Ridgelines Language Arts Partnership

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

The poems in this newest exhibition showcase our Community Poem Project. Since 2018, Ridgelines has engaged scores of community members to contribute a line to collaborative poems at public events, including the Multicultural Unity Fair, 3 Dots' Tuesday on the Terrace, CentreFest, Rhoneymeade Fest, and most recently, Crickfest. 

Our Community Poem Project offers people from all walks of life an impromptu creative writing experience and the chance to see what happens when their words are woven together with those of their neighbors. Each poem is carefully crafted by a Ridgelines Teaching Artist or board member using dozens of lines contributed by community members of all ages. We hope these poems prompt you to make a creative contribution at our next event. Join us at Rhoneymeade Fest on June 6! 

Visit the Bellefonte Art Museum and enjoy Ridgelines’ Community Poem Project, created from the words and imaginings of your friends and neighbors. 

Founded as a 501(c)(3) 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, and 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 well-being 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.