Slought Foundation is currently in the planning phase for Mixplace Studio, an urban pedagogical research initiative that will transform our organization in the years ahead. It is being developed together with People’s Emergency Center (PEC), the Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML) at PennDesign, and Estudio Teddy Cruz (ETC).

The underlying premise of Mixplace is that we understand today’s youth to be our future civic leaders and public scholars with the potential to re-imagine and transform neighborhoods within the city of Philadelphia, and the world beyond. Mixplace Studio at Slought is the project’s first undertaking, offering young scholars the necessary skills to create multi-media tools. Images, texts, maps and models will enhance and activate their intuition about the physical, social and political environments in which they live. The studio will value collaborative knowledge, and encourage young people, artists, architects, social service organizations, universities and cultural institutions to interact. The tools they create will be part of an ongoing display in Slought’s new studio space, in order to enable further civic conversation and imagination.

Stay tuned for more information as the project develops! The transformation of Slought’s front gallery, pictured above, will begin in Summer 2012. In the meantime, we encourage you to download this poster, which is designed as a planning tool. It will help us brainstorm projects for Slought’s studio environment that incubate informal economies and social relationships between communities. Use it to develop your ideas as well through sketches, words and images!

Mixplace Studio has been supported by a planning grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative.