Upcoming Events and Special Projects
Philanthophair!
April 26
Noon - 4 PM
Stove Works Courtyard
Philanthrophair is the capstone event to Arts Week, organized by ArtsBuild.
Using the county fair as a model, Philanthrophair is a day-long event in the Stove Works’ courtyard taking place on April 26th. We’re bringing together 30+ Arts Organizations and Artists to one location, saturating the courtyard with good times and good work!
At the heart of Philanthropair is you! Thank you for loving what we do and caring about what we care about. Thank you for attending our shows and events, for volunteering, for spreading the word, for being on our boards, for bringing your friends, for cheering on our artists, for being an artist, and for generally giving a hoot!
Thank you, especially to those of you who donate to our organizations. Your gift is an expression of support. Even a monthly gift of five dollars communicates your investment and commitment to our programs and our missions. It shows us that you understand the time, energy, resources, and PEOPLE who ensure that these programs are available and accessible to you. And we want to celebrate that gift, your gift, and, perhaps, inspire others to give too.
In addition to promoting their ongoing and upcoming projects, each organization will design an activity for passersby to engage with. Think dunk tank. Think bobbing for apples. Balloon darts. An RC car demolition derby. Sack races. There will be collaborations and performances. There will be speakers and panel discussions. There will be food! Because we know, all of this art makes you hungry. The options are endless. The creative minds overfloweth.
Participating Organizations:
Art 120, Art To Empower (showcasing the Capoeira Chattanooga program), ArtsBuild, AVA, Be The Change Youth Initiative, Center for Creative Arts, Chattanooga Girls Rock Camp, Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, Chattanooga Theatre Centre, Chattanooga Writers' Guild, Chattown Chatta, Contemporary Performing Arts of Chattanooga, Creative Discovery Museum, ELLA Library, HART Gallery, Hunter Museum of American Art, Playful Evolving Monsters LLC, Rhyme N Chatt, River City Company, Scenic City Clay Arts, Scenic City Shakespeare, Soft Animal, Songbirds Foundation, Southern Exposure Productions, SPLASH, Stove Works, The Pop-Up Project, and The Tivoli Theatre Foundation
Participating Artist Booths:
Coming Soon!
Schedule of Performances:
12:00 PM: Chattanooga Theater Center
12:30 PM: Songbirds/Be the Change
1:00 PM: Southern Exposure
1:30 PM: CCA
2:00 PM: Tivoli Foundation / Chattanooga Ballet
2:30 PM: Panel Discussion about Giving!
3:00 PM: The Pop-up Project
3:10 PM: Playful Evolving Monsters
3:30 PM: Rhyme N Chatt / Writer's Guild
the DUNK TANK RUNS ALL DAY! Dunk your favorite Arts Administrator!
Schedule for Dunk Tank coming soon. ;)
Past Events
//
Past Events //
Subfest
Summer of 2021 - 2023
Welcome to Subfest at Stove Works, where the captains of Chattanooga DIY-space “The Submarine” host an outdoor music festival in the courtyard of Stove Works, filled with all sorts of local and regional live music. Join us for a bit of revelry in the hot, hot heat. From 3 PM until 10:30, we’ll be hosting a stellar line-up of 6 bands from Chattanooga, Nashville, and Atlanta. Subfest is FREE to attend, open to the public, and all ages.
Organized by Em, Victoria, and Kat (The Submarine)
Photos: Kelly Lacy, William Johnson, John Dooley
Black Lunch Table
Weekend of May 20, 2023
Join us the weekend of May 20th for programming with Black Lunch Table, an oral-history archiving project that creates space for people, art, Black studies, and social justice issues.
Things kick off with the Wiki Edit-a-thon on Friday, May 19th from 5 pm to 8 pm. Bring your laptop and learn how to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives and works of visual artists and underrepresented Black artists.
On Saturday, May 20th, join us for the Photobooth and Roundtable series. Organized around literal and metaphorical lunch tables, Black Lunch Table takes the lunchroom phenomenon as its starting point.
The Artists Roundtable (11 am to 1 pm), BLT's founding initiative, invites Black artists from Chattanooga's local communities to engage in dialogue with one another. At the People’s Table (1 pm to 3 pm), Chattanooga community members will converse about site-specific sociopolitical issues affecting historically disenfranchised populations. All are welcome to the Photo Booth (beginning at noon), where you can have your portrait made by a local photographer for the Wiki Commons. Please register, as spaces for the roundtables and lunch are limited.
Photos taken by J Adams.
The Unveiling: Heather Hart's Oracle
Saturday, June 4, 2022
The Oracle of Connection is the latest public installation by Heather Hart from her Oracle series.
The day will feature a dance performance incorporating the rooftop by The Pop-Up Project and reading by Erika Roberts, a market organized by Kanika Jamila of Black Fridays, a DJ set from flux308, food from Bad Wraps, and a few words from the Artist herself!
Heather Hart, Southern Oracle: The Oracle of Connection, 2022
Courtesy the Artist and Davidson Gallery, New York
Photos by J Adams
Artist Statement
I grew up searching for myself. My father took us to the Archives regularly and we were able to trace most of his family to 1860, where slavery robbed identities. But we were never able to find my great grandfather’s mother, Minnie Wells, further than the 1870 census. In 2011 I took a road trip that led me from my home in Brooklyn to the very small Maney’s Neck, North Carolina, following my father’s family line, that geographically splintered after slavery and before my greats moved north. After listening to mixtapes and podcasts, far out of range of my GPS, I found a local library in the nearest town. There I found a microfiche for an 1877 marriage license of my great grandfather’s father. It was a marriage between Winnie Wells and Julius Hart. But I knew her name was Minnie. With a one-letter error in transcription, Minnie had disappeared for over a century.
Our “factual” records are full of errors like these: a census taker’s handwriting or the subject’s accent changes a name or a race or a date. And that changes our history (our truth?). Even more often folks are left out of the records altogether. Yet our hegemony tells us these records are the facts, thus relegating oral histories and indigenous records to fictions.
I’m captivated by this slippage, this liminal space between truth and fiction, oral histories and written histories. Through my interdisciplinary practice I fuse fabricated and historical belief systems; legends that have been bequeathed through generations mixed with invention and intuition. I create new rituals to empower the individual. I make oracles.
The oracle for Chattanooga will have the appearance of an independent rooftop, removed from its house, and dropped from the sky onto the Stove Works grounds. It could also suggest a house that has been buried or sunken into the earth, leaving an island of house to climb on. As with all legends of oracles, the methods of building my rooftops are passed from person to person. Carpentry was taught to me by my father. As a child, the hot asphalt shingles of our roof, which I had helped lay, was an oasis where I could bake in the sun and listen to music while reading. My Roof offers a space for visitors to climb atop and claim for their own for a bit, literally changing their perspective on their world as a metaphor for a potential ideological examination. While the attic inside my Roof is more private and contemplative by nature and it asks the visitor to crouch beneath to access its private space, as attics do, finding it full of history, secrets and fantasies.
For this oracle, I have been thinking about visibility and audibility of intersecting communities that make up Chattanooga and the Stove Works neighborhood. I was looking for manifestations of the intersection of this desire for communication/connection, with my fascination with threshold spaces and with the site itself. The threshold between what I say and what you hear. And I was ultimately inspired by the idea of change, of growth and of community stakeholders. I want to continue to mine my experiences in Chattanooga, and use, as a connective tissue, voice.
I want to reflect on the idea that this rooftop space may be “claimed” by anyone, that their frames of reference and activation of the piece is critical to complete it. For the site-specific heart of the oracle, I want to house a microphone. It will be a place for visitors to speak their minds or play music through a connection to a caged speaker inside the chimney. The oracle amplifies voices. To further hone-in on the concept of the liminal space, I want to plan a series of public programs to stretch the identity of the rooftop oracle through the activation and interpretation of each event.
I am interested in this kind of enigmatic nature of a space. It exists simultaneously inside and outside, the underground and the visible, private and public, minimal and handmade, the spiritual and the natural. The content of a form may further transform depending on who experiences it and their perception, which is what happens to legends that are handed down in their oral tradition: transformation. A rooftop can refer to home, stability, shelter, but in this context, it is also an action of claiming power- of influence, direction, and earth. This roof is a site of cosmic afro-futurism and ancient native legends.
- Heather Hart
Market Vendors
Viktoria Payne, Photography @viktoriapaynephotography https://www.viktoriapayne.com/absolute
Georgette Marie Allen, "Z-Mack"
Glen Griggs, Bhamsterdam
Lovely Rose, Elevated Beauty LLC
N’Nako Bacon @nakivoire https://www.nakivoire.com
Tracy Shaw
Beatrice Kennebrew, BeaGlamour
Yokita McGraw, Purple Boss Store
Kanika Jamila, KaKi Enterprise
Jamila Walker
The Oracle of Connection could not have been made possible without the support and funding of Lyndhurst Foundation, Public Art Chattanooga, SETD, Arts Build, and a pretty remarkable private donor.
Stove Works and Pop-Up Project are excited to announce a unique presentation of “Romeo y Julieta.”
DATES:
September 18, 2021
with a performance by CLILA
September 24, 2021
September 25, 2021
WITH A PERFORMANCE BY CCA and ST PETERS
In the courtyard at Stove Works, Pop-Up Project will perform excerpts from WNYC and Public Theater’s audio play production of “Romeo y Julieta,” in which the play’s reading moves seamlessly between English and Spanish translation. The selected excerpts will be interpreted through dance this coming September. Alternating between the play’s text read aloud and a curated soundtrack, the dancers will lead the audience through the familiar narrative of the play.
The public is invited to both the matinee and evening performances at no cost. We hope you enjoy it, and we are looking forward to experiencing this performance of “Romeo y Julieta” with you.
Listen to the original audio play (via Public Theater and WNYC)
Link to Performance Excerpts (COMING SOON)
Link to the SINOPSIS / SYNOPSIS (via Public Theater and WNYC)
Link to Play’s Text (via Public Theater and WNYC)
About Pop-Up Project:
Founded in 2016 by Jules Downum and Mattie Waters, Pop-Up Project’s vision is to create a vibrant, diverse, sustainable performing arts community in Chattanooga. Their social justice film series uses dance to explore stories of Chattanooga’s communities from the perspective of those most impacted. Since their founding in 2016 they have produced 15 short films and in 2020, completed their first feature-length film, “The Light We Share.”
Pop-Up Project’s Enrichment Programming has functioned as an extension of their other programs. In 2019, they facilitated a semester of arts integration curriculum focused on visual storytelling in East Lake Elementary. Pop-Up Project has performed at the Hunter Art Museum, Creative Discovery Museum, Abandon Arts, Tribal Con (ATL), and Chattanooga Theater Center.
https://www.thepopupproject.org/
