Featured here is the remarkable story of an unlikely artistic collaboration between boys who live in a residential facility and men who lived in a maximum-security state correctional facility--and the eight-mile long mural they created.

In June 1984, Jane Golden, a young muralist from Margate, New Jersey, headed up a project that was originally planned as a six-week youth program in the fledgling Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. This small exercise in fighting graffiti grew into the most vibrant public art project in the United States. Led by Golden and dozens of artists, neighborhood residents, and volunteers, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has adorned the city with over two thousand murals. In the process, this vibrant art, painted mostly on city walls, helped to change the look of the city, creating an enduring legacy in all of the neighborhoods in which the murals were added. In this lavishly illustrated chronicle of the Mural Arts Program, you will see the murals in all of their beauty and learn about their inspiring legacies in neighborhoods throughout the city. Go behind the scenes to find out how murals are made and why the process is as much an art of diplomacy and consensus building as paint and perspective. Discover through pictures and text how murals give communities a new way to define themselves, not in terms of the streets and intersections that border them, but in terms of the people who came together to create something of dramatic beauty. Author note: Jane Goldenis Executive Director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, the largest program of its kind in the United States. She graduated from Stanford University and holds an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. This is her first book. She lives in Philadelphia. Robin Rice is the senior art critic for the Philadelphia City Paper. She writes for a number of national and international magazines, including American Ceramics, Woman's Art Journal, and ARTnews. She is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the graduate programs in criticism and humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The recipient of writing fellowships from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia. Monica Yant Kinneyis a metropolitan columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she has worked since 1996. She was formerly the television critic at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana; graduated from the University of Notre Dame; and is married to David Kinney, a political reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. This is her first book. David Graham is a freelance photographer whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He has published four previous books, including Taking Liberties (2001). He is Associate Professor of photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Jack Ramsdale has been involved with the Mural Arts Program since 1998. In November 2001, his mural design titled "ONE WORLD" in remembrance of the victims of 9/11 was painted across 15th Street from City Hall. He attended Cranbrook Academy of Art, receiving an MFA with a photography concentration. He has had a commercial photography business for the last fifteen years and continues to create art in Philadelphia, where he now resides.

While the Mural Arts Program has significantly changed the appearance of the city, it has also demonstrated how participatory public art can empower individuals and promote communal healing around difficult issues. Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 is a celebration of and guide to the program's success. Unlike Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and its sequel, More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, Philadelphia Murals @ 30 showcases the results of 21 projects completed since 2009 and features essays by policy makers, curators, scholars, and educators that offer valuable lessons for artists, activists, and communities to emulate. Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 traces the program's history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation. Contributors include: Dr. Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Arlene Goldbard, Thora Jacobson, Rick Lowe, Dr. Samantha L.

Philadelphia is thick with American firsts. Some—including the first zoo, first hospital, first public library, first university, first computer—are well known. Others are not and are here to be appreciated: Girl Scout cookies were originally baked by a commercial bakery here and “American Bandstand” was born in a West Philadelphia TV studio. This Used to Be Philadelphia goes deep inside the buildings, monuments, and familiar sights of the city to uncover its rich history, layer by layer. This book will introduce you to the city’s first residents, the Lenni Lenape, the tireless workers who made this “the Workshop of the World,” and the current residents who love all of these stories as told through the spaces they have filled. Learn how buildings from the 1876 World’s Fair, the first to be held in the U.S., are used today. Appreciate the city’s creative adaptive reuse projects, including a former technical school turned office space with a rooftop bar and the railroad headquarters that’s now artists’ studios. Take a colorful tour of the city’s bygone days with local sisters Natalie and Tricia Pompilio. You’ll never look at an old building in Philadelphia the same way again.

This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in American art, African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.

This book brings the emerging fields of practical theology and theology of the arts into a dialogue beyond the bias of modern systematic and constructive theology. The authors draw upon postmodern, post-secular, feminist, liberation, and dialogical/dialectical philosophy and theology, and their critiques of the narrow modern emphases on reason and the scientific method, as the model for all knowledge. Such a practical theology of the arts focuses the work of theology on the actual practices that engage the arts in their various forms as the means of interpreting and understanding the nature of the communities and their members, as well as the mechanisms through which these communities engage in transformative work, to make persons and neighborhoods whole. This book presents its theological claims through the careful analysis of several stories of communities around the world that have engaged in transformational practices through a specific art form, investigating communities from Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the U.S. The case studies explored include Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, indigenous, and sometimes agnostic subjects, involved in visual art, music, dance, theatre, documentary film, and literature. Theology and the Arts demonstrates that the challenges of a postmodern and post-secular context require a fundamental rethinking of theology that focuses on discrete practices of faithful communities, rather than one-dimensional theories about religion.