The Whole Shebang was co-founded in 2014 by artists, partners, and sometimes collaborators  Meg Foley (she/her) and Carmichael Jones (they/them) to provide a home for the practices and growth of working artists and teachers, with support by then Manager Chelsea Murphy. Foley and Jones were looking for a place to be active working artists and to spread out, to overlap and cross paths with other artists and their practices, and for a place that housed many vital directions, not just theirs. Pregnant (literally) and hungry for more experimental performance research, Meg decided to bring the workshops she wanted to see in Philly to her. They wanted to participate in fostering artistic community, dedicated practice combined with exchange across practices and disciplines, while also raising a family. South Philly provided the literal location, merging queer community, performance community, visual arts community, public transportation, and a building big enough that it could house it all. As collaborators and partners they hope for The Whole Shebang to be a hub and a safe(r) space for creative and experimental arts in South Philly.

Formerly owned by a South Philly Mummers’ Brigade (and a stable long before that), Foley and Jones purchased the building in 2014 and renovated it from 2014-15. They built the dance studio with a heated, sprung floor upstairs, created custom shops for visual artists and sculptors downstairs in the art studio space, and built an apartment for their family and domestic lives. Eventually Shebang came to include a downstairs office space as well (formerly a catering kitchen, and a row home before that.)

From 2015-2020, Shebang offered professional and open access workshops and classes, as well as performances in the dance studio. We are fortunate to have hosted the creative thinking and teaching of such artists as Alice Chauchat, Asimina Chremos, Meg Foley, Christina Gesualdi, Lela Aisha Jones/Flyground, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, makini poe, Shannon Murphy, Nicole Bindler, Dan Blacksburg, Eroca Nicols, Stina Nyberg, iele paloumpis, and Theater of the Oppressed, amongst others. 

From 2018-2020, Shebang hosted Open Space residencies, offering weeklong, fully subsidized residencies to artists such as Casa de Coco, Laura Farrell, Marie Hinson, and Mel Krodman.

In early 2020, in an effort to increase the range of creative voices programming in the space and support Philadelphia artists, Shebang shifted to an Artist Share model, which allowed the studio to continue during lockdown and early Covid. Shebang re-opened (quietly) to rentals in 2023 and as of the end of 2024, is eager to more loudly invite people to activate the space. Huzzah!

The Whole Shebang acknowledges the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Lenni-Lenape First Nation on which we are residing, learning, working and organizing today.