This mural is one of thousands in Philadelphia.
They’re in yuppie Rittenhouse Square and working class Fishtown,
near the Liberty Bell, and in West Philly too.
Why does Philly have so many murals?
And how did they make it happen?
It’s not just because they’re pretty, though they are that.
Murals aren’t paintings, but tools….that create wealth, employ people, and can help
reimagine any city, one wall at a time.
At Broad and Spring Garden you’ll find Meg Saligman’s “Common Threads.”
Across the street from that, near a grate, you’ll find this humble pole.
This is kind of the thing that started Philly’s obsession with murals.
Graffiti.
“It was all like an unknown world to me.
In a way, but it was also super exciting.“
Jane Golden founded Philly’s mural arts program.
She came to Philly from LA, where she’d painted more than 50 murals.
She was hired in the 1980s in to work as a part of Mayor Wilson Goode’s “Anti-Graffiti
Network.”
People saw graffiti as a plague.
So the idea was to stop graffiti by recruiting graffiti artists to make murals.
“If you had met me back then, my colleagues would have been Baby Rock, and Knife, and
Cool Earl, and Disco Duck.
It was unbelievable, it was so great.
I like fell in love with Philadelphia through the eyes of young people and community leaders.”
Here’s Dr. J. in a suit.
He looks good, right?
When this mural was painted in 1990, people were certain it’d be defaced with graffiti.
When it wasn’t, it proved an anti-graffiti strategy — murals could serve as an artistic
shield against vandalism.
That’s become a model for lots of cities nationwide.
“At the end of the day, it was like the perfect vehicle to really move these kids
from where they were to another point, without being like a fascist or a dictator or too
prescriptive.”
But for Philly to grow into a city with thousands of murals, it took a total transformation—
not just for the city, but for the program that covered it, too.
Murals need money.
Mural Arts scrambles to get it.
That was the case with Common Threads, when Meg Saligman approached Jane Golden with an
idea.
“She said, do you have funding?”
“And I was like, mmm, not really,” I said, “but I’ll find funding.”
“She said ‘really?’
and I was like, ‘yeah,’ so she said, ‘OK, guess what, I got a grant from the National
Endowment of the Arts.’
It was a grant for however much money.”
“So I said, OK, that’ll be our start.”
“So then I went and I found somebody from the city, so we put that in the pot.”
“Then we applied to a few little foundations and we got some grants, and then we kept raising
money.”
“And we’d run out of money, and it’d be like halfway.
And we’d be like,
oh my God, we better raise some more money!”
And I remember we got further down and further down the wall, and then finally, I remember
the guy who came, he was working for the Philadelphia Foundation, he had a check for us for $5,000,
and he drove up to the wall and he goes, “Here’s your check!”
And it allowed us to finish the mural.
That scramble was only possible because in the mid-90s, Mural Arts restructured to use
both public and private money.
The organization brings in an average of $1.50 in private funds for every dollar it gets
from the city.
“I think our key ingredient is the leveraging of public and private funds, because without
both sectors at work, we would do less work, and I think having the long term support of
the city has ensured our longevity.”
That means it gets city perks, like the historic building that’s home to the program.
But it also seeks private dollars to pay for artists and materials.
And that money doesn’t just change a city’s colors.
It changes its character, too.
Let’s say you don’t care about Theatre of Life on Lombard and Broad or
One World just over on 16th.
The walls are just part of the program.
Murals can boost property values and combat blight.
That Common Threads building?
Today it’s being marketed as the “Mural Lofts.”
People see those murals, too.
In 2014, tours of the city brought 15,000 people to see the murals, with 65%
leaving the center of the city to see more neighborhoods.
Across the street from Common Threads, you’ll find a mural on a school.
In addition to employing a staff of artists, Mural Arts includes education programs for
about 1,000 students.
Mural Arts also designs some programs specifically for artists with mental health and substance
abuse challenges.
The Yale School of Medicine found that this “public art” helped “public health.”
And the Mural Arts Guild program, for formerly incarcerated individuals, reduced the rate
of return to prison.
The laundry list of benefits is impressive.
But these murals are really about communities expressing themselves, whether it’s a
photo-realistic picture of a legendary pool player,
Or a modern collage featuring icons like The Roots.
The goal is to help communities make the city their city, whether they like Shepard Fairey,
or Keith Haring, or Frank Sinatra.
“What we want is for the community to be ok with it, right?
To be inspired by it, so that it has meaning for them.”
“And then all of it together, it’s like this giant crescendo, that really speaks to
the importance of not just beauty— but beauty does have importance—
but also representation, and how that representation happens.
It can happen all different ways.”
“How great is that?
That we get to experience all these different narratives that, in the end,
speak about our lives?
But isn’t that what art does, that it shines a light on our
diversity, but lifts up our commonality and in the end
connects us to all that makes us human?
I think that at the end of the day that probably inspires me almost more than anything.”
“I am a very serious wallhunter.
This means that no matter where I am, no matter what city I am in, I will notice really good
blank walls.”