Between One Drexel Plaza and the new Brandywine building at 3200 Market street is a new space to escape the boisterous world of city life in University City: Mural Row.
This alley aims to become a desired path for people traveling from William H. Gray III 30th Street Station into University City while offering insight into how local artists perceive West Philadelphia. Six artists, selected by Mural Arts Project Manager Conrad Benner, were each given the project of developing two murals for the alley with one theme in mind: celebrating West Philadelphia.
“We gave them the theme, and they all went in different directions which shows…just how talented they are, how creative they are and how their own individual experiences with West Philadelphia interact with them differently,” said Benner.
One of the artists, Cindy Lozito—a South-Philadelphia-based illustrator, muralist and cartoonist—explained that her art is recognizable for its rich purples and yellows, always using warm colors and never using carbon black in her palette.
Similar to the murals displayed in the Front Street Walls installation, Benner said that his mission with this project was to “create more pipelines for emerging artists and to create more art around Philadelphia.”
For emerging artists like Akira Gordon, a University of the Arts graduate and Philadelphia-born painter, seeing her artwork on a larger canvas was a dream. She is a proud member of the Philadelphia Fellowship for Black Artists and has “been wanting to do more in the public sphere.”
To prepare for her debut into the mural arts world, she visited her aunt’s home and other places she frequents in West Philadelphia such as Malcolm X Park, combining collages of photos she took. These photos portrayed children sitting on doorsteps, eating water ice and gelato, sitting in grassy and flowery fields and surrounded by bright green trees.
For the goal of transforming an otherwise mundane alley filled with gravel and dumpsters into “a pedestrian alley that was more than just gray,” Benner noted that “of course, you go to Mural Arts Philadelphia to curate that!”
Mural Arts Philadelphia has had a well-known presence in the City of Brotherly Love, existing for 40 years and counting. Their involvement in the community is heavily reliant on funding from the City of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Arts and others. The funding for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts, however, is significantly less than other cities that are leading in the mural arts world, such as Cincinnati. In the absence of public funding, companies like Brandywine—who aim to incorporate creative spaces into their development projects—provide the needed support for Mural Arts. The program is instrumental to bringing art initiatives to Philadelphia, so be sure to check out Mural Row to support their efforts in University City.