These days, jazz artist V. Shayne Frederick is thinking a lot about pepper pot soup, a tripe and vegetable stew commonly prepared and sold by Black women who worked as street vendors in colonial Philadelphia.
He’s thinking about the sounds of the market, the stories of the women who made it, what it tasted like and what it felt to live in that moment in history.
“There’s a story that no one talks about,” he says. “These women from the Caribbean or straight from the continent of Africa, were entering the world of commerce on the streets of Philadelphia by selling this soup. I wonder what that sounds like, what does that musically look like? And why can’t we recreate those soups”
Frederick is at work guiding a group of interdisciplinary artists, including chef Valerie Erwin, former owner of Germantown’s Geechee Girl Cafe, and illustrator Eric Battle, well known for his DC Comics work, in the creation of a multimedia, performance project about pepper pot soup. The idea came from artist and founder of the Philadelphia Jazz project Homer Jackson, who passed away last year. It will feature musical and poetic performances, imaginative illustrations of the chefs who made the soup and, of course, the food itself.
The performance will be coming to the streets of Old City in 2026 as part of ArtPhilly, a citywide, multidisciplinary art festival that seeks to mark the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday by celebrating Philly artists and their contributions to our past, present and future.
What is ArtPhilly?
ArtPhilly got its start in 2022. Big-time benefactor Katherine Sachs had been looking at the events the city had secured for 2026 — six FIFA World Cup matches, Major League Baseball’s All-Stars weekend — and noticed what seemed to be missing: art and artists.
“There are many, many reasons why people are going to be coming to Philadelphia in 2026,” Sachs says. “We thought this is the moment to show them how absolutely extraordinary Philadelphia’s arts and cultural resources are. We have amazing institutions and a lot of creative people in this city, and they need their moment in the sun.”
Art has played a big role in previous centennial celebrations. 1876 was when the Philadelphia Museum of Art got its charter as part of our World’s Fair. But Sachs was also aware of how previous centennials — notably the bicentennial — had flopped in Philly. She wanted to highlight the work of local artists, yes, but she also wanted to throw a great party, one that highlighted Philly’s diverse neighborhoods and brought tourists to all corners of the city. She feels a multi-disciplinary, citywide art show could do that.
“I wanted to do a better job in 2026 than we did in 1976,” Sachs says.
So, Sachs got to work. Sachs has long been involved in the arts in Philly — she’s an adjunct curator and museum trustee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she chairs the contemporary art committee. She also endowed the PMA’s modern and contemporary art curator and named its gallery dedicated to artist Jasper Johns, with her late husband, Keith. The Modern and Contemporary galleries at the PMA are also named for them.
In other words, when Sachs calls, you pick up the phone. That’s exactly what Bill Adair, former program director for Pew’s Center for Arts and Heritage, current ArtPhilly executive director, did. He’d known Sachs for decades.
“She called me and she said, I really think that the arts and culture sector needs to be majorly foregrounded in the 250th anniversary. What do you think?” Adair remembers. “And so she and I started working together.”
Soon, they’d assembled a veritable who’s who of folks engaged in the local arts scene to serve as staff, board and curators including the Barnes Foundation’s Thom Collins; Mural Arts’ Jane Golden; writer and Penn professor Lorene Cary; and the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s Patricia Aden. People they reached out to were excited for an opportunity to spotlight Philly’ arts and cultural community in a big way. In 2024 ArtPhilly incorporated as a nonprofit and between 2023 and 2024 commissioned 34 artists to create performances, films, installations and other works for 2026.
What now?
All 34 ArtPhilly works will center around the theme, “What Now?”
“We wanted it to, in some way, reflect on the past. We also knew that we wanted it to be very present and very contemporary — all of the projects that we are presenting involve contemporary artists. And we also knew that we wanted to somehow have people interrogate the future and think about the future,” Adair says. “We think artists are some of the best interpreters of history and some of the best interpreters of this complicated moment in our country’s history.”
The prompt leaves room for a variety of interpretations. Some, like Frederick’s collaborative Pepper Pot look back at the past, with an eye toward how Black women contributed to Philadelphia’s cultural and economic marketplace. Others, like Bicentennial Babies, by poets Trapeta B. Mayson and Yolanda Wisher, engage in active history-making. Mayson and Wisher are interviewing 10 people born in Philadelphia in 1976, seeking their reflections on how our country has changed in the last 50 years for a podcast series.
“There are many, many reasons why people are going to be coming to Philadelphia in 2026. We thought this is the moment to show them how absolutely extraordinary Philadelphia’s arts and cultural resources are.” — Katherine Sachs, ArtPhilly
The festival will take place in neighborhood venues, small galleries and major art institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where artists and curators will be giving tours that reconsider permanent collections.
“From Our Forefathers: Climate Crisis through Museum Tours” will look at permanent collections with an eye toward how artifacts and artworks depict the energy transition from wood to coal and the dispossession of Indigenous people’s land. Artist, curator and public historian Aislinn Pentecost-Farren, who has been offering a similar tour in the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 2023, will lead the tour.
Pentecost-Farren began the project without permission at the PMA, leaving pamphlets out in the museum for visitors to pick up and follow, on their own accord. Local curator Daniel Tucker liked the idea so much, he invited her to give the tour formally. For ArtPhilly in 2026 it will be in several other museums in addition to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the names of the additional museums have yet to be fully announced, but she’s planning one for the Independence Seaport Museum.
“The ‘What Now?’ theme is looking at the Semiquincentennial and asking: What is the critical public dialog to be having about the past so that we are creating the future we want?” Pentecost-Farren says.
“Understanding the history of the climate crisis is an important piece of this, because we both need to understand the mistakes of the past and not replicate them … People don’t really remember that we haven’t been using coal and oil for that long. We did an energy transition less than 200 years ago, which is a blip, historically speaking. History can help people see that energy transitions are achievable.”
Making Philly the arts destination it should be
“Philadelphia has been and remains a place of tremendous talent, and I think the sadness of that is very often artists feel that they have to leave to‘make it,’” says Walé Oyéjidé, a Philly filmmaker who is developing three films as part of ArtPhilly, which will be accompanied by s the Philly jazz artist Immanuel Wilkin, and his quartet.
Philly has one of the nation’s largest public arts collections, thanks in large part to the work of Mural Arts Philadelphia. We’re about to get a new museum when the Calder Gardens museum — a space that will showcase the art of sculpturist Alexander Calder — opens on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in September. The Forman Arts Initiative is opening an arts campus the size of a city block in Kensington. We’ve been a haven for artists who are priced out by New York’s high rents.
But our arts community has also suffered from a lack of investment over the last five years. At the beginning of 2024 The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced it would stop granting degrees in 2025. Then, University of the Arts abruptly closed in summer 2024. Long before all that, in 2020 the City cut arts funding by 40 percent to address other budget gaps. This year, Mayor Parker is proposing cutting funding for both Mural Arts and the Art Museum by $500,000 each in her fiscal year 2026 budget.
One of ArtPhilly’s ambitions is to use 2026 as a springboard to help show that art is a critical part of Philadelphia that we should be investing in long-term. A splashy event in a pivotal year like 2026 might send a message to the city that it’s important to prioritize art and support artists.
“We hope people begin to understand that art is truly a very important part of Philly’s character,” Sachs says.
“We think artists are some of the best interpreters of history and some of the best interpreters of this complicated moment in our country’s history.” — Bill Adair, ArtPhilly
To that end, the people behind ArtPhilly plan to reprise and reinvent the festival every three years, rather than a one-off event. (So the next one would be in 2029.) Repeat festivals will lead to the commissioning of art as ArtPhilly is doing for 2026, but it will also give tourists a reason to come to Philly and open up opportunities for much-needed collaboration amongst the city’s artists and arts organizations, which have tended to operate as silos. As arts organizations work on ArtPhilly together and leaders talk with one another, the hope is that more opportunities for collaboration will emerge.
“Philly’s arts and culture scene really deserves to be in the spotlight,” Adair says. “It’s one of the reasons that Philly is so special, and we really want everyone to know it, the people who live here and people who are visiting here.”
It’s a big ambition for a festival, and ArtPhilly likely won’t be able to do it on its own. But if big arts events are attracting tourists (and their wallets) to Philly, it will signal to the City that they should invest in the arts. It will also make us seem like a destination — and potential home — for artists who want to do shows at our galleries or live and work here.
“There are many, many challenges that this city faces, and it’s important for us to consider the arts as one of many potential solutions to the ills that we have to contend with,” Oyéjidé says.
“It should be seen as one of our primary tools that we can use to connect with people who feel that they don’t have a voice, who feel that they are ignored, who feel that their needs are not being met. … The arts very much deserve a seat at the table, because, if nothing else, this is a way that we can connect on a universal level, beyond the many ways that we are culturally and economically divided.”
COVERAGE OF THE DEVELOPING PLANS FOR AMERICA’S 250TH
