Kaitlyn Oliveri was perhaps a bit more excited than most college students for her graduation year.
Her senior year of high school came during Covid. Many of the plans she had for celebrating the milestone had to go on hold; the pandemic prevented gathering for an in-person commencement. So, even as Oliveri started at University of the Arts in the fall of 2021, she looked forward to her last day there. Not that she was rushing things.
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During her first three years at UArts, she joined a band, studied saxophone, music education and business, and hung out at Dirty Franks. She stayed busy playing shows and spending time with friends. It was the perfect urban arts school experience.
“With the band, I was able to make friends in all other majors, like photography and film and work on music videos and artwork together. It makes you realize how important other artists are and why the arts community should support each other,” Oliveri says.
But when UArts closed with a week’s notice last June, Oliveri’s plans for a senior year do-over changed. Suddenly, she had to scramble to find a place to finish her degree. She chose Temple. During her May graduation, she missed many of her UArts classmates who’d moved across the country to attend other schools. It was deja vu.
“You spend your three years in college building up your senior year and envisioning what you want your career to be, taking certain classes and mapping everything out and that didn’t happen again for a second time,” Oliveri says. “I didn’t realize how unique my school was and the community that we had until I wasn’t able to be in it anymore.”
In fact, Oliveri missed the UArts community so much that as part of a class project, she planned her own version of a UArts class of 2025 graduation. She envisioned a combined celebration and memorial, a place to party and to mourn. She reached out to David DeCristofaro, chair of the UArts alumni council, about trying to make it happen.
Turns out, she learned, there was already a commemoration in the works. Scout, the Philadelphia-based company that purchased Hamilton and Furness halls, was planning a Celebration of Life for UArts.
June 4 through 8 from 1 to 7pm, alumni, former students, faculty, staff and others members of the UArts community will gather to celebrate (and mourn) the school’s legacy before these spaces begin a new chapter as a redefined space for artists, makers and others, similar to Scout’s much-lauded reimagining of the Bok Building, a former vocational technical high school in South Philadelphia.
An abrupt closure
After UArts closed without warning in June 2024, Scout co-founder and managing partner Lindsey Scannapieco, a Philadelphia native, lobbied bankruptcy court and found a benefactor to give her an emergency loan to purchase the buildings. She did it, she says, not just to develop for development’s sake. She wanted to rescue at least a piece of the arts scene on the Avenue of the Arts. And, like other onlookers, Scannapieco felt for the students and staff, who, overnight, became school-less.
“I think many of us, when we heard the news, thought this would be a wind down. We’ve heard of institutions closing in that way before,” Scannapieco says.
Indeed, Cabrini, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts degree-granting operations and University of the Sciences all handled (or are handling) their closings by phasing out degree programs gradually or merging with larger institutions. UArts, however, shut their doors and left students nowhere to go. It wasn’t fair, Scannapieco thought. They didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
With this in mind, walking through the old UArts buildings, Scannapieco found inspiration in the leftover educational and administrative materials — books, flyers that advertised performances, blank transcript paper. Before redeveloping the spaces, she’d invite the community back to take a piece of UArts with them, and to honor what UArts meant to them.
“I think a lot of alumni [are] really grateful to have the opportunity to come into the space and to have their first time back in the space be [for a celebration of the school’s legacy] versus for another use, or an event that would not be linked to the closure,” she says. “I’m sure it will bring up a lot of different emotions and feelings for a lot of different people. And that’s okay too.”
A gathering of artists
In the atrium of Hamilton Hall, the Celebration of Life will be an open-house style with both set performances and open mic opportunities. Scheduled performers include Song Aziza Tucker, a UArts adjunct professor and 2022 alum; adjunct professor Monica O. Montgomery’s DiasporaDNA Story Center, which works with origin stories and collective memory, will be there; as well the dance groups BIGKID Dance and Just Sole Street Dance Theater Company. Oliveri’s band Blush, the one she formed with other UArts students, also signed up to perform.
Scout enlisted grief coach and death midwife Naila Francis of This Hallowed Wilderness to be on hand to offer writing prompts, lead guided meditations and visual exercises and interact one-on-one with attendees about the grieving process.
Francis typically works with individuals and families but it’s not her first time doing something like this. Organizations have hired her to help with major transitions, mourning one loss while savoring the opportunity to gather, and, in some cases, even looking toward the future. “We’re not grieving if something wasn’t truly meaningful to us, if there wasn’t some kind of love or deep appreciation or affection,” Francis says.
“So while this is a space to grieve, I also see it as a space of, in some ways, celebrating and praising and honoring how much UArts meant to them, whether that was the connections they made, the classes they were a part of, or the projects they did.”
“It just didn’t feel right for us to start a new chapter without providing some form of closure. I don’t think this will be an all encompassing closure, but it’s an attempt.” — Lindsey Scannapieco.
A piece of UArts
The event coincides almost exactly with the anniversary of UArt’s closure. All these months later, the UArts community still seeks answers: Why did their school close the way it did? Why did students have to learn about it via social media? Alex Stevenson, a UArts photography student who would have been part of the class of 2025, found out while on a UArts study abroad program in Italy. Stevenson transferred to Moore to finish their degree, but still took graduation photos at UArts.
“Everything about the closure is so jarring … so many people haven’t really had a chance to deal with it, to process it, to grieve it,” Stevenson says. “This [event] really has that opportunity.”
Through June 7, participants can add to a memory wall and an altar, where all that leftover ephemera — the transcript paper and books, plus branded t-shirts and water bottles — will be. On the last day, they can remove and take home altar items.
“There’s a lot of memories in that stuff. There’s a lot of materiality [for artists] in that stuff,” Scannapieco says. “Hopefully everybody who wants a piece or thing is able to get that.”
The event is free and open to the public; Scout doesn’t yet know how many people will attend. Some are traveling quite a distance for the occasion, including former UArts dance students whose program relocated to Bennington College in Vermont.
“It’ll be great to reconnect with all those people that we haven’t seen in a year,” Stevenson says.
“It just didn’t feel right for us to start a new chapter without providing some form of closure,” Scannapieco says. “I don’t think this will be an all encompassing closure, but it’s an attempt.”
After the Celebration
Scout still plans to use Hamilton and Furness Halls for art and art-making, although Scannapieco also plans to go ahead with her initial plans to also create an artist housing component. This summer, they’ll turn the Furness Hall courtyard into Frankie’s Summer Club, a pop-up hospitality space whose defined purpose is TBA.
As for the community, they’ve already created a Discord for students in the Brind School of Theater Arts, where they stay in touch and announce upcoming shows. Zoe Hollander, class of 2025, has used it to attend a few performances by former UArts students.
“[We were] strong before, but I think it really strengthened after this because the community was all we had,” Hollander says.
Alumni have been meeting up at Tattooed Mom to support one another and sell their work at events organized by Jess Swift, UArts class of 2017. Stevenson is working with Swift on two more of these gatherings for later this summer.
As for Oliveri, she took her experience into a summer internship with State Representative Ben Waxman last summer, where she helped write legislation to prevent other universities from closing abruptly.
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