Former UArts students, faculty and alumni exhibit on the walls of Philly City Hall

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Seven months after the sudden closure of the University of the Arts, student, faculty and alumni artists are now showing their work in Philadelphia City Hall.

More than 40 artists contributed works to “Transcending Uncertainty: Art Endures at Home in Philadelphia,” now on display on the first and fifth floors of City Hall. The exhibition re-opens the first-floor gallery space of the city’s Office of Arts and Culture, now called Creative PHL, which has been closed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the exhibiting artists is Nijah Blanton, who was one year away from graduating when UArts abruptly shut down last summer. She is completing her painting degree at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

“I miss everybody from UArts and what we used to have,” she said. “It feels like a good opportunity to get as many people together again and experience something one last time.”

Blanton, who paints in a surrealistic manner, submitted a stark dreamscape featuring a headless figure holding a balloon with a shadowy face on it — evocative of the style of artist Salvador Dali. A striped circus tent lies in the background. She said the image is based on a recurring dream she has had since childhood.

“It’s this balloon figure who just stares at me from the distance. It’s very eerie,” Blanton said. “But I feel like over time, when you are having the same dream over and over again, you find some comfort in it.”

“It’s beautiful. It’s spooky,” said Councilmember Rue Landau, who organized the exhibition with Creative PHL. “It sends so many messages to all of us about how we have to hold on. We need each other.”

About 100 people came to the opening reception of “Transcending Uncertainty,” an exhibition intended to highlight the plight of those directly impacted by the dissolution of the downtown art school. The exhibition is part of the Art in City Hall program, which has installed curated exhibitions for two decades.

“We bring beauty and novelty to a building where city employees spend eight hours a day, but it is open to the public,” said Val Gay, the city’s Chief Cultural Officer. “This program creates an essential dialogue between our city’s artists and our city’s workers and officials. And I can tell you: We are listening.”

Last summer Philadelphia City Council held a special testimonial session so members could hear directly from faculty and students of UArts. Another session with state lawmakers convened in the William Way Center, where UArts’ former dean of graduate studies Erin Elman testified that the school’s deans were kept in the dark, only notified of the closure 10 minutes before the news went public, then spending a week scrambling in a futile attempt to find an alternative solution.

Elman submitted a large abstract floral painting, “Hortensis,” to the City Hall exhibition.” It is one of the last paintings she completed before temporarily abandoning her art practice after UArts shut down and she lost her job.

“UArts closed, but the energy behind UArts is not closed,” she said. “It was incredible that Councilwoman Landau focused on that zeitgeist. We need a place to channel that creative energy.”

Elman said she is now painting again and starting a new job in the new year: She will be CEO of the Philadelphia chapter of Girls, Inc., a national non-profit supporting education and opportunities for girls.

Ultimately, the fate of UArts and its assets will not be decided in City Hall. The University is currently in bankruptcy proceedings and has started a court-ordered process to sell its nine downtown properties, estimated to be worth $87 million. The real estate firm handling the sale has marketed the properties as potential apartment buildings.

Former students and faculty will likely have little influence over the future of the school and its assets, but Landau wanted to give them an officially sanctioned place to commiserate after the closure.

“There’s no place that gathered them all together, and we thought here in City Hall, the people’s house, to bring them all together,” she said. “To show not only the strength and resilience of our arts community – it’s so beautiful – but when you look around you feel the frustration, the anger and the grief of what happened.”

“Transcending Uncertainty” will be on view through January 25.