Proof of Life: A Conversation with our Artists in Residence (Part 3/3)
Why to Show Up
A Conversation with the Artists in Residence, Part Three
Painted Bride Project Space | Public Presentation Week: May 9–17, 2026
Over the past two weeks, we’ve provided a view from inside the artists’ processes: how they work, what they are building, and the questions shaping each residency in real time.
This week, we share how their work opens outward.
What audiences encounter during Proof of Life is not a polished retrospective or a finished conclusion. These projects invite participation, reflection, and exchange. Each artist approaches that invitation differently, but all three ask audiences to enter the room as more than spectators.
What follows is not a preview. It is an invitation to understand why presence matters to the work itself.
Yannick Lowery
“I’m trying to preserve the spaces that a census can’t count, developing an archive and resource by and for these spaces to remember.”
Yannick Lowery’s Proof of Life residency centers memory, place, and the stories communities carry forward together. Rooted in West Philadelphia’s Parkside neighborhood, his work explores matriarchal lineage, neighborhood memory, and collective reflection through image-making, conversation, and archival process.
Late last week, Blues of Parkside: A Cyanotype Workshop invited participants into a hands-on process shaped by neighborhood storytelling and shared experience. Community members created image-based impressions rooted in memory, conversation, and reflection.
Those contributions now carry forward into Between Matriarchs: A Community Exhibition, an evolving visual archive built from both personal histories and collective experience.
“I hope that my audience sees themselves in this work. I’m making this work for the Parkside neighborhood so it should feel like a memory of home, or at least help fill the gaps that memory can leave without collective reflection.”
Yannick has described his role in this project as that of a keeper, one person among many holding the thread of collective memory. Audiences are invited to move through the exhibition, engage with the materials, and consider how stories are preserved, transformed, and passed forward.
This community arts activation continues on Wednesday, May 13, from 6 PM to 8 PM.
Taj Rauch
“The whole point of developing work driven by audience choice is to offer people the chance to see themselves in the work.”
Taj Rauch’s All Heathens Go to Heaven begins with a formal premise: the audience is the protagonist. Not metaphorically. Structurally.
Participants move through a constructed social world where their decisions shape what unfolds in real time. The work examines toxic masculinity, influence, self-worth, and collaboration through a gamified environment designed to reveal behavior through participation rather than observation.
“Games are so interesting because we never play as ourselves. We use experiments and games as an opportunity to explore who we could be in a given situation.”
The experience is not built as a lecture or a moral directive. Instead, it creates situations that ask participants to confront how power operates socially, emotionally, and collectively inside the room.
For Taj, participation itself becomes the mechanism for reflection.
“How would you act? And how would you collaborate with your peers in the room who, in most other productions, would remain strangers to you?”
The performances on May 15 and 16 begin promptly at 7 PM and are followed immediately by artist and audience talkbacks. The conversation is built into the structure itself.
Andrés Cisneros
“The experiment is to make the audience understand how, in Latin American music and our folklore, songs are created.”
Before the music begins, Andrés Cisneros asks audience members to write something down. A sentence. A memory. A response to a prompt.
Throughout the evening, Andrés selects submissions and transforms them into live musical compositions with his band in real time.
What usually unfolds slowly across generations of oral tradition and communal exchange becomes compressed into a single shared evening.
“The purpose is to recreate how songs are constructed over years, over time, something that somebody said in the neighborhood, and it carried word of mouth, and then somebody decided to compose it.”
For Andrés, audience participation is not symbolic. The audience becomes the literal source material for the work itself.
“Community speaks. Someone listens. A song forms.”
The performance takes place Sunday, May 17, from 6 PM to 7:30 PM as the culminating event of the ‘Proof of Life’ Artist in Residence project.
A Final Word from the Residency
These artists arrived at Painted Bride Project Space with work already in motion. What the residency offered was time, space, collaboration, and a community willing to participate in the process while the work is still alive.
Not simply to observe.
But to contribute, reflect, question, respond, and witness alongside others.
Yannick said it plainly, though it speaks to the residency as a whole:
“We’re all each other’s witnesses. And without that, there’s something in just knowing that there’s company and community and engaging with one another genuinely.”
That may be the clearest description of Proof of Life itself.
A gathering of witnesses.
Reserve your seat for our four remaining Proof of Life activations:
YANNICK LOWERY
Between Matriarchs: A Community Exhibition
Wednesday, May 13 | 6 PM to 8 PM
TAJ RAUCH
All Heathens Go to Heaven
Friday, May 15 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Saturday, May 16 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
ANDRÉS CISNEROS
Philly Cancionero
Sunday, May 17 | 6 PM to 7:30 PM
Click the date want to RSVP to.