Forman Arts Initiative acquires a city block in Kensington for an arts campus

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Nearly an entire block of industrial buildings in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood will be transformed into an arts incubation hub.

The Forman Arts Initiative has acquired all the properties of the 2200 block of North American Street, except for a church on the corner, totaling about 100,000 square feet plus an outdoor green space of roughly a quarter of an acre.

The space will total about 100,000 square feet plus an outdoor green space of roughly a quarter of an acre.

But the FAI doesn’t know what to do with it yet. Executive director Adjoa Jones de Almeida said she has been fielding questions about what this proposed arts campus will become.

“Most people we’ve been talking to, they’re like, ‘What’s the plan? What’s the plan? What’s the plan?’” she said. “We’re like, ‘We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.’ And we don’t. But we don’t know on purpose. It’s a very intentional choice.”

The intention is to come up with a development plan in collaboration with the community — both the immediate neighbors in Kensington and the greater creative community that FAI has been supporting through grants for the last three years.

FAI partnered with the internationally recognized artist Theaster Gates to collaborate on the future use and design of the arts campus. Gates, based in Chicago, makes installation work that often addresses social issues and urban design. He recently installed a set of reclaimed monument pillars on the campus of Drexel University at the invitation of Philadelphia Contemporary that spoke to the nature of public memorials.

For the FAI campus, Gates will develop strategies to engage with community members to come up with development and programming ideas.

“This collaboration with Adjoa — who also comes from an art and community engagement background — gives us both an opportunity to build on the lessons we’ve learned from our previous respective experiences,” Gates said in a statement. “To develop a unique model for what a community-grounded, globally relevant art space can look like.”

Jones de Almeida only recently arrived in Philadelphia, in February. She left her position as deputy director of the Brooklyn Museum to lead Forman Arts.

“While I loved that experience [at Brooklyn Museum] and there’s so much that I learned, there’s also a lot of baggage that comes with being a museum, especially an encyclopedic museum. A lot of really heavy systemic baggage that makes it hard to innovate and to be imaginative around how you engage communities,” said Jones de Almeida, whose background is in education and community organizing.

“This is an opportunity to collectively imagine,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a museum. I don’t think it’s going to be a community center, per se, but it’s going to be something in the middle.”

FAI co-founder Michael Forman said not knowing what the arts campus will be is the fun part.

“We want to make sure we get enough of the community engagement and understand what the communities are looking for,” Forman said. “We have some ideas. We think there’ll be some music or hospitality piece, an education component, community center components. We’re going to let that develop organically over time.”

FAI plans to open the green space in the middle of the block this summer, and in the summer of 2025 open a large building at the end of the block built to be a PECO electrical substation, as a performance or event space. A former manufacturing building on the block is expected to open in 2026, likely as an exhibition space for the extensive Forman Family Collection of contemporary art.