Mellon Foundation awards $150K planning grant to Friends of the Tanner House and Penn preservation center

The Mellon Foundation has awarded a $150,000 planning grant to the Friends of the Tanner House and the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS) at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the Penn center announced Monday.

The grant project is titled “Henry Ossawa Tanner House: Annunciating a Community Cultural Platform with Holistic Preservation.”

The grant will help the Friends of the Tanner House develop community arts and cultural programming to create a “holistic preservation planning process” for the renovation and future programs at the house.

The Tanner House, located at 2908 W. Diamond St. in Strawberry Mansion, is on the National Register of Historic Places and also is a National Historic Landmark because the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner lived there from age 13 to about 28.

Tanner was the first Black artist to achieve international acclaim after he moved to France in his early 30s. He is known mostly for his religious paintings set in North Africa and the Middle East, and also for the genre paintings, The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor.

“The cultural significance of the Tanner House is enormous, and our understanding of it continues to unfold,” says Randall Mason, faculty director of the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites.

“The Friends of the Tanner House are thinking about preservation in exciting new ways, and we are honored to be working in support of this effort. This project embodies many of the values at the heart of CPCRS’s mission.”

» READ MORE: Once ‘the center of the Black intellectual community in Philadelphia,’ the Henry O. Tanner House could be demolished

The Friends of the Tanner House, which has been active in trying to raise awareness of the house’s deteriorating condition since December 2021, will lead the community engagement planning process. Friends member Christopher R. Rogers will direct it while working with Philadelphia cultural workers and community members to participate in the arts-centered participatory planning process.

The grant was made possible through the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program, which supports “a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where our stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue,” Penn’s CPCRS said in a statement Monday.

“This shows that this is a worthy project,” Rogers said on Monday. “We have some good people in our corner who believe in this community envisioning project.”

Rogers said the Friends group is continuing to work with the current owner of the house, Michael A. Thornton, a college professor in Florida who is going through Philadelphia courts to untangle the title to the house so that it can be sold to a nonprofit organization.

Rogers said the grant is for planning with the community, to find out what kinds of programs neighbors want to see at the Tanner House once it is renovated, possibly as a cultural center.

“We want to engage with the neighborhood to get local community opinions and ideas on how this house can serve the needs and desires of the neighborhood and how it fits into the overall ecosystem in Strawberry Mansion,” Rogers said.

While the Friends of the Tanner House group is fighting to preserve it from decay, its members also recognize that the Tanner House is not the only significant historic site in the area.

Noting there are also efforts to also preserve the Dox Thrash and the John Coltrane houses, Rogers said, “there is a historic district feeling for the Black cultural contributions in North Philadelphia.

“This is about the [Tanner] House and what we need to do to fix it, but we also want to use this momentum as a leverage to all the different sites. The Church of the Advocate is right down the street, and the Hank Gathers Rec Center is across the bridge.

“As we go into the summer, we are questioning how do we build community led spaces that provide safety. And all these different spots have a relationship to each other,” Rogers said.

Rogers also pointed out that the Friends of the Tanner House are continuing to raise money to stabilize the house before it is sold to a nonprofit organization.

This Mellon Foundation grant money can only be used for planning and community engagement and not for making the structural repairs needed for the house that The Inquirer first reported about in December 2021.

The next major fundraising event to complete the stabilization work is planned for Thursday evening, May 25 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where Henry Tanner studied, starting at about age 20.

Tanner family descendants Rae Alexander-Minter and Lewis Tanner Moore Jr. are among the guests invited. There will also be a showing of the excerpts of the HBO documentary film, Master of Light, about the artist George A. Morton, who told The Inquirer that Tanner was his inspiration as an artist.

PAFA president Eric Pryor and PAFA chief curator Anna Marley are also expected to attend.

While the Tanner House has its National Landmark status because of Henry Tanner’s accomplishments, The Inquirer first suggested in its 2021 article that the house is also historic because of the accomplishments of other members of the Tanner family.

These include Tanner’s father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and editor of the A.M.E. Church newspaper, the Christian Recorder, who also advocated for the education of people newly freed from enslavement.

Another Tanner family member was Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the artist’s grandniece. She was the first Black person to achieve a doctorate in economics in the United States from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, and the first Black woman to graduate from Penn’s Law School in 1927.