Meyerson Hall Dean's Alley, 210 South 34th Street, Philadelphia
Marian April Glebes
MSHP, MCP'25
The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument is a project centered in process, people, and making. The Mobile Community Brick Factory produces handmade bricks using local hand-processed clay and historic water-struck methods. Participants personalize and inscribe their stories onto these bricks. These bricks – their people and their stories – are our future, and our past.
The Fall 2024 installation at the Weitzman School of Design features the Mobile Community Brick Monument, an ongoing series of exhibitions that create shared spaces and collect oral histories through ethnographic methods. In Baltimore, over 150,000 people have visited the Mobile Community Brick Monuments, finding connections to stories that are like their own.
Like the bricks themselves, the form of the upcoming permanent Community Brick Monument is created by the community. What if we could build a wall that was not divisive? What if these stories were embedded in sidewalks, and become part of daily journeys? What if they created a new space of gathering and conversation, or a path towards connection? What if they were strategically placed alongside existing urban monuments in order to be in concert with the voices that preceded them? Whether diffused or together, mobile or permanent, the Community Brick Factory & Monument reminds us that we are all part of a greater whole.
The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument exhibition and associated programming makes something new for Dean’s Alley in Meyerson Hall on the University of Pennsylvania campus and beyond that uses a process developed over the past decade. This monument is a grassroots process and product made by the people who live, work, and study here, together. As such, all facets of the work address social justice movements and tensions surrounding monuments in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia while reminding us that there is power in collectiveness. The goal of the process and product is to create a new type of community-built monumental public space, using heritage methods that reflect the historical construction and living heritage of these “brick cities.”
We believe ordinary voices matter, especially those that aren’t usually heard, that public space should be built by the people who use it, that heritage is alive, memory is mutable, and history is ongoing - made by daily lives. Our bricks represent pasts, presents, and futures that would otherwise remain untold and unwitnessed, built, shared, and spoken by urban residents. All are welcome and included in the process - a different kind of monument – not one to a dead white guy on a horse, but a living space that honors the past and is built collectively by the people who live in and use our cities.
Support for the Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument is provided by The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Loading Dock Inc, Taylor Clay Brick, Stancills Inc, Baltimore Clayworks, Union Collective, and people like you.
Marian April Glebes is a conceptual artist, preservation planner, wife, activist, gardener, and human. In 2015, she became the inaugural Artist-In-Residence at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Patricia and Mark Joseph Center for Education, during which she mounted a yearlong exhibition and associated public programming. She received a 2015 Rubys Artist Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and three Our Town Creative Placemaking Grants from the NEA (2011, 2016, 2019) for her collaborative work in the public realm. Glebes’s work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions in Baltimore and beyond. She curates exhibitions and temporal public art installations, happenings, conversations, and lecture series. Having received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2004 and her MFA from University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2009, she has made a home in Baltimore, and supports artist-run spaces as a consultant and works on the Cultural Landscapes team at Quinn Evans while pursuing dual master’s degrees in City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. When not a student herself, she teaches as Part-Time Faculty at MICA in the General Fine Arts Department which she joined in 2012.
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