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The art of tapestries, impactful films, and new plays
The BSR Weekly Arts and Culture Roundup, July 16-22, 2026
Kyle V. Hiller
This week, Fabric Workshop and Museum brings an exhibition to the east coast that highlights the art and history of tapestries and how it is a reflection of contemporary narratives. Then, Arborlogues has us contemplating our relationship with the land, PlayPenn convenes with new plays in development that you can check out with the artists themselves, and two film festivals highlight important narratives and perspectives.
You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry
July 16-January 3
Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch Street
Organized by Mexico-based curator Su Wu, this group exhibition offers extended engagement with tapestry while reflecting how contemporary artists have magnified and challenged the material, ideological, and narrative conventions of the age-old medium.
Newark LGBTQ Film Festival
July 17-23
Streaming online
The fourth annual Newark LGBTQ Film Festival ran this past spring with a lineup of films centering queer BIPOC voices. A virtual encore revisits the full slate of films this week.
PlayPenn’s 2026 New Play Development Conference
July 17-August 2
PlayPenn offers 19 free public events that will showcase new works, playwrights, hands-on workshops, and conversations exploring the role of theater in civic life. This year's conference gives audiences the rare opportunity to experience new work while it’s still taking shape alongside the artists bringing it to life. Timed for the nation's 250th anniversary, the conference explores democracy, belonging, constitutional history, and collective imagination. Serving as the centerpiece of the conference are three new plays that ask audiences to reconsider the architecture of freedom.
Arborlogues
July 18-19
Pickleball Courts at FDR Park, 1500 Pattison Avenue
Arborlogues is a one-person play where you are the performer and a single tree is your audience. The 15-minute play takes place within a specially built red curtain theater that hangs from a specifically chosen tree. After receiving the script, you are left alone with your arboreal audience. The script leads you through a series of stories, prompts, and actions related to this tree, the land, and yourself.
Do Not Disturb Film Festival
Sunday, July 19, 1-4pm
Tattooed Mom, 530 South Street
Do Not Disturb, an adult arts assembly founded on embodied liberation created in 2025 in response to sharply escalating affronts on American civil freedoms, sets out to channel creativity, community, and carnality into mutual aid and material action. This year, Do Not Disturb screens its first film festival, a one-day screening event of short films promoting political and social liberation via the liberated body “Euphoric to melancholy, sinful to spiritual, brutal to beautiful: we can see the full span of the human psyche stemming from this one root instinct, with interpretations as diverse as the humanity that imagines them.” The schedule will include two film blocs, a vendor market, and an awards ceremony and mixer.
Featured image: Arborlogues comes to Philly this week. (Photo courtesy of Anisa George.)
Image description: A tall tree is surrounded by a red curtain, a person stands next to the tree looking up.
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