aspects of their own identity. Through fiber and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness, and Latinidad, while also nodding lightly at absurdity and the macabre.