Showing Up for Community with A2O

Over the last six years, Mural Arts has worked in partnership with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation on an Art Education program that brings artistic exploration to green spaces around the city. Arts & Artists Outdoors, or A2O, has held weekly classes and community events in connection with long-term artist residencies, guided by the voices and ideas of students. In helping youth make connections between sustainability and creativity, A2O has left an impact that will last long beyond this program. Here, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren, the A2O Program Manager, looks back on the last six years of this partnership.

If one purpose of community-based art practices is to strengthen group identity and pride in a place, it’s important to support an artist to be there for the long haul, through success and difficulty.  When an artist can model commitment, creativity, and care—like the artists we worked with for A2O—they set an example of what helps make a community strong.

A2O’s last season wrapped up a few weeks ago: a unique program at Mural Arts, employing local artists to work long-term at neighborhood recreation centers, each artist spent a year leading workshops and co-developing a public art project about the natural environment. As Mural Arts pursues more long-term place-based engagement projects like Southeast by Southeast, Tacony LAB, Environmental Justice, and Southwest Roots, A2O provided another model for creating a platform for creative meaning-making through long-term relationships between an artist and a community. A2O artists worked a minimum of nine months at the same recreation center, and several returned to the program for multiple years to work with the same group of youth and their community.

A2O did have its challenges, of course. Workshops were often not full, recreation center staff changes were disruptive, and artists new to muralism needed extra support to pull off their projects. But the intimacy of a small group allows for fast bonding and deep arts coaching, and the shifts in staffing made the artists’ consistent presence even more important. Over the last three years of the program, A2O trained 15 local artists in how to design, install, and manage a mural project, none of whom had done it before.

Now, after the program’s end, recreation centers from Kingsessing to Tacony are left with a visible marker of these relationships and adventures in strengthening social bonds through artistic practice. Here are a few of my favorites.