Folks may remember that in June 2024 the University of the Arts in Philadelphia pretty abruptly announced they were closing after about 150 years in operation. This came as a shock to faculty, staff, and students. Many students were left to scramble because the university hadn’t made any arrangements to help students transfer to other institutions.
One consequence I hadn’t really been aware of is that the school closed so abruptly that faculty and students weren’t able to retrieve the art they had produced. While security did walk them through some buildings, not all spaces were open for retrieval.
This past month there was a newspaper story about a salvage company which was going through one of the buildings that was offering to reunite students with their work before the building is converted to luxury apartments. Thunderbird Salvage was posting a lot of what they found on Instagram but warned people that they were removing so much that it was impossible to record every object.
Thunderbird’s Instagram post racked up several hundred comments within days, while Mathes warned users that the brutalist, nine-story classroom and workshop building had too much stuff inside to catalog.
[…]
Mathes says he’ll save what he can and haul it up to Thunderbird’s locations — a church on the 2400 block of Frankford and a hall on the 2800 block of Frankford — for a sale planned for mid-August. If an artist drops by with a credible claim to a specific piece, it’s theirs at no cost, he said.
[…]
What Mathes and Thunderbird don’t manage to save, workers from Richard S. Burns Waste Recycling Company are hauling to the company’s scrapyard. But Mathes soldiers on: The thought of junking items still precious to the artists, if not potential buyers, bugs him.
*If you are thinking the title of this post sounds familiar, it was the name of an album U2 released in 2000.
There is another way. The Gewandhaus Leipzig in Germany (concert venue) offers flex- tickets for a small premium. Not an…