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The Lost Meeting, curated by Julie Courtney, takes place in Little Abington Meeting, an abandoned Quaker meetinghouse built in 1836 that lies within the Sculpture Park of Abington Art Center in Alverthorpe Park, Jenkintown, PA. Little Abington Meeting was created by Quakers, who later became known as Orthodox, as an outcome of the Orthodox/Hicksite schism of 1827-28. The Schism was a separation based, in part, on Quaker theological understanding which lasted from 1827-1955. Moving through this schism and the Quaker culture of that period, the collaborators in The Lost Meeting have set-up a provisional drafting studio in the building of the Little Abington Meeting to experiment with historical domestic Quaker objects using 21st c. technology. The objects will be considered as mediators that are part of our everyday life. These object-mediators occur everywhere and between us — it is what allows us to be part of the world, (i.e. clothing, furniture, children's toys, writings). They intervene into the dialogue of re-thinking what is our relation to the "everyday". The installation itself becomes the ambassador of difference that travels in between and across a terrain that involves the Quakers, site histories and other events. This studio will investigate the "everyday" and mediators primarily through architectural and pattern drafting systems. The Lost Meeting, is curated by Julie Courtney, and additionally in collaboration with David Lang. It takes place in Little Abington Meeting, an abandoned Quaker meetinghouse built in 1836 that lies within the Sculpture Park of Abington Art Center in Alverthorpe Park, Jenkintown, PA. The collaborators, in gratitude, acknowledge the host institution (AAC) and its staff in their devotion to the local community and in the effort to transform this vernacular building from its current state of decay. We are deeply thankful to the generous support from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI), a program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by The University of the Arts, Philadelphia; The William Penn Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); Artists & Communities, a program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MAAF), is made possible by major funding from the Heinz Endowments, Johnson & Johnson, the J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, William Penn Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development; The Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) through the Our Stories, Our Future program; the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of We the People, a national initiative exploring the history of the United States; Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service as they recorded Friends Meetinghouses within the Region of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting; and importantly, The Township of Abington, Department of Parks & Recreation. |