Ridgelines Language Arts Partnership

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! Visit the Bellefonte Art Museum to read poems by East Penns Valley youth participating in Ridgelines’ Art & Imagination Club. 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.

Introducing the Ridgelines Language Arts Gallery - The poems in this exhibition grew out of field trips, collaborative writing projects, and visual art activities. Throughout 2023, the Bellefonte Youth Centre (BYC) Imagination Club students visited and engaged in place-based writing at the Crooked House in Milesburg, the Bellefonte Art Museum, Bonfatto's Corner Cafe, the gardens at St. John's Episcopal Church, and Curtin Village; they also took exploratory walks around Bellefonte and visited with anglers from the Spring Creek Chapter of Trout Unlimited for a fishing expedition in Talleyrand Park. Every week they have fun writing, reading, talking, singing, imagining, and visiting with new neighbors.

Visit the Bellefonte Art Museum beginning January 31st, 2025 to read poems by the BYC Imagination Club.

The BYC Imagination Club, a creative writing program that invites Bellefonte youth to explore their inner and outer worlds. Hosted by Ridgelines Language Arts at the Bellefonte Youth Centre, a service of the Youth Service Bureau, Imagination Club is a dynamic expressive arts program that fosters connection to new aspects of their society, but also to strengthen our society throught he inventive, exuberant, and insightful voices of local youth.