Making Art with Each Other, for Each Other

I believe that the creation of public art has a unique capacity to build community and to stimulate creativity.

I have loved the idea of art in public places since I was very young, when my father showed me the works of Ben Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton created for the WPA in the 1930s. I became fascinated with the art form, and when I moved to Los Angeles after college and saw the remarkable murals in LA’s neighborhoods, I was further inspired.

My first mural in 1978 was an image of the historic Ocean Park Pier, an icon of Santa Monica that had been torn down years earlier. Each day, as my ragtag crew and I showed up to work on the mural, people stopped and watched—on their way to the library, the bus, or the beach. Sometimes they brought food, sometimes they brought boomboxes to play music on, and sometimes they gathered to talk to one another. Older neighbors told the younger ones about their memories of the pier; spontaneous discussions about neighborhood issues or city politics were common. Even before it was fully painted, the mural became a focal point of energy and activity. I was amazed and thrilled by how creating art in public could engage and stimulate my diverse group of neighbors.

For several years, I continued to paint murals in LA, but I didn’t fully appreciate their impact until I returned to the East Coast several years later.

In 1984, when I was hired to run an art program for the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network, I began working in neglected neighborhoods where many people had nearly given up hope. These were places where the only visible city employees were the police. Here, I met block captains and community leaders, mostly elderly women, whose optimism and determination provided inspiration and role models for a lifetime.

I have vivid memories of Ms. Rachel Bagby, from the neighborhood at 20th and Dauphin, gradually overcoming her skepticism about what good “painting on walls could do” and then becoming a committed partner in the creation of community murals. She longed for a little beauty in her community, to compete with the billboards advertising alcohol and cigarettes. She saw the murals as a way to tell the stories of the people in the neighborhood. She helped gather her neighbors, and we began talking about their histories and their hopes. We painted several rural scenes to commemorate the tradition of black family farms in the South, a visual memory treasured by the elders but virtually unknown to the young people. Our partnership culminated in an enormous mural of Mount Kilimanjaro, which Ms. Bagby and some other neighbors had visited. It stood for years like a beacon on a busy street, reminding all passers of their ties to the African continent.

Since then, I have seen truant teens emerge from silent cocoons to contribute their ideas and take up brushes to create a mural. I’ve watched lifers in a maximum-security prison struggle to find peace and common ground with victims of crime—and then visualize that healing effort in a mural painted together. I have seen neighborhoods split by animosity and racial strife overcome suspicion and hostility while working together to create art.

I am not naïve. I don’t see art as the solution to all problems. But I have seen enough evidence to know that public art is not a frill or an extravagance. Not for my community or my city, and certainly not for me. In 1982, when I could no longer use my left hand and was told I had a fatal illness called lupus, the need to paint, the drive to tell stories on walls kept me going.

I believe that art keeps us all going. And I believe that when people make art with each other, for each other, transformations occur, and the force of life triumphs.

Jane Golden, founder and executive director, has been a driving force for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, overseeing its growth from a small city agency into the nation’s largest mural program. Under Golden’s direction, the Mural Arts Program has created more than 3,800 landmark works of public art, and Golden has received numerous awards for her expertise and accomplishments. Golden holds an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, as well as a BA in fine arts and political science from Stanford University.