Introduction:

Hi, my name is Glorious. I’m a Junior Creative Writing major and was fortunate enough to be paired with Veronica Cianfrano. She’s a visual artist, teacher at UArts, an exhibition curator, and an all-around great person. She founded a local pop-up gallery with Jessie Clark called Champions of Empty Rooms, also known as CHER. The mission of the non-profit is to connect the art community with the community at large and to bring contemporary art that express relatable and meaningful themes to communities throughout Philly, making art accessible to everyone. Right now, we’re preparing for a series of events that will lead up to a group exhibition, More Stately Mansions which focuses on the themes of wage inequality, class divide, and the notion of the American Dream. The artists who were selected to contribute to the exhibition will remodel the gallery space into renditions of great American mansions built during the Gilded Age using free materials to explore the artist’s role in the class divide, to challenge the exclusionary stigma in the arts, and to exhibit the exploitative nature of the American dream.

Bringing art to communities that would otherwise not have access to it, is an ambitious feat, and to assist her with that, I will be helping her manage any and everything press and social media related. I will maintain Veronica’s PR database, write and send newsletters and press releases, manage CHER Pop-Ups’ social media accounts, and I will contribute to and help organize the zine that will accompany the exhibition. I also intend to volunteer by distributing the zine throughout the city once completed and published, and I will assist with ushering at her three events: The Opening Reception, Performance Night and Zine Launch Event, and the Closing Reception and Artist Talk (which I encourage everyone who’s reading this post to attend. There will be free art and free food available!)

Though, as artists, Veronica and I are passionate about similar things, we both use different mediums to express how we feel and challenge the systems that we and our neighbors find ourselves confined by. 

The impulse to work with her came from a place of not only wanting to discover different ways other types of artists use to find inspiration, but also, different ways inspiration can be elicited. I’m also excited to learn more about using art as a type of grassroots campaign and about the work and creative processes done that ensures the fruition of exhibitions and other types of events.