The Phillips Project

From 2008 – 2018, The Phillips Project, a community-based residency,  provided an immersive puppet and mask theater experience to the neighborhood youth who have limited access to arts programming. The residency served youth in HOBT’s home neighborhood, reaching a highly diverse population of children through partnerships with Waite HouseLittle Earth, and Project for Collaborative Village.

The Phillips Project is no longer a program of HOBT. Bart Buch, longtime HOBT Education Director and Creator of The Phillips Project, will continue the work of The Phillips Project as an independent program separate from HOBT. The Phillips Project is a partnership of Little Earth, Collaborative Village Initiative, Waite House and community artists providing year-round arts experiences to neighborhood youth. In the fall of 2018, HOBT lost funding to continue The Phillips Project. We are glad Bart and the community partners are continuing this important work with youth in the Phillips neighborhoods. Bart will begin a new phase of exploring with partner organizations, artists, youth, and their families to evolve the work and learn more about ways programming can best serve neighborhood youth. For more information, contact Bart Buch at [email protected].

The Phillips Project:

  • Delivers high-quality arts programming, designed and taught by professional artists, to economically disadvantaged youth at Phillips community sites that do not have such programming.
  • Fosters creative expression and extend arts learning opportunities through hands-on puppet and mask arts activities.
  • Strengthens long-term neighborhood partnerships, based in puppetry and arts education, with community organizations that serve disadvantaged and diverse youth and families.
  • Creates opportunities for dialogue among youth, fostering communication and an appreciation for their diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
  • Celebrates the creative accomplishments of participating youth through a culminating performance event.

Youth at the sites participated in parallel themes through site-specific art projects that focus on the expression of cultural identities and creation of dialogue with the people and places in the Phillips neighborhood.

Our experienced teaching artists conducted workshop sessions for three hours per week during a 24-week period. During this period, youth involved studied the history of the neighborhood's physical and social landscape and the people who have lived there, led by local historians, naturalists, community members, and teaching artists.

Youth participants also observed and collected stories from the present-day communities, families and individuals living in Phillips. They used the stories to explore the cultural and physical landscape, history, and sense of place in their neighborhood. They expressed the history of the place through the mediums of hand puppetry, photography, video, shadow puppetry, masks, music and spoken word poetry. All sites shared the artistic processes and products of their projects through inter-site field trips and culminating in public events.

HOBT Phillips Project
HOBT Phillips Project
HOBT Phillips Project

Photos above are from the first year of The Phillips Project in 2008.

This work was supported by:

phillips-logos-for-website