Firstival: Free Admission All Day!

As part of a yearlong celebration of national firsts across Philadelphia, join us for a family-friendly event exploring the history and legacy of America’s first penitentiary.

Enjoy free admission to Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site all day long—from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm! Explore this iconic site’s powerful history, deepen your understanding of the criminal justice system today, and imagine a more just future. Admission includes a self-guided audio tour, guide-led tour and discussion, mini tours and pop-up talks, art installations, exhibits, and more. All tours are limited capacity and subject to availability.

Visit between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm to take part in special Firstival programming. Engage with your neighbors—and visitors from across the country and around the world—as you reflect on the ever-evolving meanings of justice and freedom from the Revolutionary Era, through Eastern State’s opening in 1829, and into today.

• 11:00 am
  Firstival Welcoming Remarks
   
• 11:30 am–2:00 pm
  Community & Activity Fair — Make and take art with artist-in-residence Cody Stuhltrager. Connect with local businesses and community organizations from our Fairmount neighborhood and across the city.
   
• 11:30 am–12:30 pm
  Live Music — Listen as members of Orchestra 2001 fill the historic site with diverse musical selections that evoke the stories of people who lived and worked at Eastern State and other American prisons. Enjoy a jazz trio near the front gate, a rhapsody at Al Capone’s Cell, traditional Jewish music in the historic synagogue, and a live performance of a piece composed by incarcerated musician David Lee Powell  that inspired an art installation by Mark Menjivar in Cellblock 15.
   
• 12:30–12:45 pm
  Spoken Word Performance — Reflect as 2026/2027
  Philadelphia Poet Laureate, Raina J. León, Ph.D., and renowned percussionist, poet, and playwright Karen Smith, use the power of spoken word to contemplate historic milestones, urban growth, and human connection across and throughout Philadelphia’s history.

52 Weeks of Firsts is produced by the Philadelphia Historic District 250th Committee. 

Generous support provided by the Philadelphia 2026 Neighborhood Celebration Grant Fund, which is supported by the City of Philadelphia and PECO/Exelon Corporation.  

Meet the Performers & Community Partners

Orchestra 2001, Collaborative Musical Ensemble

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Orchestra 2001 is a collective of adventurous, virtuoso performers dedicated to the music of our time. The ensemble is a leader in connecting diverse audiences with the greatest music of the 20th and 21st centuries, engaging new listeners through exhilarating concerts, innovative artistic collaborations, and enriching community partnerships in Philadelphia and beyond. The ensemble has performed in 39 of Philadelphia’s 48 zip codes, throughout the United States, and in 9 foreign countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.  For more information, visit Orchestra2001.org.

Raina J. León, Ph.D., 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia

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Raina J. León, Ph.D. is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is the 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks,profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work.  She has received fellowships and residencies and attended retreats with The Watering Hole, the Obsidian Foundation, VONA, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts.

She co-founded the Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series (2024) in Germantown, Philadelphia with Sarah Browning in deep partnership with Young American Cider and Reclaim Philadelphia and now Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre and Hands Up Productions. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Award (2025), Letras Boricuas Fellowship (2025), a Velocity Fund Grant (2026), a Puffin Foundation grant (2026), and an Academy of American Poets laureates fellowship (2026). She retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there; she is professor emerita there. She teaches poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and poetry at Bryn Mawr College as a visiting professor. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. She is an enrolled Higuayagua Taíno tribal member and (very slowly) learning Hiwatahia.

Karen Smith, Percussionist, Poet, and Playwright

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Karen Smith (she/her) is a self-taught percussionist who captures “the rhythm of a place and the cadences of people” in performances with a wide range of artists, including two music collectives she founded: Weez the Peeples and Sistahs Laying Down Hands. Smith’s creative practice extends to poetry, theater, teaching, and a healing circle project she calls “spiritual atmospheric cleansing,” featuring percussion, song, and storytelling. As both a lead and accompanying drummer, she is a deeply collaborative improviser who has performed with Pew Fellows Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker, choreographer Debbie Allen, public speaker Stedman Graham, and many others. Her practice is focused on live performance in traditional venues as well as a variety of non-traditional settings, including fashion shows, prisons, martial arts demonstrations, and a grocery store during operating hours. Smith earned a BA in behavioral health studies from Alvernia University and a BS in health science from Kaplan University.

 

Cody Stuhltrager, Artist-In-Residence, ReVision: Art and Justice

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Cody Stuhltrager is an artist-in-residence at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, where he is developing a new body of work for a fall 2026 debut. Stuhltrager began his artistic career in 2013, collaborating with Mural Arts Philadelphia while incarcerated at SCI-Graterford. Over the past decade, he has contributed to dozens of Philadelphia murals and public art projects, exhibited at prominent venues including the Barnes Foundation, and dedicated himself to supporting fellow artists across disciplines in the production and installation of their work.