CREATIVE PLACEMAKING: CASE STUDIES
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Transforming Neighborhoods and Lives Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Mural Arts Program Through a unique city agency-non-profit hybrid, Philadelphia, once plagued by graffiti, is now the City of Murals. More than 3,000 of them have converted expanses of once-vacant walls into beacons of pride.
Photo by Clem Murray for the Philadelphia Inquirer
Stabilizing abandoned lots, enlivening community centers, and animating open spaces, multi-story paintings reflect the cultures of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. Twelve thousand residents and visitors tour the artworks annually. But the 2,500 youth, 400 inmates and ex-offenders, 300 professional artists, and 100 communities involved each year in arts education, restorative justice programs, and mural creation feel the Mural Arts Program’s impacts even more deeply.
Ann Northrup and inmate artists at Riverside Correctional Facility celebrate the dedication of Going Home, the mural on which they collaborated.
Today, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program is a city agency headed by founding artist Jane Golden. A non-profit sister organization, Philadelphia Mural Arts Advocates, works in tandem with the agency, securing service contracts and raising private grant dollars and donations. Half of the Mural Arts Program’s $6.5 million annual budget comes from private grants, donations, and earned income, and half is from the public sector. The City of Philadelphia contributes the bulk of public funding through staffing and service contracts, although the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts also provide support. The program’s crosscutting projects speak for themselves. Thanks to a partnership with Philadelphia’s Streets Department and the Design Center at Philadelphia University, two fleets of recycling trucks
now sport colorful youth-created graphic wraps. Through the process, youth learned about single-stream recycling and now look on with pride as the trucks service neighborhoods surrounding their schools. A 50,000-square-foot mural will soon enliven the massive expanse of parking garages at the Philadelphia International Airport, an initiative of the Deputy Mayor for Transportation. The artwork, How Philly Moves, will celebrate the joy of dance. To create it, artist JJ Tiziou photographed 60 professional and amateur dancers and will employ both artists and ex-offenders to install the mural, which will incorporate a selection of the photographs. To date, the Philadelphia Airport, Philadelphia Parking Authority, Bank of America, and US Airways have committed funding. A City search for a solution to a growing graffiti problem sparked the Mural Arts Program. In 1984, as part of the City’s Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network, Mayor Wilson Goode hired muralist Jane Golden to work with adjudicated graffiti writers. Golden recognized their artistic sensibilities. Through mural-making, she offered these youth a support structure, empowering them to create beautiful public works of art. From the start, neighborhood residents sanctioned and shaped mural themes and collaborated on design through facilitated community meetings. During the first ten years, many mural-involved community residents had