Community Meeting with Mural Arts - Three

This is a repost of an article I wrote on the phillyimc.org newswire. Please see posts below for comments from a participant after the meeting.

A community meeting with Philadelphia Mural Arts Program was held this past Monday April 21 at Songhai Cultural Center. Jane Golden, director of the Mural Arts Program, and other program staff and artists were there to listen to the concerns of the city's residents at large. The meeting was well attended, with residents from all over the city including Norris Square, Center City, Brewerytown, West Philly, and others.

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The meeting was facilitated and framed with the intention of getting constructive criticism that Mural Arts can implement. Ms. Golden started off, sharing the legacy of political art that she looked to when the program started as the Anti-Graffiti Network. The intention of the program was always to involve youth and other residents where murals were painted.

It is rare that a leader with Ms. Golden' visibility in the city actually shows up to listen to the community. She and the facilitators took copious notes that will turn into a document of the event and will aid in reshaping their community engagement process at all stages of mural development. There was much independent media coverage with video and audio recording, and photography, so the level of accountability should be high.

The meeting was structured in a classic conflict resolution format, beginning with the audience being invited to share comments that recognized the good parts of Mural Arts. These included appreciation for the beauty of the murals and the high-level of technical skill of the artists, the inclusion of children in the process, especially in the absence of art from public school curricula. The meeting then went on to address things that could be done better. These comments centered mostly on better community inclusion: being able to comment on the design before it is painted, outreach to a larger radius around the mural (Mural Arts typically limits their notification to a 2 block radius). Mural Arts staff answered questions on why artists who live in the community are not hired by Mural Arts. A staff person answered that painting a mural is a special skill set that many artists do not have. One community member said he felt that the ongoing debate during the mural painting should not be viewed as an annoyance or a late arrival, but an opportunity for further discussion and refinement. There were several suggestions about what an appropriate content should be for the murals. Some suggested images of residents, others referred to themes that are ‘historically correct.’ Arriving at an idea about what is historically correct was not possible given the structure of the meeting.

Each comment from the audience was limited to one-minute. This did not allow a deep discussion of more complicated concerns. I spoke with Bonita Cummings after the meeting to listen more in-depth to the issues she has witnessed as a resident of Strawberry Mansion. The difficulty with the mural in Mansion was the genesis for the meeting on Monday. Two audio clips are included below in which Ms. Cummings, who works for Strawberry Mansion Community Concern, addresses the content of art and the community outreach process.

It seemed that the meeting would have benefited from an answer back session from Mural Arts. Personally, I am curious whether funders and city officials constrain the outreach process or the content of the murals. The history of murals invoked by Golden at the beginning of the meeting is of revolutionary art that expressed the political pulse of a community at a time of intense upheavals, not unlike Philadelphia we live in today. Is that a legacy that can be built on by a non-profit agency held accountable to funders and politicians?