A revolutionary idea

Mosaicked alleyways unfurl like ribbons in Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens. Bottles, bicycle wheels and assorted dinnerware protruded from the walls, which were coloured in muted pinks and Arctic blues. Human effigies broke through the patterns: contorted faces with their eyes askew and bodiless arms reaching out as if in greeting. Occasionally I’d catch my own reflection in a constellation of mirrored tiles.

This riot of glass, ceramics and found objects is a long-standing installation by Isaiah Zagar, a mosaic artist and Philadelphia native who is something of a legend in these parts. His work spills from the confines of the Magic Gardens, an indoor-outdoor gallery open to the public since 2008, and pools into the city streets. It’s just one fragment of the textured Philly arts scene that I was here to discover.

Philadelphia is arguably better known for its Revolutionary-era history than its art, but its creator-led spaces and packed ‘Museum Mile’ should command equal attention. So I eschewed a visit to Independence Hall in favour of the South Street neighbourhood, an enduring cradle of alternative culture and a canvas for Zagar’s whimsical works. In the middle of the 20th century, the district was almost bulldozed for a highway and the artist was among those who rallied to save it. In turn, when a swathe of Zagar’s installations faced the wrecking ball, the local community rushed to his aid.

“Isaiah has been making mosaics for more than 50 years,” explained my guide, Marty Foley of WeVenture tours, as we wandered past another rainbow-striped stretch of brickwork. “These streets are his gallery.”

Foley led me down South Street, the district’s namesake and main artery, which once formed Philadelphia’s southern border. Here businesses unfold in a Shoreditch-esque swirl of folksy galleries, vintage shops and bars.

“This is Philadelphia’s answer to Haight-Ashbury,” Foley told me, referring to San Francisco’s birthplace of counter culture. “It’s long been a gathering place for hippies and creatives.”

It was also a gathering place for Philly’s punk rockers. The city’s alternative music scene sprouted here in the late 1970s and ’80s, and there are still vestiges of it today. Indie music spots are part of the district’s cultural fabric and rock concerts still shake the Theatre of Living Arts, a gig venue that opened in 1908.

Our tour began here, then snaked towards the giant Philly AIDS Thrift shop, whose façade curls with a mural depicting seven deceased members of Philadelphia’s transgender community. Inside, it’s an emporium of dog-eared books and eccentric fashion finds. Cabinets are filled up with porcelain trinkets and the prints on the wall are for sale. We later moved on to Palumbo Park, where another wall painting showed a deer grazing within a blaze of autumnal trees. As we walked, Zagar’s mosaicked masterpieces would glint from alleyways and melt down the fronts of buildings.

We paused at a particularly colourful backstreet, where the words ‘MIKE MATTIO MASTER PLUMBER’ appeared in a whirl of ceramic shards. Beneath them, there was a mosaicked caricature of the spanner-wielding plumber himself. Foley explained that Zagar champions various members of the community in his installations. On another wall he extols the virtues of Abe Kravitz’s deli pickles.

“Art doesn’t have to hang in a gallery – it’s right here,” Foley said. “And it’s for everyone to see and consume.”

This theory isn’t confined to bohemian South Street, either. The City of Brotherly Love has one of the nation’s largest and most eclectic public art collections, from the statue of Pennsylvania founder William Penn that towers atop City Hall to the bold red LOVE sculpture that draws tourists to the plaza opposite. The latter, by pop-artist Robert Indiana, has become a symbol of the city. And while plenty of places profess themselves ‘mural capitals’, it’s more than just lip service here. Some 4,000 murals coat Philadelphia, its buildings rising like giant easels.

Most are the work of Mural Arts Philadelphia, an organisation founded in 1984 as a reaction to the graffiti that was creeping across the city. Beginning life as the ‘Anti-Graffiti Network’, the group worked with often talented graffiti writers to channel their efforts into curated public artworks. Almost four decades later, the result is a city that swells with murals, from mammoth portraits of Philly locals to psychedelic skylines and abstracts.

“Murals tell the story of Philadelphia,” said Carol Weidler of Mural Arts Philadelphia on our street-art tour of the city. We’d paused before a painting of a tree, whose leaves were bundled with keys, musical instruments and sand timers. “They speak – just like any of the arts: music, prose, poetry – and it’s usually a human story.”

The city’s past, present and future is painted into its walls. In North Philadelphia a giant new mural honours civil-rights freedom fighters with a mix of archive-like black-and-white images, bold lettering and Ghanaian Adinkra symbols. In Germantown, local poet and activist Ursula Rucker rises on the side of a mall building – she speaks into a megaphone, verses of poetry hanging around her like clouds.

The tour took us through Center City, where a particularly poignant mural is tucked up by the side of St John the Evangelist Church. ‘Finding Home’ is a patchwork of fabric strips on which community members, both homeless and otherwise, have shared their ideas about what it is to have a home. Those fabric scraps were then stuck to the wall and painted over, before being blessed with holy water.

“We work in communities, and the people in the community decide on the theme [of the artwork],” Weidler explained to me. “Art ignites change. Not only do the murals beautify the city, but they empower and inspire.”

But while murals are Philly’s pièce de résistance, that’s not to say its museums are lacking. Quite the opposite, in fact. The city’s fine art collections rival those in institutions everywhere from Chicago to New York. Wander the cavernous galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and any visions of Philly as a scrappy underdog in the creative world are soon forgotten. Among the highlights is its 12,000-piece-strong American Art collection, featuring works by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Georgia O’Keeffe. I visited at the debut of its ‘Matisse in the 1930s’ exhibition, addressing a time when the French artist came to Philadelphia to produce work for the city’s Barnes Foundation art institute. Proof that Philly’s artistic roots go deeper and longer than most.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art shares ‘Museum Mile’ with the Barnes Foundation, a gallery showcasing a who’s who of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern art scenes. The collection belonged to chemist, philanthropist and art lover Albert C Barnes, and paintings hang in heavy gilded frames, arranged like Tetris blocks among antique chests, wooden figurines and iron door knockers. I wandered through a web of rooms pregnant with works by Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne and Modigliani. Murals exist here too. ‘The Dance’ is a trio of wall panels by Henri Matisse that fill the lunettes at the gallery’s heart. The work unfolds in a tangle of dancing bodies, set against a background of green and Egyptian blue.

Yet although Philadelphia’s larger museums can compete with the big dogs elsewhere, its experimental galleries and artist-run spaces are what really shine. I made a pit stop at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), a gallery looking to “serve the next generation of contemporary art enthusiasts”, according to executive director Christina Vassallo.

What sets Philadelphia apart from the USA’s mega art cities is its relatively small size, Vassallo explained. That feeds a want to collaborate and a free-wheeling attitude that’s “pretty DIY”.

The FWM wholly leans into this ethos. It was established in 1977, when the Eastern Seaboard had a booming textiles market. Founder Marion Boulton Stroud encouraged its artists to play with fabric and, eventually, other mediums too. More than four decades later, the venue has bloomed into a thriving contemporary gallery.

“The core of what we do is experimental,” Vassallo told me. We stood before a mannequin-like sculpture with human legs and a screaming medley of soft toys for a head and body. It cast mushrooming shadows against the wall. “All the making happens here on-site. We want to help demystify the art process,” she said.

They do this by asking the artists that they work with to collect items essential to their process in boxes as they go. These little treasure chests are then typically displayed alongside the original artwork.

During my visit, an installation by Indigenous artist Rose B Simpson, who hails from the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, covered an entire floor. Her ‘Dream House’ exhibition opened out in a series of rooms inspired by adobe architecture, designed to represent Simpson’s own lived experience and notions of domesticity. I passed through constructed halls, peering into rooms filled with ceramic masks, tapestries and wooden furniture. At the end, the visitor is invited to remove their shoes, sit down at a low wooden table surrounded by scatter cushions and contemplate what home means to them.

But as I sat, I thought little of my home. Instead, I mused on how Philadelphia had become a home for challenging art, and how this temporary installation is everything that the city is: raw, reflective and unwaveringly creative.