The year is 1984. Jane Golden, a slight woman in paint-splashed white overalls, is up on scaffolding, brush in hand, dark hair held back by a blue bandana. The city is Philadelphia and the neighborhood decimated by poverty: Where blank walls exist, they are targets for graffiti tattoos. It's Golden's job—part-time, at first—to persuade taggers to quit defacing walls and create a neighborhood mural instead.
Accompanied by a notorious Philadelphia tagger, she has trolled crack corners and El stops, looking for recruits. In exchange for a signed pledge to give up graffiti, the street artists are granted amnesty from prosecution and the opportunity to work on a mural. Critics are skeptical, but then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode is stubborn in his insistence that his new anti-graffiti initiative include incentives as well as crackdowns by police.
Who knew—certainly not Golden, '75—that she would turn out to be the mayor's most formidable weapon against graffiti? Who would have predicted that, one wall at a time, Golden and an ever-expanding team of urban artists and volunteers would transform the face of the city and earn it international acclaim? Most surprising of all, who could have known that murals would revive crumbling inner city neighborhoods whose residents had long since given up hope of redemption?
"The Anti-Graffiti Network was not an art program," she says. "It was a clean-up program and a work program—pushing art into the forefront was a daunting task. But it became an art program as time went on. Then it became a real catalyst for social change in the neighborhoods and that surprised everyone, including me.
"People thought that graffiti writers should be arrested and put in jail—they thought these people were part of the expendable populations. I didn't really think that murals could create a tangible change in a neighborhood. But then the murals became a focal point and a beacon—the residents could suddenly see their potential."
Twenty-five years and 3,100 murals later, the work has evolved from a straightforward anti-graffiti program to a one-of-a-kind entity that uses public art—actually, the process of making public art—to forge community bonds where none exist. Having already changed the face of the city, the program is now changing the way social services are delivered in Philadelphia.
"Working with Jane and the Mural Arts Program has been very effective in allowing us to engage those communities in a nonthreatening way," says Dr. Arthur C. Evans, director of Philadelphia's Department of Behavioral Health and Mental Retardation Services. "As far as I know, no one else in the country is doing this—first of all, not everyone has a Jane Golden." In praising her ability to get people working together, he adds, "The first time I heard her speak I went, 'Wow!' She's a community psychologist."
It was 1997 before the remnants of the Anti-Graffiti Network—by then, mainly the murals work—morphed into the Mural Arts Project. Golden's staff had grown from one former teacher and a cadre of ex-graffiti artists to a staff of five, a few desks and a file cabinet at City Hall, and a budget of $100,000. She was able to stop using house paint and buy paint formulated specifically for murals.
In 2009, she manages a staff of almost 50 from MAP headquarters in the historic home of American painter Thomas Eakins. The city provides about 40 percent of a $7 million annual budget; much of Golden's time is spent raising the rest from individuals, corporations and grants organizations. MAP completes about 100 murals a year and serves more than 3,000 children in arts education programs. More than 100 U.S. cities are replicating or trying to replicate the program. Representatives from Hanoi to Rome and Paris have sought advice and technical assistance for starting similar programs.
Golden admits to a little thrill when, on a recent trip to Rome, people were referring—as they often do—to Philadelphia as "The City of Murals." But she's not the type to rest on her laurels. "I'm somebody who has ever-present angst," she says. "I do feel that those statements are thrilling, in a way. But it's also a statement that indicates our complex responsibility in continuing to do this work. I feel good and proud about it for a minute, then I begin to think about all the problems we face—it's a double-edged sword."
Golden believes everyone, and maybe especially the dispossessed, should have access to art. "People who have felt in the margins, not in power, can be part of changing a place and reclaiming it. Art overcomes the feeling of being disconnected, of being alone. It connects them back to the world."
After 25 years, she still focuses on MAP's potential. "More kids to serve, more communities to help, work to be done in prisons and shelters, and more educational programs to run." Some recent work has reached out to perhaps the most dispossessed of all—prisoners. A series of murals on the theme of restorative justice—a philosophy that criminals need to be educated, rehabilitated and, at the end of the day, redeemed—has brought together prisoners, crime victims and victim advocates.
"We started saying that we wanted to do outdoor murals with inmates. People thought this would be dangerous," she says. "Victims were feeling they didn't have a voice in the system. The discussions were very acrimonious."
For months, participants met separately and together. They wrote poetry and essays about retribution and reconciliation. Inmates learned the Christian parable of the prodigal son, then taught the concepts to incarcerated juveniles. Victims of crime and the relatives of murder victims met with prisoners convicted of violent crimes.
"I felt at times over my head and that we weren't making progress," Golden recalls. "Except in the afternoons, once a month, we would paint together—six inmates and six victims' advocates. We were able to start to understand this treadmill of violence. Everyone agreed that what they wanted to do is save the next generation."
The resulting murals—painted section by section on special canvas, then applied with acrylic gel to their sites—are visual essays on the rights and responsibilities of prisoners, on restoration for both criminals and victims, on the impact and consequences of juvenile crime. The figures in one, on the theme of forgiveness, are based on those in a Rembrandt painting of the prodigal son.
Murals have been a feature of public life in almost all of human history. But Timothy W. Drescher, former co-editor of Community Murals magazine and author of San Francisco Bay Area Murals, says that Philadelphia's program—because of its focus on involvement by residents—is more than public art. "I would make the distinction between public art, which is done for the people. Community art is done by or with people. And that makes all the difference in the world." Its significance is "less about the message and more about the process."
Philadelphia's is one of the few ongoing community mural programs and is by far the largest. Drescher attributes its success to Golden's ability "to articulate what these murals can do, how they can make an impact."
The impact of the anti-graffiti program on individual taggers was expected and immediate. Eric Gibbs, now in college and planning for med school, was arrested in high school for defacing walls and sentenced to six months of mural duty. He returned often to the program as a volunteer and an instructor. Going to jail, he says, wouldn't have deterred him from tagging walls. The murals program gave him structure, people who cared about him and "a place to go on weekends." The program's benefits for the morale and upkeep of neighborhoods—while initially unexpected—also materialized shortly after the first murals were finished.
But what Golden calls "the real power of art to bring about reconciliation" became apparent in 1998 in a neighborhood where racial conflicts had intensified to the point of combustion. A black family had been beaten by a group of whites. In response, a thousand African-Americans staged a protest march.
Golden stepped in and proposed a Peace Wall mural to bring the various factions together. "People told us repeatedly that a wall would have absolutely no impact, that it would be both frivolous and a waste of time." The community meetings were contentious. As often happens, issues unrelated to the mural flared into bitter arguments.
Gradually, consensus and cooperation grew. A digitized design—the hands of residents, photographed and collaged together—was approved and projected on the chosen wall. Night after night, people painted. In the end, they created not only a mural, but also an integrated community that remains strong today.
"We're prepared for the idea that a mural can be a lightning rod for other issues . . . around race or class or gentrification or other issues that have very little to do with the mural," Golden says. "I look at that as part of the job and one that I take on willingly. . . . The deeper, more profound changes happen long after we've finished painting."
Health Director Evans seeks to foster such change in his department. He's already seen it work in mural collaborations involving a mental health shelter. "We're used to what I call the black box approach: We build a clinic and expect people to come in. We are realizing that we have to have connections in a community. We have to engage people."
In a second case, he cites the tensions in a neighborhood between refugees from West Africa and the original African-American residents. Mural planning brought the two groups together—and gave social workers entrée to the immigrant community.
One of the few neighborhood quarrels over a mural that Golden wasn't able to mediate involved Rittenhouse Square. Wealthy residents of the city's toniest address have forestalled the creation of a mural in their neighborhood. The proposal, by a prominent attorney who lives on Rittenhouse Square, resulted in a prolonged shouting match between what Philadelphia magazine characterized as Old Money residents and the nouveau riche. The mural was to be located on a small side street, facing a parking lot.
"The fact that it was a theme about social justice made it complicated," says Golden, ever the diplomat. She terminated MAP involvement and left the residents to duke it out among themselves. Every year, she adds, there are a few projects that are "really difficult."
Resistance by middle- and upper-income neighborhoods to murals is often voiced as a complaint that murals, or a single mural, would stigmatize a neighborhood. Golden has heard those arguments. "Do we have too many murals? Are the murals a sign of urban blight? Every year, we conduct 500 mural tours for 12,000 visitors. There are 2,000 people on the waiting list for a mural—for them, there probably aren't enough murals."
It can seem that no corner in Philadelphia is without its mural. Many feature civil rights icons such as Martin Luther King Jr., Harriett Tubman, Paul Robeson and Rosa Parks or sports figures such as Julius Erving and Wilt Chamberlain. Patriotic themes abound, as do tributes to famous artists. Nature themes have not been neglected—there are unity gardens, community gardens, tropical gardens and butterflies of the Caribbean, to name a few. Many have artistic merit. Many do not. Some topics seem incongruous.
On one visit to Philadelphia, Drescher toured the murals, including one of Mount Kilimanjaro on a wall in a North Philadelphia neighborhood. He interviewed an elderly woman and asked her, "What does a mountain in Africa have to do with the community at 21st and Diamond in Philadelphia?"
"She looked at me and she said, 'Honey, without that mural we wouldn't be a community.'"
SUSAN CABA, a 1997 Knight fellow, is a journalist based in St. Louis.
