Monolith
- Sebleh Alfa and Aseal Saed
- College of Arts & Sciences, Makuu: The Black Cultural Center
Monolith, a group that works to showcase and uplift Black visual art by cultivating spaces in which Black art can be appreciated and exchanged at the University of Pennsylvania, will produce a gallery exhibition and digital archive during the 2022-2023 Academic Year. The group will also facilitate the interaction of Penn artists and Philadelphia area high school and middle school students through the ASE Academy: a weekly program run by Makuu and WEB Dubois College House, which creates weekly programming for high school and middle school students in the greater Philadelphia area. Monolith will be taking over an ASE Academy session where Penn artists will be leading arts activities with students; this will serve as the introduction of Monolith to the students, who will then decide if they would like to be involved with the curation process of the Fall 2022 exhibition. The younger students, during this meeting, will be making one collective canvas that will be showcased during the gallery exhibition. Monolith will also be supplying students who are involved with their own supplies to encourage them to make their own art. This interaction will serve as a soft launch to future iterations of arts mentoring. This event is the starting point to create more opportunities to bridge Philadelphia youth to artists at Penn.