Book talk: Mural Arts @ 30
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Ohh and ahh at Philly's murals, but take a peek at this book to consider their deeper impact and history.
Jane Golden, executive director of the Mural Arts Program, mentions somewhere in the middle of her speech how much she loves her job, though to everyone who’s been paying attention, this is overtly evident.
She speaks in a rapid, enthusiastic voice and uses sweeping hand gestures when she comes to a topic that particularly excites her. Last Tuesday night, at the Free Library of Philadelphia on Vine Street, Golden spoke about Temple University Press’s release of Mural Arts @ 30, a book that traces the 30-year history of the Philadelphia Mural Arts program.
Golden began her remarks with praise for Temple Press for pushing her and the Mural Arts program to create a book that could have “national significance” beyond the two previous releases about Philadelphia murals. Mural Arts @ 30 combines beautiful color photos of murals across the city with essays concerning the artistic, cultural and social significance of mural making.
If there is one thread that ties the essays and artworks together, it is that the importance of murals lies just as much off the walls and within the communities where these murals exist, or as coeditor David Updike put it in his introduction of Golden, Mural Arts @ 30 is “about transforming places, but mostly it’s about transforming people.”
During her speech, Golden proudly recounted the history of the program from its 1984 inception under Mayor Wilson Goode as the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. It began as a radical idea to solve the graffiti epidemic – rather than just paint over graffiti and punish the offenders, the PAGN would work with graffiti taggers. They signed a contract promising to start focusing their creative and artistic abilities on covering the cities walls in murals instead of tags.
Golden highlights Mayor Ed Rendell’s term in the mid-90s as a key point of mission evolution. 1997 brought on a shift of the PAGN “anti-graffiti” attitude to the “pro-art” attitude of the Mural Arts Program. Thirty years later, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has created more than 3,800 pieces of community-made art across the city. It has created art education programs that have given thousands of impoverished kids the chance to succeed. Mural Arts @ 30 gives deeper insight into the importance of the murals that decorate our city.
This new book offers stories that show that the impact of murals goes far beyond their aesthetic beauty since, as Golden said several times in her speech, “Art can ignite change.”
