Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Digging through old schoolwork, found this, my Art History Seminar paper from senior undergrad. Enjoy!
The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is representative of both the acmes and shortcomings of a successful peoples’ art project. The Mural Arts Program has brought a means of artistic expression and voice to ordinary people and underserved youth, but because of constraints endemic to the nature of public art, the level of grassroots involvement aspired to by the Program is not always a reality.
The origins of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program lie in the mass political activism of the 1960s. Though not always institutionalized, grass-roots mural projects sprang up around the country as a means of bringing art out to the public and bringing the public into art. Some of these immediately blossomed into mural arts programs, with the most successful being that in Chicago. In Philadelphia, however, mural arts had a much slower start, largely due to the gang violence and incredibly small scale of the programs that actually existed. By the 1970s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art had begun its Community Outreach Program, and part of that program involved the creation of public art, such as murals. However, the program remained small in scope until the 1980s, when it became a function of the city government.
By the early 1980s, the gang and drug-related violence that had plagued Philadelphia in previous decades has largely abated, but the problem of graffiti remained. Drawing on an important lesson learned by the infantile mural arts projects in the 1960s and 70s, Mayor Wilson Goode announced in 1984 the creation of an Anti-Graffiti Campaign to combat the graffiti plague by using murals. It had been discovered in the preceding years that graffitists avoided writing on walls which were covered in murals; the logical solution to the problem was, then, to greatly expand the number and size of murals in the city, denying graffitists the blank wall space on which to write, or at least banishing the graffiti to back alleys where the average person – or tourist – was not likely to find them.
By 1996, the program was so successful that the Anti-Graffiti Campaign was ended, and the mural aspect of the program split and formed into its own organization; thus the Mural Arts Program was born. The Program exists as a strange hybrid of both non-profit organization and municipal bureau, since it is technically a part of the City of Philadelphia government. Jane Golden, the woman chosen in 1984 to head the program, was selected in 1996 to head the new Mural Arts Program, because of her extensive studies of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his work. She also has a Master of Fine Arts from the Gross Mason School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and degrees in Fine Arts and Political Science from Stanford. In short, Miss Golden possessed the right frame of mind and knowledge about politics, art, and mural painting required to head a mural arts project. It should come as no surprise, then, that she is still in charge of the program in 2009. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently described her by saying: “[the Mural Arts Program] is by far the most important, prolific, and successful public art project in the nation. And that is because of Jane Golden [sic]. The artist, a woman of remarkable intensity, drive, and heart, took what might have remained a minor city program aimed at eradicating graffiti and turned it into a force for beauty, redemption, and hope. Golden is a singular force who helps make Philadelphia distinctive [sic].” Since 2000 she has taught an interdisciplinary class on mural arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The process of creating a mural is long and arduous, and can begin in one of several ways. The most common way is simply for the Program to select particular buildings which it deems suitable for holding a mural and inquire with the community or business if they would like to have a mural put there, and what they would like it to portray. Another way is for communities to come to the Program and request that a mural be put in their community, or for a business or building owner to approach the Program; sometimes they have ideas about topics for the mural, sometimes they do not. The third and final way is for politicians to come to the Program and request a mural for their districts, either naming a specific location or a general area. Once a site has been chosen, then the Program sets out to find funds for it. The average mural costs between $15,000 and $20,000, though the largest have cost as much as $35,000. Smaller murals may cost less than $10,000. While accumulating funding, the Program interacts with the community where the mural will go in order to understand what it is they wish to be portrayed, the overall design and composition of the mural, and just how big it will be.
There are various methods by which the mural may be created, depending on the circumstances of each mural’s location. Most muralists prefer to work directly on the wall surface itself, only buffing it and sealing it beforehand, but sometimes circumstances prevent this. The most common method is by grid transfer, where a grid is superimposed over a smaller image of the mural, and each grid square on the wall is painted one at a time to match with the part of the image contained in the grid on the original image. Another method is pouncing, in the manner that fresco painters have transferred images to their walls since Antiquity. A finished-size image of the mural-to-be is drawn on paper, which is then held against the wall where the mural will be painted. Small holes are tapped along the lines of the work, and then a bag full of chalk is pounded against the holes such that when the paper is removed, all the lines in the mural can be seen on the wall as chalk dots, which need only be connected and colored in.
A third method of direct-application is wall projection. This type of transfer can only be done at night, as an overhead projector similar to those used in classrooms is used to project the image on the wall, where it can then be painted or outlined. The fourth and final method is the parachute method, which involves painting the mural on large pieces of parachute fabric, which are then adhered to the wall. This can be used for a variety of reasons, including an irregular surface or prolonged inclement weather, such as when a mural is being prepared over the winter. This is also the chosen method used in the prison outreach program, whereby incarcerated prisoners participate in mural making by painting the murals on the fabric brought to their penitentiaries. Many artists chose not to use this method, however, unless they absolutely must, since it is done primarily indoors and away from the input of the community. Also, many of the artists enjoy the unique circumstances of each mural’s creation, such as location, surface, and weather, as part of the adventure and fun of the job.
To create these murals, the artists use an acrylic mural paint called “NovaColor,” produced specifically for this sort of outdoor painting. It was not always so, however, and murals from the early days did not have ultraviolet protection, which has caused them to fade through years of exposure to sunlight. Most muralists apply this paint directly to the buffed surface of the building, but as mentioned before, sometimes the mural is painted on parachute fabric and attached to the wall once it is complete. After the mural is completed, it is sealed with a weather-resistant gel to protect it from the elements; some murals also require a weather sealant on the surface under the mural as well, before work even starts. Other materials include obvious things such as brushes and rollers, and taller paintings require the renting of scaffolding, which can be very expensive.
The question must ultimately be asked: “why murals?” Murals are a unique form of public art called “peoples’ art.” Because of the relative ease of their construction, they invite the participation of the community in ways it could not engage were the public art architectural or sculptural in nature. Those kinds of public art are simple art that is in the public, but murals are art created by the public. It is a convenient coincidence that murals are also the cheapest form of public visual art.
It is perhaps appropriate, then that the murals have no defined author, if they were painted by a group of people, or that if there is a single artist, that their name is not tied to the work except for purely archival purposes. Lacking an author to decide what the work means or represents, there can be no conflict between intended message and received message, between Signifier and Signified, only the received messages. Though perhaps consensus was arrived at when deciding how the murals would be composed, there can be no subconscious insertion of volksgeist, only conscious attempts at conveying messages. It is also appropriate, then, that the murals deteriorate so rapidly – over a span of 20-25 years – and replaced; as records of the spirit of their times, there is little purpose in their heavily-inlaid zeitgeist for future generations. These are not intended to turn Philadelphia into an American Composanto, merely express social concerns and make cultural references relevant only to the time when they were made. A mural addressing asthma problems may have no meaning at all for inhabitants of the neighborhood in a hundred years or fifty, and residents of that time may no longer know of the local heroes whom present murals portray.
There is a unique psychology to peoples’ art which makes it such a useful social tool. Because the surrounding community is involved in the mural’s creation, it helps that community to interact. In this, it can actually create a sense of community where none existed before, with family lives becoming increasingly atomized in recent history. As artist Shaprio Kiok put it, “community art is art that builds community.” Because of their direct involvement with the creation of these murals, they become products of the community as a whole; residents come to refer to the mural as “their” mural and not the artist’s. The presence of murals around the city invokes new ideas of pride and identity. Residents regard the presence of murals in their neighborhood or on the side of their business or apartment flat as a mark of prestige, especially when the murals become widely known. Because it is their creation and they take pride in it, communities work together to take care of their murals and the areas around them, which may also serve as a focal point for future community projects such as a community garden or simply a nice hang-out spot.
Engaging the people in art demystifies art; it gets people talking about art. In this way, murals help expand the public discourse. The people identify with murals because they tell the story of the people themselves. It is not because of figurative resemblances in the murals, but the themes themselves and their expression in a “vocabulary of vernacular images.” The Latin term for vernacular is “vulgate,” which means “of the people;” in that sense, these images are vulgar, and that is precisely why people like them so much. That is why the Mural Arts Program works with communities, so that the murals address the concerns of the residents. Sometimes the themes are community problems like absentee landlords, drugs, or racial tensions, but other times murals portray local heroes, adopted sons and daughters of the city, or simply the favorite celebrities of local residents. Portraits of everyone from Paul Robeson to Frank Sinatra and no-name local politicians or community activists can be found as mural subjects around the city.
For all the great things that the Mural Arts Program has produced, there are some major shortcomings and drawbacks to its program. The first and largest of these is bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of an expanding organization is in many ways inevitable; as small community activist groups expand and become institutionalized, they require an ever-increasing delegation of responsibilities, which leads to an impersonalization of the organization. It is no longer easy for the average person to speak with the people in power, and each person in the organization has a smaller say in how things are run. In addition, purely administrative positions are born, which results in people being in charge of programs or making decisions about things in which they are not directly involved. Again, these things are somewhat inevitable as organizations experience success and grow, but this effect becomes more pronounced in an organization which touts its grass-roots origins and continuing grass-roots nature.
Other ways the bureaucracy has developed is to meet other unique attributes and problems of non-profit public art organizations. First, one of the major roles of the Mural Arts Program is simply to find funding to pay for the murals it creates, and funding seasons run in cycles; this places a demand on time. Summer youth employment schedules are another cyclical phenomenon which dictates the nature and schedule of the Program. Weather can also play a role, as creating murals is much more demanding during the winter or the dog days of summer, with the former being far less likely to occur at all. In addition, IRS tax codes governing nonprofit organizations further govern available time for murals. Planning for mural construction must be precisely planned out and cannot be improvised in ways that would negate the need for bureaucratic governance.
Because of these constraints, the organization cannot be as responsive to community wants and needs as it should be, as mural artist Astrid Bowlby described. When she worked with high school students to create a mural on the side of their school, the Chester Arthur School in South Philadelphia, she found it regrettable that it was only the school students who were involved in the brainstorming for the mural, not the whole community. Because of time constraints, even the high school students were only met with a few times, which, as Ms. Bowlby described it, “resulted in the design being shoved down their throats.” Approval from the rest of the community was simply tacit. Ms. Bowlby had a very negative experience with the program overall, due to other described problems such as intransigent bureaucratic chiefs and the Program behaving as a company not as a collaborative grassroots organization. Though she emphasized that these were only her experiences and probably not indicative of the entirety of the program, she also hinted that she had heard similar experiences from other participant artists.
Another muralist shed light on other aspects of the MAP. James D. Burns has worked a staff position since August 2008 and thus has insight into the inner workings of the program that a regular artist like Bowlby could not. He does not deny that the organization has expanded, and that such expansion includes increasing amounts of management and staff positions, but simply sees this expansion as the result of success, and urges that “if organization is vital for survival and growth, then you have to take the good with the bad,” and Burns thinks that the overall effect of what I have termed “bureaucratization” is good. He also described how, despite the growing staff numbers, feedback from all levels is taken into account by the administration heads: “I think that Philadelphia is lucky to have this organization. I was born and raised here and I remember the blight of the eighties. I was young but I remember. There is work to do. There are always critics willing to write on both sides of the fence and believe me... it is all taken into consideration by the people upstairs.” So by Burns’ word, the bureaucratization is not as bad as it might appear to be, or has the potential to be.
Another problem already mentioned is impersonalization of the organization. Part of this is driven by the bureaucratization, but it is also a consequence of the organization’s reliance on community activist groups; as activist outlooks changed into community service outlooks, mural organizations followed suit. This is as true of mural programs in Chicago and New York as it is of Philadelphia’s. In addition, mural organizations began to think of the communities they worked in as clients for whom they were providing a service, not as organs which encourage, interpret, and create community expression. This transformation was aided largely by municipal and corporate funders as well as politicians, all of whom have only ever regarded the communities in this way.
In addition to the myriad murals the Program has created itself, it has also helped to inspire other kinds of public murals as well throughout the city. One artist who has contributed non-affiliated works is Isaiah Zagar, who uses recycled materials to create enormous mosaics that encompass entire buildings or even city blocks, creating a tunnel of shimmering colors. Zagar works only in South Philadelphia, where the residents declare the buildings he has finished to have been “Zagarized.” Zagar works by himself, mostly, to create these mosaics, and his masterpiece is a small maze called “The Magic Garden” on South Street. In addition, the Mural Arts Program’s success and widespread appreciation for their work has led to communities taking the initiative and creating their own murals independently of the Program. These represent the truest form of grass-roots community expression, a true “peoples’ art.” These murals do not face the same constraints in production that murals by the Program do; there is no formal organization so there is no need to raise funds, deal with IRS tax codes, or consult with local politicians. In addition, the community can create essentially whatever images they want so long as they are legal, and can work at their own pace and modify and update the murals as they please. The occurrence of these spontaneous grass-roots murals is probably the Mural Arts Program’s greatest legacy, having served as a model and inspiration to local communities to take the initiative and beautify their own neighborhoods themselves, build communities themselves, and to express themselves artistically.
Despite its shortcomings, Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has still been a fantastic success. Rising out of the Sixties-era social activism along with numerous other public art programs in cities around the United States, Philadelphia’s program has become the most successful and widest-reaching of them all. Today the Program produces more than one hundred new murals each year, and has produced more than three thousand over the course of its lifetime. It works cooperatively with other mural arts programs in cities both in the United States and around the world, and has outreach programs into the prison system, bringing public art and community activism to millions of people. But the Mural Arts Program has also been the victim of its own successes; as it expanded into a larger and larger program it became increasingly bureaucratized, and has lost touch with some of the grass-roots aspects which gave it so much strength in its early days. Nonetheless, the benefits outweigh the cost, bringing a form of public art to many more people, whilst helping to inspire communities to take the creation of public art into their own hands.
Bibliography
• Bowlby, Astrid. Interviewed by Allan Bowling. Towson, Maryland, October 12, 2009. Transcript in possession of this writer.
• Burns, James D. Interviewed by Allan Bowling. Philadelphia, October 25, 2009. Transcript in possession of this writer.
• City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Accessed on October 25, 2009. http://www.muralarts.org/
• Golden, Jane, Rice, Robin, and Kinney, Monica Yant. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
• Philly.com: Everything About Philly. “Defining Lives: Jane Golden.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. July 25, 2008. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/25912164.html.
• “Philadelphia’s Magic Garden.” (Accessed on October 25, 2009). http://www.philadelphiasmagicgardens.org/
• Philadelphia Mural Arts Program Tour. October 17, 2009.
• Cockcroft, Eva, Weber, John Pitman, and Cockcroft, James. Toward a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
The History and Nature of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is representative of both the acmes and shortcomings of a successful peoples’ art project. The Mural Arts Program has brought a means of artistic expression and voice to ordinary people and underserved youth, but because of constraints endemic to the nature of public art, the level of grassroots involvement aspired to by the Program is not always a reality.
The origins of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program lie in the mass political activism of the 1960s. Though not always institutionalized, grass-roots mural projects sprang up around the country as a means of bringing art out to the public and bringing the public into art. Some of these immediately blossomed into mural arts programs, with the most successful being that in Chicago. In Philadelphia, however, mural arts had a much slower start, largely due to the gang violence and incredibly small scale of the programs that actually existed. By the 1970s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art had begun its Community Outreach Program, and part of that program involved the creation of public art, such as murals. However, the program remained small in scope until the 1980s, when it became a function of the city government.
By the early 1980s, the gang and drug-related violence that had plagued Philadelphia in previous decades has largely abated, but the problem of graffiti remained. Drawing on an important lesson learned by the infantile mural arts projects in the 1960s and 70s, Mayor Wilson Goode announced in 1984 the creation of an Anti-Graffiti Campaign to combat the graffiti plague by using murals. It had been discovered in the preceding years that graffitists avoided writing on walls which were covered in murals; the logical solution to the problem was, then, to greatly expand the number and size of murals in the city, denying graffitists the blank wall space on which to write, or at least banishing the graffiti to back alleys where the average person – or tourist – was not likely to find them.
By 1996, the program was so successful that the Anti-Graffiti Campaign was ended, and the mural aspect of the program split and formed into its own organization; thus the Mural Arts Program was born. The Program exists as a strange hybrid of both non-profit organization and municipal bureau, since it is technically a part of the City of Philadelphia government. Jane Golden, the woman chosen in 1984 to head the program, was selected in 1996 to head the new Mural Arts Program, because of her extensive studies of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his work. She also has a Master of Fine Arts from the Gross Mason School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and degrees in Fine Arts and Political Science from Stanford. In short, Miss Golden possessed the right frame of mind and knowledge about politics, art, and mural painting required to head a mural arts project. It should come as no surprise, then, that she is still in charge of the program in 2009. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently described her by saying: “[the Mural Arts Program] is by far the most important, prolific, and successful public art project in the nation. And that is because of Jane Golden [sic]. The artist, a woman of remarkable intensity, drive, and heart, took what might have remained a minor city program aimed at eradicating graffiti and turned it into a force for beauty, redemption, and hope. Golden is a singular force who helps make Philadelphia distinctive [sic].” Since 2000 she has taught an interdisciplinary class on mural arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The process of creating a mural is long and arduous, and can begin in one of several ways. The most common way is simply for the Program to select particular buildings which it deems suitable for holding a mural and inquire with the community or business if they would like to have a mural put there, and what they would like it to portray. Another way is for communities to come to the Program and request that a mural be put in their community, or for a business or building owner to approach the Program; sometimes they have ideas about topics for the mural, sometimes they do not. The third and final way is for politicians to come to the Program and request a mural for their districts, either naming a specific location or a general area. Once a site has been chosen, then the Program sets out to find funds for it. The average mural costs between $15,000 and $20,000, though the largest have cost as much as $35,000. Smaller murals may cost less than $10,000. While accumulating funding, the Program interacts with the community where the mural will go in order to understand what it is they wish to be portrayed, the overall design and composition of the mural, and just how big it will be.
There are various methods by which the mural may be created, depending on the circumstances of each mural’s location. Most muralists prefer to work directly on the wall surface itself, only buffing it and sealing it beforehand, but sometimes circumstances prevent this. The most common method is by grid transfer, where a grid is superimposed over a smaller image of the mural, and each grid square on the wall is painted one at a time to match with the part of the image contained in the grid on the original image. Another method is pouncing, in the manner that fresco painters have transferred images to their walls since Antiquity. A finished-size image of the mural-to-be is drawn on paper, which is then held against the wall where the mural will be painted. Small holes are tapped along the lines of the work, and then a bag full of chalk is pounded against the holes such that when the paper is removed, all the lines in the mural can be seen on the wall as chalk dots, which need only be connected and colored in.
A third method of direct-application is wall projection. This type of transfer can only be done at night, as an overhead projector similar to those used in classrooms is used to project the image on the wall, where it can then be painted or outlined. The fourth and final method is the parachute method, which involves painting the mural on large pieces of parachute fabric, which are then adhered to the wall. This can be used for a variety of reasons, including an irregular surface or prolonged inclement weather, such as when a mural is being prepared over the winter. This is also the chosen method used in the prison outreach program, whereby incarcerated prisoners participate in mural making by painting the murals on the fabric brought to their penitentiaries. Many artists chose not to use this method, however, unless they absolutely must, since it is done primarily indoors and away from the input of the community. Also, many of the artists enjoy the unique circumstances of each mural’s creation, such as location, surface, and weather, as part of the adventure and fun of the job.
To create these murals, the artists use an acrylic mural paint called “NovaColor,” produced specifically for this sort of outdoor painting. It was not always so, however, and murals from the early days did not have ultraviolet protection, which has caused them to fade through years of exposure to sunlight. Most muralists apply this paint directly to the buffed surface of the building, but as mentioned before, sometimes the mural is painted on parachute fabric and attached to the wall once it is complete. After the mural is completed, it is sealed with a weather-resistant gel to protect it from the elements; some murals also require a weather sealant on the surface under the mural as well, before work even starts. Other materials include obvious things such as brushes and rollers, and taller paintings require the renting of scaffolding, which can be very expensive.
The question must ultimately be asked: “why murals?” Murals are a unique form of public art called “peoples’ art.” Because of the relative ease of their construction, they invite the participation of the community in ways it could not engage were the public art architectural or sculptural in nature. Those kinds of public art are simple art that is in the public, but murals are art created by the public. It is a convenient coincidence that murals are also the cheapest form of public visual art.
It is perhaps appropriate, then that the murals have no defined author, if they were painted by a group of people, or that if there is a single artist, that their name is not tied to the work except for purely archival purposes. Lacking an author to decide what the work means or represents, there can be no conflict between intended message and received message, between Signifier and Signified, only the received messages. Though perhaps consensus was arrived at when deciding how the murals would be composed, there can be no subconscious insertion of volksgeist, only conscious attempts at conveying messages. It is also appropriate, then, that the murals deteriorate so rapidly – over a span of 20-25 years – and replaced; as records of the spirit of their times, there is little purpose in their heavily-inlaid zeitgeist for future generations. These are not intended to turn Philadelphia into an American Composanto, merely express social concerns and make cultural references relevant only to the time when they were made. A mural addressing asthma problems may have no meaning at all for inhabitants of the neighborhood in a hundred years or fifty, and residents of that time may no longer know of the local heroes whom present murals portray.
There is a unique psychology to peoples’ art which makes it such a useful social tool. Because the surrounding community is involved in the mural’s creation, it helps that community to interact. In this, it can actually create a sense of community where none existed before, with family lives becoming increasingly atomized in recent history. As artist Shaprio Kiok put it, “community art is art that builds community.” Because of their direct involvement with the creation of these murals, they become products of the community as a whole; residents come to refer to the mural as “their” mural and not the artist’s. The presence of murals around the city invokes new ideas of pride and identity. Residents regard the presence of murals in their neighborhood or on the side of their business or apartment flat as a mark of prestige, especially when the murals become widely known. Because it is their creation and they take pride in it, communities work together to take care of their murals and the areas around them, which may also serve as a focal point for future community projects such as a community garden or simply a nice hang-out spot.
Engaging the people in art demystifies art; it gets people talking about art. In this way, murals help expand the public discourse. The people identify with murals because they tell the story of the people themselves. It is not because of figurative resemblances in the murals, but the themes themselves and their expression in a “vocabulary of vernacular images.” The Latin term for vernacular is “vulgate,” which means “of the people;” in that sense, these images are vulgar, and that is precisely why people like them so much. That is why the Mural Arts Program works with communities, so that the murals address the concerns of the residents. Sometimes the themes are community problems like absentee landlords, drugs, or racial tensions, but other times murals portray local heroes, adopted sons and daughters of the city, or simply the favorite celebrities of local residents. Portraits of everyone from Paul Robeson to Frank Sinatra and no-name local politicians or community activists can be found as mural subjects around the city.
For all the great things that the Mural Arts Program has produced, there are some major shortcomings and drawbacks to its program. The first and largest of these is bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of an expanding organization is in many ways inevitable; as small community activist groups expand and become institutionalized, they require an ever-increasing delegation of responsibilities, which leads to an impersonalization of the organization. It is no longer easy for the average person to speak with the people in power, and each person in the organization has a smaller say in how things are run. In addition, purely administrative positions are born, which results in people being in charge of programs or making decisions about things in which they are not directly involved. Again, these things are somewhat inevitable as organizations experience success and grow, but this effect becomes more pronounced in an organization which touts its grass-roots origins and continuing grass-roots nature.
Other ways the bureaucracy has developed is to meet other unique attributes and problems of non-profit public art organizations. First, one of the major roles of the Mural Arts Program is simply to find funding to pay for the murals it creates, and funding seasons run in cycles; this places a demand on time. Summer youth employment schedules are another cyclical phenomenon which dictates the nature and schedule of the Program. Weather can also play a role, as creating murals is much more demanding during the winter or the dog days of summer, with the former being far less likely to occur at all. In addition, IRS tax codes governing nonprofit organizations further govern available time for murals. Planning for mural construction must be precisely planned out and cannot be improvised in ways that would negate the need for bureaucratic governance.
Because of these constraints, the organization cannot be as responsive to community wants and needs as it should be, as mural artist Astrid Bowlby described. When she worked with high school students to create a mural on the side of their school, the Chester Arthur School in South Philadelphia, she found it regrettable that it was only the school students who were involved in the brainstorming for the mural, not the whole community. Because of time constraints, even the high school students were only met with a few times, which, as Ms. Bowlby described it, “resulted in the design being shoved down their throats.” Approval from the rest of the community was simply tacit. Ms. Bowlby had a very negative experience with the program overall, due to other described problems such as intransigent bureaucratic chiefs and the Program behaving as a company not as a collaborative grassroots organization. Though she emphasized that these were only her experiences and probably not indicative of the entirety of the program, she also hinted that she had heard similar experiences from other participant artists.
Another muralist shed light on other aspects of the MAP. James D. Burns has worked a staff position since August 2008 and thus has insight into the inner workings of the program that a regular artist like Bowlby could not. He does not deny that the organization has expanded, and that such expansion includes increasing amounts of management and staff positions, but simply sees this expansion as the result of success, and urges that “if organization is vital for survival and growth, then you have to take the good with the bad,” and Burns thinks that the overall effect of what I have termed “bureaucratization” is good. He also described how, despite the growing staff numbers, feedback from all levels is taken into account by the administration heads: “I think that Philadelphia is lucky to have this organization. I was born and raised here and I remember the blight of the eighties. I was young but I remember. There is work to do. There are always critics willing to write on both sides of the fence and believe me... it is all taken into consideration by the people upstairs.” So by Burns’ word, the bureaucratization is not as bad as it might appear to be, or has the potential to be.
Another problem already mentioned is impersonalization of the organization. Part of this is driven by the bureaucratization, but it is also a consequence of the organization’s reliance on community activist groups; as activist outlooks changed into community service outlooks, mural organizations followed suit. This is as true of mural programs in Chicago and New York as it is of Philadelphia’s. In addition, mural organizations began to think of the communities they worked in as clients for whom they were providing a service, not as organs which encourage, interpret, and create community expression. This transformation was aided largely by municipal and corporate funders as well as politicians, all of whom have only ever regarded the communities in this way.
In addition to the myriad murals the Program has created itself, it has also helped to inspire other kinds of public murals as well throughout the city. One artist who has contributed non-affiliated works is Isaiah Zagar, who uses recycled materials to create enormous mosaics that encompass entire buildings or even city blocks, creating a tunnel of shimmering colors. Zagar works only in South Philadelphia, where the residents declare the buildings he has finished to have been “Zagarized.” Zagar works by himself, mostly, to create these mosaics, and his masterpiece is a small maze called “The Magic Garden” on South Street. In addition, the Mural Arts Program’s success and widespread appreciation for their work has led to communities taking the initiative and creating their own murals independently of the Program. These represent the truest form of grass-roots community expression, a true “peoples’ art.” These murals do not face the same constraints in production that murals by the Program do; there is no formal organization so there is no need to raise funds, deal with IRS tax codes, or consult with local politicians. In addition, the community can create essentially whatever images they want so long as they are legal, and can work at their own pace and modify and update the murals as they please. The occurrence of these spontaneous grass-roots murals is probably the Mural Arts Program’s greatest legacy, having served as a model and inspiration to local communities to take the initiative and beautify their own neighborhoods themselves, build communities themselves, and to express themselves artistically.
Despite its shortcomings, Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has still been a fantastic success. Rising out of the Sixties-era social activism along with numerous other public art programs in cities around the United States, Philadelphia’s program has become the most successful and widest-reaching of them all. Today the Program produces more than one hundred new murals each year, and has produced more than three thousand over the course of its lifetime. It works cooperatively with other mural arts programs in cities both in the United States and around the world, and has outreach programs into the prison system, bringing public art and community activism to millions of people. But the Mural Arts Program has also been the victim of its own successes; as it expanded into a larger and larger program it became increasingly bureaucratized, and has lost touch with some of the grass-roots aspects which gave it so much strength in its early days. Nonetheless, the benefits outweigh the cost, bringing a form of public art to many more people, whilst helping to inspire communities to take the creation of public art into their own hands.
Bibliography
• Bowlby, Astrid. Interviewed by Allan Bowling. Towson, Maryland, October 12, 2009. Transcript in possession of this writer.
• Burns, James D. Interviewed by Allan Bowling. Philadelphia, October 25, 2009. Transcript in possession of this writer.
• City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Accessed on October 25, 2009. http://www.muralarts.org/
• Golden, Jane, Rice, Robin, and Kinney, Monica Yant. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
• Philly.com: Everything About Philly. “Defining Lives: Jane Golden.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. July 25, 2008. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/25912164.html.
• “Philadelphia’s Magic Garden.” (Accessed on October 25, 2009). http://www.philadelphiasmagicgardens.org/
• Philadelphia Mural Arts Program Tour. October 17, 2009.
• Cockcroft, Eva, Weber, John Pitman, and Cockcroft, James. Toward a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
