BAM is teaming up with local nonprofit Ridgelines Language Arts to provide a space for celebrating youth writers in our community. Located outside our second-floor Makery at the Museum studio, this new gallery will rotate works quarterly and will be available to visit during our regular museum hours.

The poems in this newest exhibition celebrate the exuberant voices of Central Pennsylvania’s rural youth. Ridgelines is happy to be partnering with the Aaronsburg Civic Club to bring Art & Imagination Club to East Penns Valley. This weekly after-school program invites youth to explore visual art, poetry, and nature, and the connections between the three. With Teaching Artist Abby Minor and volunteer assistants Ariana Macneal, Renee Macneal, and Molly Buchanan, Imagination Club students are taking exploratory walks, keeping nature notebooks, writing collaborative poems, engaging with community members, and learning techniques for peaceful connections to self, others, and creation. We hope you enjoy their words!

Founded as a 501c3 in 2017, Ridgelines Language Arts provides community arts education for those who are impacted by stigma and injustice in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. Our programs—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—take place in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, community youth centers, queer & trans youth groups, & more. 

Through in-depth language arts workshops led by professional Teaching Artists, participants gain ways to explore their voices and their stories, exercise creative agency, and advocate for personal wellbeing and social change. Our programs, exhibitions, and publications leverage creative expression to create many layers of social connection. We offer these programs because we believe that healthy individuals and just social conditions are sustained by the reflection, honesty, pleasure, and intimacy fostered by the study of language arts.