From Anti-Graffiti to Pro-Art: Murals as Engines for Good

The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program began as an effort to fight graffiti, working with kids who illicitly painted walls in the 1980s. But, says Jane Golden, founder and executive director, “we quickly realized we were a pro-art program, not anti-anything.”

Mural Arts has evolved over the past 30 years into a public-private partnership dedicated to the power of art to ignite change. Its programs bring emerging and established artists together with wide-ranging groups of people, including students and ex-offenders, to work on collaborative public art projects. Philadelphia Mural Arts Advocates, its nonprofit arm, was created in 1998 and today raises about 65 percent of the nearly $9 million annual budget.

Now considered the nation’s largest public-art program, the effort has created more than 3,800 works, earning the City of Brotherly Love a new moniker: the City of Murals. Each year, 12,000 residents and visitors tour the organization’s works.

Ms. Golden says the murals are more than beautification projects; they are engines for education, community empowerment, and economic revitalization. “When it comes to the big, intractable problems facing our country, we should never discount the role of innovation and creativity to make a difference,” she says.

Mural Arts projects include restorative-justice programs that help build skills for inmates, parolees, and former prisoners re-entering society, and Porch Light, which works with the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disabilities Services to help people overcome the stigma of mental-health issues, among other services.

“Art has become a lifeline” for people dealing with a wide range of challenges, Ms. Golden says.