New research from Philly’s Mural Arts Institute proves public art has a huge civic impact

Moritz shared her study during a Mural Arts Institute event last month, “Researching the Impact of Murals for Philadelphians,” a collaboration with UPenn’s Humanities for Human Flourishing Project.

For several hours, scholars, artists, activists, and community members packed a lecture hall on Walnut Street to hear from researchers in psychology, neuroaesthetics, and medicine. These scientific speakers were joined by Mural Arts Program staff and city officials—the director of public safety, the chief cultural officer—to explore the way murals affect community engagement, individuals’ sense of belonging, their perceptions of neighborhoods, and their mental health.

Their bottom line: Philadelphia’s murals—a 24-hour, no-ticket-required, open-air gallery of more than 4,000 works of art—provide a boost in all those measures.

Public art reduces crime

The research tells a story about “the intersection of public art and public health,” said Joseph Iacona, director of the Mural Arts Institute, a program of Mural Arts Philadelphia that shares ideas and experience about community-centered art-making with people and organizations around the world.

Moritz’s work examined the areas around murals installed between 2007 and 2023, a period in which more than 500 Philly streets acquired a mural. She found that in places where murals went up, total daytime crime dropped by an average of 42 percent, with a 40 percent drop in property crime at night.

Those effects lingered for as long as seven years. “We’re looking at real neighborhood change that sticks around,” Moritz said. The most effective murals—that is, those that had the biggest impact on crime rates in their immediate areas—were those depicting people, groups eating, working, or playing together, or representations of social and political systems.

In the next stage of research, Moritz wants to figure out why. She has theories: murals may boost a sense of collective efficacy and community identity. Or they may result in busier streets, a reinvigoration of commerce, and the redevelopment of housing in the vicinity.

She did find that sometimes, crime didn’t vanish but simply moved to adjacent areas. “That’s an argument for painting more murals, for having a bigger effect,” she said.

How do murals make us feel?

Other scholars examined how Philly’s murals make people feel. Katherine Cotter, associate director of research for the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project at UPenn, has previously looked at how museum art affects viewers’ sense of well-being.

But murals are different, she learned. “Public art is widely accessible—[viewers can see] a mural, for free, without scheduling a particular time. They’re place-specific. They represent the community. They bring people together, causing them to pause and look up from their phones and experience something together, even if no words are exchanged.”

As a Mural Arts Program tour guide, I’ve witnessed that happening. When I ask tour groups to turn around 180 degrees after viewing The Promise of Biotechnology on Sansom Street for a big reveal of Amy Sherald’s six-story-high portrait of a young Black woman, they gasp in unison.

And they get quiet when I tell them that Finding Home on S. 13th Street was made in collaboration with unhoused community members who wrote their hopes and dreams on strips of cloth that were woven into the mural’s nubbly texture.

Cotter had undergraduate students stop passers-by near three murals, including The Promise of Biotechnology and Philadelphia Muses and ask them a series of questions: “Does this mural make you feel stressed or relaxed, isolated or connected, excluded or included, bored or thoughtful?”

“Across the three murals, people were feeling more connected, included, and thoughtful,” Cotter said; some commented, “It’s like an antidepressant for my whole being…It makes me happier overall…It gives me an extra dimension to think about.”

“I helped to make this”

Anjan Chatterjee, a physician and director of UPenn’s Center for Neuroaesthetics, looked at how murals affected people’s perceptions of city neighborhoods. “In Center City, after looking at murals, people think the neighborhood is less noisy and trashy,” he said; in West Philly, after viewing murals, people described the area as safer and more interesting.

Scholars and city officials noted the ripple effect that murals can have: a giant artwork in a vacant lot inspired a community group to purchase that lot and plant a garden; former graffiti-writers and street-corner drug dealers have approached mural artists to ask, “Can I help?”

Some of the day’s most poignant moments came in anecdotes recalled by researchers, artists, and Mural Arts staff. Samantha Matlin, a community psychologist and associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, evaluated the impact of a long-term mural-making project near a methadone clinic in North Philadelphia. She recalled one client of that clinic sobbing as she pointed to a mural she’d helped paint and saying, “I’ve never had something I could show my child to be proud of me. But I helped to make this.”

Anthony McLaughlin works with the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, which partners with Mural Arts on the Porch Light program. He recalled a paint day at which he saw a woman painting half of a heart.

“I said, ‘What’s this about?’ She said, ‘I’m creating this because I lost my son and my nephew to gun violence.’ Folks are impacted by something they create: I’m in this mural; I painted this piece of that mural.”

A powerful cultural landscape

Valerie Gay, the city’s chief cultural officer, noted that murals are just one part of Philadelphia’s cultural landscape—a terrain that also includes poetry, spoken word, and music. Gay cited one current project: a first-ever “cultural master plan,” a blueprint for how creativity can “help make Philadelphia a cleaner, greener city with access to economic opportunity for all.”

I thought about Declaration, a striking mural painted in collaboration with people in prison at SCI Phoenix and those who had recently left prison to come home; it’s an image of the Declaration of Independence with some phrases blacked out. On a recent tour I led with 5th graders, one boy suggested the redacted words might be considered offensive; a girl said the image made her think about what was absent from the original document.

“It’s really important for the work we’re doing to reintegrate arts and culture into our lives,” Gay said. “Creativity and beauty are linked to all of our lived experience and are an inalienable human right.”