Entrepreneurial American Community Award

For their success in supporting local artists, youth education mentoring and neighborhood transformation through their groundbreaking mural program.

Throughout the decades following World War II, the loss of industry and population from within Philadelphia left the city burdened by concentrations of poverty, vacant properties and vandalism. Of the few resources dedicated to community development and beautification at the time, one program in particular was able to empower marginalized citizens while successfully enhancing the city’s built environment and cultivating civic pride. Since its inception, the City of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program (MAP), has become one of the most celebrated public-private arts organizations in the nation, supported by both the city and the nonprofit sector, and has provided Philadelphia’s neighborhoods the fresh coat of paint they so desperately needed.

The Mural Arts Program was developed in 1984 as a component of the Anti-Graffiti Network, an effort led by then Mayor Wilson Goode to rid Philadelphia of its graffiti. To lead MAP’s inaugural efforts in reaching out to young local graffiti artists, the Anti-Graffiti Network hired then co-founder and director of the Los Angeles Public Art Foundation, Jane Golden. Through the mural-making opportunities created by Ms. Golden, these young artists enjoyed creative outlets that enhanced their neighborhoods rather than defaced them. Hundreds of murals were created during the first few years of the program, bringing life, color and pride into Philadelphia’s changing urban core.

Under Jane Golden’s leadership, who became the program’s director in 1996, the Mural Arts Program has evolved into a dynamic community arts organization encompassing participants from every niche of the neighborhood. MAP now includes free art education programs in over 50 neighborhood sites throughout the city and serves nearly 2,000 young Philadelphians every year. The intensive curriculum uses the process of mural-making to develop life and job skills such as teamwork, personal responsibility and creative problem solving. As a second pillar to the Mural Arts Program, a criminal justice initiative reaches out to adult inmates at local correctional facilities as well as juvenile offenders, providing the opportunity to improve basic social skills and give back to the community through the mural-making process.

In its 25 years, MAP has produced over 2,900 murals in Philadelphia and has become a model all over the world for its educational and criminal justice programs. Throughout the program’s history it has created art galleries from industrial buildings and transformed school walls into visions of peace, but perhaps the Mural Arts Program’s greatest contribution to the Philadelphia community is the new life is has given to downtown’s visual aesthetics and its success in shaping marginalized citizens into Philadelphia’s community leaders of tomorrow.

For more information: Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Anti-Graffiti Network