How does Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program deal with social issues?

At that point I suspect something obvious, but also strange: We will not find murals here. We don’t, making me wonder whether this is accidental or deliberate and what it could mean. I refer to the online map of murals and see there are none among the residences of Society Hill, on the south side of Rittenhouse Square, or near the Art Museum. According to Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell (a book on the Mural Art Project, compiled by Jane Golden, Robin Rice, and Monica Yant Kinney), “despite the program’s prominence, some people still equate murals with urban blight and argue that murals don’t belong in thriving Center City.”

The authors describe protest against a mural near Logan Square; neighbors objected that it was not appropriate for a “prosperous neighborhood. Some also made reference to the girl’s skin color.” Golden concludes that energy is better spent in communities where “murals are wanted.”

The have (murals) and have nots

Yet I can’t help but wonder about distinctions between neighborhoods with murals — especially very visible street murals expressing social messages — and neighborhoods where murals are deemed inappropriate. Is this discrepancy the tip of a much larger racial structure from which we understand communities in radically different ways?

Given the history of the mural program — it began to stop graffiti and channel troubled youth into productive activities — it is understandable that certain neighborhoods were targeted for murals. However, here lies a large discrepancy: how troubled youth are treated in different neighborhoods.

I think of Dave, the former police chief of an affluent community now working on a road crew. Waiting to turn his construction sign from “stop” to “slow,” Dave tells me his heart could no longer take the constant crimes of kids who, in his words, were abandoned by rich parents. Parents bailed them out, charges were dismissed, and kids entered college with clean résumés, making crime just a funny developmental stage to adulthood.

Dave’s lament about rich kids is supported by observations of psychologist Dr. Suniya S. Luthar, who concludes that there is as much crime among affluent youth as there is of inner-city poor youth. The difference is that crime among affluent youth tends to be understood as a private matter, not the result of living in a troubled neighborhood. The privileges of privacy take precedence over public accountability, so affluent youth crime is seen not as a community matter but as idiopathic. Murals as a response activity with this group would make the issue too public.

What might entitled delinquents say?

But if a gang of acting-out white rich youth were asked to create a public, in-your-face residential mural for their community, what would they paint? Probably not the Peace Wall mural, painted in response to the fighting between black and white residents in Grays Ferry during 1997. Kids from wealthier neighborhoods, where encounters among persons from different economic statuses is controlled through service-industry relationships, are not likely to paint such a mural.

A NPR report comparing two neighboring communities in Connecticut, economically challenged Bridgeport East Side and wealthy Greenwich, asked a Greenwich resident about her neighbors in Bridgeport. She replied, “I don't think of it at all.” An honest answer. How many residents of any educated affluent community would answer similarly?

But volatile prejudices within a single neighborhood merely provide the smoke screen for the greater covert racism of an economic structure that is creating a widening gap between neighborhoods of wealthy and poor; between Greenwich and Bridgeport East Side or similar Philadelphia neighborhoods. This covert racism is as destructive as the Confederate flag, sending more troubled white youth to college and more troubled black youth to prison. It is racism that closes public schools and spends $400 million rebuilding Graterford Prison.

Starting a dialogue

Does the Peace Wall mural in Grays Ferry raise public awareness of the underlying economic structure that maintains the local prejudice? Or is it, too, a smoke screen? Can murals as beauty facelifts address the deeper issues of racism?

Likewise, can a campaign of citywide murals addressing the current prison statistics eradicate incarceration? People are increasingly aware of the prison situation, but the statistics and the bandwagon slogans enable us to see prison as the hateful other. There is no other — we are the prison, a prison with a dividing wall as distinct as Graterford.

Without involving all communities, the wall continues.

So that gang of wayward white rich kids, pushed to paint a mural, might portray an invitation to the Greenwich woman to meet her Bridgeport neighbors, not as an employer or benevolent patron, but as a down-the-road neighbor. And since she’d probably be confused as to what she has in common with Bridgeport East Side, the kids could paint another mural exploring the relationship. It might be concluded that the wall between the neighborhoods serves them well and should be maintained. And another mural could challenge that, and so on, moving away from simple platitudes of niceness to what is really happening.

Murals have the potential to delve deeper into social issues, but only when they are dialogues that challenge and take risks in exposing us all.

For the author’s first essay on the Mural Arts Program, click here.

Above: Jerome Washington, Neighborhood. 2014. (Drawing by an inmate of Graterford Prison; courtesy of the artist)