Modern Toichographology (MURALS & STREET ART) with Conrad Benner AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Ologies with Alie Ward

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Episode: Modern Toichographology (MURALS & STREET ART) with Conrad Benner

Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 01:19:01

Episode Shownotes

Murals! Frescos! Graffiti! Street art! Philadelphia is the birthplace of graffiti and the mural capital of the world so we sit down with city historian, journalist, curator, and Toichographologist Conrad Benner to chat about public vs. private art, cultural movements, commissioned vs. um… un-commissioned murals, how mural topics are chosen,

how much it costs to make a mural, where to get that money, vandalism and murals and the fine line between, and how everything you do is art. Let Philly’s history and 5,000 murals inspire you to gaze at what’s in your city and find out who made it, how you can get involved, and why it matters. Also: this episode will have a bonus Field Trip we’ll release in a week or so that will take you to a series of murals in the process of being born. Follow Conrad on Instagram, TikTok and XVisit his guide to Philadelphia’s public art and public space at StreetsDept.comDonations went to the William Way LGBT Community Center and SkypeAScientist.comPurchase a Frog Facts Advent Calendar at SquidFacts.net More episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Political Sociology (VOTER TURNOUT & SUPPRESSION), Nomology (THE CONSTITUTION), Domicology (ABANDONED BUILDINGS, RECYCLED HOUSES & GHOST TOWNS), Wildlife Ecology (FIELDWORK), Very Special Episode: BlackAFinSTEM, Mythology (STORYTELLING), Museology (MUSEUMS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Instagram and XFollow @AlieWard on Instagram and XEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jacob ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Summary

In this episode of 'Ologies with Alie Ward,' guest Conrad Benner explores the vibrant mural culture in Philadelphia, focusing on the distinction between commissioned and un-commissioned art. He discusses the significance of the Mural Arts Philadelphia program, the historical roots of graffiti, and various techniques used to create murals. The conversation highlights the involvement of the community in artistic expressions, the impact of murals on local identities, and the evolving cultural perceptions surrounding public art. Listeners are encouraged to appreciate and engage with the murals in their own cities.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Modern Toichographology (MURALS & STREET ART) with Conrad Benner) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
Oh, hey, it's the acquaintance who always reintroduces themselves in case you forgot their name. Allie Ward. This is Ologies. Here we are with a trip through time, space, art, ideas, paint, and guest starring Philadelphia. So this ology is in fact real.

00:00:15 Speaker_04
I was just tickled to discover that toiko means wall, graph means writing, and that scholars have used this term to discuss wall paintings dating back like thousands of years. But this episode is going to be more of a modern look at big street art.

00:00:29 Speaker_04
that either colors your day without you even noticing or maybe it stops you in your tracks and then you're like weeping into a to-go latte. This ologist hails from Philadelphia and as it happens, so does street art, we shall discuss.

00:00:43 Speaker_04
But he has been on the scene as a journalist for approaching 15 years as the editor and the founder of this really popular blog streetsdepartment.com.

00:00:52 Speaker_04
And he's a curator for the public arts program, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and also has a podcast called Wise Art Outside. And through all this work, his focus is really about spotlighting and elevating artists. He's the best.

00:01:05 Speaker_04
And I was introduced to him by your favorite squid expert, toothology guest, Dr. Sarah McAnulty. And this interview took place on her living room couch. It was a sunny summer day.

00:01:16 Speaker_04
The walls around us were brick on one side and then various pieces of squid art on the other with her cat holding court between our microphones. And we're going to get to that convo in a second.

00:01:26 Speaker_04
But first, thank you to everyone supporting and sending in questions via our Patreon at patreon.com slash ologies. Thanks to everyone out there in ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Also, heads up, we have a new show spinoff called Smallogies.

00:01:41 Speaker_04
I know you've seen Smallogies in our feed, but you can now subscribe and listen on a separate feed wherever you get podcasts. We're making them every week. We'll link it in the show notes.

00:01:49 Speaker_04
And also for no dollars, you can just leave us a review, which I read, and then I read one to you.

00:01:54 Speaker_04
And thank you this week to Cody Halt, who wrote, In a world of division, endless trolls and sleuths, this show grabs you warmly by the hand and says, hey, it's okay if you don't know much, let's go explore together.

00:02:06 Speaker_04
Cody Halt, thank you so much for that. Let's explore murals. Let's explore Philadelphia, shall we?

00:02:13 Speaker_04
Okay, now this episode also has a bonus field trip episode that we're going to release in a week or so that will take you to a series of murals in the process of being born.

00:02:21 Speaker_04
But in this episode, we're going to be looking through the lens of the inception of street art and public versus private art.

00:02:29 Speaker_04
cultural movements, commissioned versus uncommissioned murals, how to make murals without everything looking wonky because you've scaled up, how murals are chosen, how much it costs to make a mural, where to get that money, vandalism and murals and a fine line in between, and how everything you do is art.

00:02:48 Speaker_04
Trust me. We'll also be talking a lot about the history and art in Philly. And because we cannot and should not attempt to touch on every mural in every city across the globe. We couldn't do it. Do you know how long this episode would be?

00:03:00 Speaker_04
And we shouldn't just highlight the most famous ones.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
So rather, let this look into the workings of public art and murals, where they started, inspire you to find out more about what's in your city and who made it and how you can get involved and why it matters.

00:03:16 Speaker_04
So stand back and admire the history as told by journalist, curator, art appreciator, Philadelphia liver and Toyko graphologist, Conrad Benner.

00:03:44 Speaker_01
Conrad Benner and he, him pronouns.

00:03:46 Speaker_04
You live in Philadelphia.

00:03:47 Speaker_01
I live in Philadelphia.

00:03:48 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:03:49 Speaker_01
Best city in the world.

00:03:50 Speaker_04
Is it the best city in the world? I believe it so far. I've been here a couple hours and it's feeling good.

00:03:55 Speaker_01
I think it's a fantastic city. I'm so glad to be from here. I grew up around the block from where we're recording this. Everyone in Philly is so awesome. And I think we're just, you know, we're the salt of the earth. We're, I don't know. I don't know.

00:04:08 Speaker_01
I love everyone here.

00:04:10 Speaker_04
I only learned recently that Philadelphia has a culture of murals that goes way back.

00:04:18 Speaker_01
Oh my gosh, where do we begin?

00:04:20 Speaker_01
I mean, yes, when we're talking specifically about murals, not only do we have the nation's largest public arts program that is Mural Arts Philadelphia, and they have been responsible for creating somewhere around 4,000 murals in their 38-year history.

00:04:37 Speaker_01
And yeah, Mural Arts a number of years ago created the nickname Mural Capital of the World. You know, you have to self-brand.

00:04:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
And it's kind of stuck. It's like on Wikipedia now when we get written about internationally. Of course, there's other cities with great murals and some with great mural programs. But yeah, we're the one who took that name, Mural Capital of the World.

00:04:56 Speaker_04
I've been wanting to do an episode on murals for years, and it's like, there's not gonna be an ology for that. I was like, I wish there were.

00:05:03 Speaker_04
Maybe I have to invent one, because very rarely I'll work with an ologist to be like, can we coin a term, please? But I was doing some research.

00:05:12 Speaker_01
Ooh, the phone has come out. I know, because there's no- For those listening, which is everyone.

00:05:17 Speaker_04
Toycographology.

00:05:18 Speaker_01
You just called me a twink?

00:05:19 Speaker_02
What did you say?

00:05:22 Speaker_04
Follow up episode.

00:05:25 Speaker_01
I am 38 years old.

00:05:28 Speaker_04
Your skin is amazing though.

00:05:30 Speaker_01
Oh, thank you.

00:05:30 Speaker_04
Forever young. Toyko, you are a Toyko graphologist. You're a modern Toyko graphologist. Nice.

00:05:37 Speaker_01
Did you know that? You know, I did know that. No, I did not.

00:05:42 Speaker_04
And it comes from, it's a real term. It's used the world over. It's used in academic journals. And a Toyko graphologist is someone who studies mural arts or makes them. And it comes from Toyko for wall and graph writing, wall writing.

00:06:00 Speaker_04
And so modern Toyko graphology would be murals.

00:06:02 Speaker_01
Hold on, I have to update my about page. Cause that is my new, that's in my new bio.

00:06:05 Speaker_04
Can you tell me a little bit about, take me back.

00:06:09 Speaker_01
Sure. But yeah, I grew up in Philly. So I did take an art class, but I really don't remember it. I remember like all the math classes. I was really obsessed with math.

00:06:17 Speaker_01
And then the long story long, because this is a long podcast, is I got sick my junior year of high school. They couldn't figure out what it was, but I was just lethargic all the time, like would sleep right through my alarm.

00:06:26 Speaker_01
So they ended up homeschooling me. Public school system here had a great program where a teacher came out a couple of times a week and I graduated on time. Long story long, it messed up my transcript and I didn't go to college.

00:06:37 Speaker_01
So the reason I got into the arts is because in my late teens, early twenties, worked at Whole Foods, worked at Zara, worked a few jobs. I was late everywhere. So I got fired after a few years at all these places.

00:06:49 Speaker_01
So, but around this time I met a lot of great people. A lot of like, you know, I was 19, 20 and the folks I were meeting were in their early 20s and a lot of them had just graduated from art school.

00:06:58 Speaker_01
You know, this is like early 2000s Whole Foods, which for the young folks out there, it was a different world. Whole Foods was a different, it was very artsy and fun, at least in Philadelphia. That's where it attracted a lot of young artsy folks.

00:07:09 Speaker_01
In Philly, we have this thing called First Fridays.

00:07:11 Speaker_01
It was started about 30 years ago in the 90s here, and they said, let's do this thing where every first Friday, we open our doors, we give folks free wine and free snacks, and maybe people will come out. They did, and seeing the art there,

00:07:23 Speaker_01
when I was like 19, 20, 21 in old city seeing really experimental art. It wasn't the stuff you see in the PMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art or other galleries. It was really exciting and it was stuff I'd never seen before.

00:07:33 Speaker_01
And then just like really interesting themes, lots of queer art, lots of queer themes, lots of like really beautiful representations of people who were from my community. I'm part of the LGBT army.

00:07:46 Speaker_01
And yeah, I think my experience with art before was sort of whatever I was taught in the textbooks. whatever I saw in like the museums. And it's kind of, you know, a lot of European art, a lot of from Renaissance painters and stuff.

00:07:58 Speaker_01
And it's great, you know.

00:08:00 Speaker_04
Bowls of fruit, dead pheasants. Yeah. But what Conrad was seeing in the more underground and experimental art scene really spoke to him. And it was more colorful.

00:08:09 Speaker_04
It was more daring and in more evocative settings, like art showcased in an otherwise dark room or with more vibrant palettes.

00:08:18 Speaker_01
that felt like what I would see on Nickelodeon as a kid, like, but cooler. So it was around that time I was out actually one time and this woman who I went to elementary school with, her name was Kelly White. This was 2005, 2006 and blogs were so new.

00:08:34 Speaker_01
And she was like, I'm looking for someone to help me co-write a weekly article where we talk about arts and culture in the city. Would you like to co-write it with me? And I was like, what? Of course, let's figure it out.

00:08:43 Speaker_01
All I wanted to do was write about the arts. It was just this thing I found myself in because I was going to these first Friday shows. When I was 24, I broke my leg. I got hit by a van that was turning right on red and broke my leg.

00:08:58 Speaker_01
I had to move back in with my parents for a minute, went through this depression. By then I was 24, making most of my money at a coffee shop job, making $7 an hour. What am I doing with my life? I'm so scared.

00:09:08 Speaker_04
So Conrad enrolled in the local community college and at the suggestion of a friend, he took up photography.

00:09:14 Speaker_04
And then his love of photography and the art scene and writing kind of coalesced into his own blog about street art, streetsdepartment.com, which is now this long running staple of the art scene in the mural capital of the world.

00:09:26 Speaker_04
And he knows everyone, everyone knows him. Conrad is like a city treasure.

00:09:32 Speaker_04
Did you find that transition having written about and consumed and been in that art world that your transition to photographing it kind of felt like it scratched a different itch for you?

00:09:44 Speaker_01
Yeah. First of all, it's so funny. I was just listening to a podcast on the way here that Well, maybe it was your podcast. But it was some quip about how, like, everyone hates to write, but everyone loves to have written.

00:09:56 Speaker_03
Yes. Was that your podcast? It was.

00:09:59 Speaker_04
I hate writing, but I love having written.

00:10:01 Speaker_01
And I literally laughed on the L. I was like, that's how I felt.

00:10:04 Speaker_04
So this quote is usually attributed to early 20th century poet and screenwriter Dorothy Parker, but some people online fight about if that's a misattribution to this writer named Frank Norris, but it doesn't matter.

00:10:15 Speaker_04
Writing could be daunting, Conrad says, but he loved being out cataloging street art with his camera.

00:10:21 Speaker_01
So yeah, it did scratch a different itch for me and it was so different.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
I mean, within the first few months of creating this blog, Time Magazine had republished one of my articles on their Tumblr and used one of the photos, very small, it was very small, but used it in one of their like wrap ups in the print edition too.

00:10:38 Speaker_01
By the end of that first year, the Encyclopedia Britannica used a couple of my photos to talk about yarn bombing.

00:10:44 Speaker_04
Oh my God.

00:10:45 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:10:46 Speaker_04
Let's talk about semantics.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
Sure.

00:10:49 Speaker_04
Street art, graffiti, murals. Can you break down some of the terminology for people that don't know jack shit about this?

00:10:57 Speaker_01
Great. I would love to. So when you see art in the public space, there's two broad categories, commissioned and non-commissioned. Commissioned work is stuff that's approved. So you have the wall owner's approval or the land owner's approval.

00:11:11 Speaker_01
Usually there's funding, whether that be city, state, federal funding, or grant funding, or private funding. Usually there's a curator involved. So an artist is selected through a process. Oftentimes there's decent amount of community involvement.

00:11:27 Speaker_01
So maybe the community is consulted before, during, or after, or all of the above. Sometimes the idea comes first, and then the artist is selected. Sometimes the artist comes first, and then the idea comes through that.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
But the general idea being that it's this big, purposefully bulky process to make sure that artwork is created in the public space that has some reflection of the community, city, town, block, neighborhood, home, whatever that it's around.

00:11:53 Speaker_04
Here in the US, there is this government art and architecture program. I did not know about this.

00:11:58 Speaker_04
It's been in place since 1962, and it reserves half of 1% of the construction cost of every federal building for commissioning artworks, and that includes murals. Now, what if big government or nobody asked you to art on them?

00:12:12 Speaker_01
On the non-commissioned side, it's artists speaking directly to the people around them. No approvals, usually self-funded or almost always self-funded. And the two sub-buckets there are street art and graffiti.

00:12:26 Speaker_01
It all really started with modern-day graffiti. The modern-day graffiti movement started here in Philadelphia, so you're in the right place.

00:12:33 Speaker_01
Some could argue also in the Bronx right around the same time, but if my memory serves me correctly, even the New York Times credits Philadelphia as being the place it started.

00:12:44 Speaker_01
There were writers like Kornbread and Cool Earl and a number of others who would go around and write those tags, those names on different walls around the city. Kornbread famously did like the Jackson 5 jet and the elephant at the zoo.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
So he became a huge name and is still a working artist today.

00:13:02 Speaker_04
Okay, so this is wild, you're not gonna believe this, but Cornbread is not his given name. He was actually born Darryl Alexander McRae.

00:13:09 Speaker_04
And after getting into some trouble in his youth in the 1960s, and asking the cook at a detention center for cornbread every day, people started making fun of him by calling him Cornbread. And he embraced it, and he said, so frickin' what, haters?

00:13:22 Speaker_04
And then when he was out, he used the tag Cornbread around his neighborhood to tell this girl named Cynthia that he loved her.

00:13:29 Speaker_04
I don't think that this led to a relationship, but it did lead to more writing on walls, moving up from marker to spray paint. And then when this rumor spread that Kornbread had died, he was like, no, I didn't.

00:13:41 Speaker_04
And so he snuck into the city zoo in Philly and he painted Kornbread Lives on an alive elephant. Also the Jackson Five's Private Jet when it touched down for a Philly gig.

00:13:52 Speaker_04
So by the early 1970s, word had gotten out that with some paint, you could get the word out.

00:13:57 Speaker_01
And graffiti was invented about 12 years after the invention of the spray can, which makes sense. You know, there is roller graffiti. So, you know, dipping a roller into paint and rolling it that way.

00:14:06 Speaker_01
But really the quickest form of graffiti is spray paint. And oftentimes you want to get in and out really quickly because you don't have anyone's approval. And then street art is kind of everything that's not graffiti.

00:14:15 Speaker_01
So graffiti is a tagline, sometimes a character. A tag is just a couple of letters usually that spells out a name and it's spray paint on a wall. It's all about like hand control. So it's like the style of your hand that you have on the wall.

00:14:28 Speaker_01
And as I said, sometimes there's characters. And then street art is sort of everything else you can imagine. So there are street artists who do stickers. There are street artists who do wheat paste. Wheat paste is paper and glue on a wall.

00:14:38 Speaker_01
Yarn bombing, it's creating some sort of insulation with yarn and attaching it to something. There are artists who do projection work. Street artists do projection work. Anything, this, that, and above, you know?

00:14:47 Speaker_01
So yeah, on the commission side, there's murals, monuments, and public art. On the non-commissioned side, there's street art and graffiti. Those are the super broadest strokes we could take.

00:14:57 Speaker_04
When it comes to murals, I feel like the biggest thing I've always wondered is what counts as a mural? If I do something that is a postage stamp size on a wall, is that a mural?

00:15:10 Speaker_04
At what point does something go from, this is a painting on the wall, to this is a fucking mural?

00:15:14 Speaker_01
That's like, when does a drop of water become a lake sort of thing? So really kind of any paint on a wall that's commissioned would be a mural, even if it's just a dollop.

00:15:24 Speaker_04
Okay, see, this is good to know. I always wondered about that. And do you ever look back at like frescoes say in antiquity, where do you think frescoes lie in all this?

00:15:38 Speaker_01
Oh, this is a beautiful question. I even remember taking art history when I was going to community college and my art history teacher saying like, yeah, graffiti is kind of always existed. They would carve things into like different buildings.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
And you could say like the cave paintings of France are right. There's no permission there. I mean, we didn't even have property then. So like, is that commissioned mural work or is it street art or graffiti? Whatever it might be this.

00:16:06 Speaker_01
urge for us as human beings, as this like consciousness on this earth, we want to paint, to decorate to have the space around us reflect us and our experience in some way.

00:16:21 Speaker_01
And if you look at the murals in Philadelphia or a lot of cities around the globe, a lot of them kind of just depict the city around them and the people around them and the culture around them or different cultures in the world, different histories.

00:16:32 Speaker_01
So when we're talking about frescoes, yeah, maybe some of the earliest murals, right? Because certainly commissioned, certainly approved, certainly funded. And they're beautiful. It's so interesting, yeah.

00:16:44 Speaker_04
Just a side note, don't call just any mural that features people in robes and stuff a fresco. So fresco comes from fresh in Italian, like a fresco. And frescoes are painted using pigment that's laid directly into wet plaster.

00:16:59 Speaker_04
So like the wall's going up, the fresco is going up, hence fresh. Also, it's a huge pain in the ass. I drive by a mural and I go, that's pretty, but I don't know anything. I'm like, is that acrylic? Is that enamel? Is that spray paint?

00:17:13 Speaker_04
Do certain media lend themselves better to elements on the East Coast as opposed to like a mural in Joshua Tree or something? Like when people are making murals, what do they have in their trunk when they roll up to make a mural?

00:17:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's a few different ways you can make murals. That's a great question. And we're actually making some right now on Front Street here in Philadelphia.

00:17:32 Speaker_01
In addition to running a blog, I have a curatorial part of Streets Department called Streets Department Walls. And right now we're creating four new murals with four up-and-coming artists on Front Street.

00:17:40 Speaker_04
Stay tuned for a field trip where I stand on a Philly street corner at midnight with Conrad, watching muralists do their thing and asking them what their inspo was, how they do it, where to get a good cheesesteak, et cetera.

00:17:53 Speaker_01
You can make murals with acrylic outdoor paint or with spray paint, but I would say most murals are created with acrylic outdoor paint. Most murals are created to have some length of time.

00:18:05 Speaker_01
If you wanted to live more than a couple of years because weather will deteriorate it, the sun will start to remove some of that color, you'll often want to do this clear coat that goes on top that cost a decent amount.

00:18:18 Speaker_01
So they're under the commission bucket. So there's funders, there's approvals, there's artist selections. Murals aren't cheap to make for the most part.

00:18:26 Speaker_04
Yeah. How much does it cost to make a mural?

00:18:28 Speaker_01
So yeah, murals can go anywhere from a few thousand dollars to 100 plus thousand dollars. It really depends on who the artist is you're hiring, the wall. all of it, the materials, how long you want it to last.

00:18:40 Speaker_01
So if you are, let's say, a homeowner who has a great wall, who would love a mural on their wall, but can't pay $10,000, $20,000, $40,000, $50,000, whatever it might be to create a mural there, in a place like Philadelphia, what you can do is submit your wall to the mural program.

00:18:56 Speaker_01
And it'll be put into a batch of walls that project managers and curators can look at as potential opportunities for murals. And it can be funded through that organization. And you can have a mural on your wall with that money.

00:19:07 Speaker_01
So for you, it's free, but you know, everyone's still paid.

00:19:11 Speaker_04
What about trends in murals? Because you've been covering this for so long. You're such an expert in this. What have you seen in terms of content wise over the last decade or so? What used to be depicted and where is it trending?

00:19:24 Speaker_01
So this is a great question. So one thing that's really clear is that we're in an era now where graffiti and street art is so nostalgic. I mean graffiti is, I can't do the math on that, over 50 years old at this point.

00:19:42 Speaker_01
So that aesthetic is so nostalgic for people and people just really love it that we're seeing a lot of like mural programs be a little more open to those sorts of styles of mural making.

00:19:56 Speaker_01
To give you an example, when the mural arts program, which is 38 years old in Philadelphia, started in the 80s, it's today now the biggest, it started as the anti-graffiti network.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
And it was a part of the mayor at the time, Wilson Goode, wanted to create a division of the city that would cover up graffiti with murals. And they hired a person named Jane Golden, who is now still the executive director of the mural arts program.

00:20:22 Speaker_01
And her theory of the case was, well, let's actually hire the graffiti writers. So while we're out there, if we see someone tagging, we'll say, hey, do you want a job?

00:20:28 Speaker_01
Now, unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, however you want to see it, think of the 70s. You can think of train graffiti in New York.

00:20:36 Speaker_01
I think that those images come fresh to a lot of people's minds who've seen movies or entertainment or old photos. There was a real pushback still about graffiti in the 80s.

00:20:45 Speaker_01
So even when graffiti writers were hired, their talents were used, but they were making more depictorial murals. So murals that would depict, you know, the communities around them, civic leaders, people from history.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
A lot of those sort of early anti-graffiti murals were very literal, let's say. There's a very famous one that's still there now. It's been there for like 30 plus years on the side of a car mechanic's place.

00:21:12 Speaker_01
And the mural depicts a car mechanic and what it looks like inside, you know?

00:21:16 Speaker_04
So this is the 1985 Blatt Tire mural in the Callow Hill area of Philly. And it was made by artist Joshua Kaufman and commissioned by the then called Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network and Marv Blatt, the owner of Blatt Tire and Auto.

00:21:31 Speaker_04
And it's in this flat, blocky, almost cartoonish style. And it shows these cars parked in a line and a few cars up on lifts as if they're getting worked on. And it's now this city landmark, and it's been restored twice in its 40-year history.

00:21:48 Speaker_04
And whatever Blatt paid to have it done, excellent investment. So much Blatt for the buck.

00:21:54 Speaker_01
Mural arts did take chances though. They did this like Diego Rivera mural right around where their offices were in the 80s. But very few were in any kind of graffiti style or street art style. They were all like... Like or trending toward fine art?

00:22:08 Speaker_01
Nothing was experimental. There wasn't even like abstract murals, really. By the late 2000s, early 2010s, mural art started taking more risks because they could.

00:22:17 Speaker_01
The culture had moved to a place where graffiti and street art themes started to be more appreciated and many more abstract murals. So now when you walk around, you're more likely to see abstract murals than you ever were in the 80s or 90s.

00:22:31 Speaker_01
And things are just more experimental. So I think that's been the evolution, this acceptance of this culture, which has been really important. Just think of the irony there, right? And mural arts started as the anti-graffiti network.

00:22:42 Speaker_01
And this was the same for a lot of cities across the country. There was this battle against graffiti. I guess it was a part of this like broken windows theory of local governance, right? That sort of took hold in the 80s and 90s. Like, how can we fix

00:22:54 Speaker_01
quote-unquote fix these small problems as opposed to addressing like real systemic problems. Like why don't we raise the minimum wage? No, why don't we, you know, yeah.

00:23:02 Speaker_01
And now 30 plus years later, they're hiring graffiti writers to create murals that look like graffiti. It's so funny. It's right. That's the turnaround.

00:23:10 Speaker_04
So from its original name of the Anti-Graffiti Network to the now Mural Arts Program, and founder Jane Golden has been quoted as saying, we quickly realized that we were a pro-art program, not anti-anything.

00:23:23 Speaker_04
And when you go to different cities, if you ever travel to different cities, do you see stylistic differences? Like if you're in LA or let's say you're looking at pictures of Tokyo, are you ever like, oh shit, they do it so differently there?

00:23:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, I just came back from Mexico City. I spent a week in Mexico City. I loved it. And it's always a response to the city that you're in. Every city's culture is a bit different. All the artists there have different energies and flows.

00:23:51 Speaker_01
And that's what I get really attracted to. You know, there is this like growing trend in some cities. I won't name them. where they create little mural districts. They bring in huge name muralists and they create a little outdoor museum.

00:24:06 Speaker_01
Those are fantastic. I've been to plenty.

00:24:09 Speaker_04
Dish the shit, Conrad. Come on.

00:24:10 Speaker_01
I'll name the most famous one, Wynwood Walls in Miami. When you do that, it's great.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
I think those are super valuable spaces, but we also need to support the local artists in whatever city you're in because you never know who's going to be the next big artist.

00:24:25 Speaker_04
So look into the work of Aaron, A-R-E-N, who paints clowns in like magnifying mirror level detail with face paint caked into wrinkles and stray silver hairs kind of escaping wigs. Really gorgeous. Like you can almost smell the clowns.

00:24:45 Speaker_01
And he did one to a very famous clown from that city. There are a couple of famous clowns from Mexico City I didn't know. I think comedy is really important there. But in looking at it, I was like, wow, this is really interesting.

00:24:54 Speaker_01
There's no clown murals in Philly. I think in America, like clowns are kind of scary, right?

00:25:00 Speaker_04
that would not have been something I would expect. Like, oh yes, of course, there'll be a lot of public clown art. That's not a thought I would ever have. And I feel like in LA, we do have some of our murals are very clearly an Instagrammable backdrop.

00:25:15 Speaker_04
Like there are a lot of murals in LA where it's like butterfly wings that you stand in the middle, angel wings that you stand in the middle of. Like they're very much like a backdrop for your tourism photos.

00:25:26 Speaker_04
But as more people are looking for Instagramable opportunities, do you find that mural artists might be getting fucked a little bit more because it's like, well, this is the great exposure, great exposure, great exposure.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
Who are you? Your insight is spot on. So this is, you have just opened up a can of worms. Okay, so let's talk about this. First of all, yes, this is why funding is really important for these projects.

00:25:53 Speaker_01
So the idea of sort of outdoor mural museums with only big name artists comes from this idea of usually the funding is maybe a developer or someone who wants to create a tourist attraction. That's where like complicated questions around gentrification

00:26:08 Speaker_01
Because especially if you look at Wynwood, there's a huge conversation happening there about like, it has transformed the neighborhood around it because it's become such a tourist attraction. And there's a whole debate to be had there.

00:26:18 Speaker_01
So when, yeah, like what is the intent of the funding? What is the intent there? So yeah, when you see murals that are all about like creating Instagramable moments on like shopping district streets.

00:26:29 Speaker_04
Not to mention the many debates about neighborhoods pushing out long-established locals. And the real estate tycoon behind Wynwood Walls called this gentlefication. Guess what? People did not like that term.

00:26:43 Speaker_01
sure i don't want to yuck anyone's yum like and i've taken photos in front of those things too like okay do it but there needs to be kind of an equal playing field here you know there's lots of private funding for murals because there's lots of incentive especially in the instagram age and the tiktok age of like

00:27:00 Speaker_01
If we put murals here, people will come out, people will photograph them, people will take selfies in front of them. And then the businesses around this sort of district that we create will benefit from it.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
But murals and public art can't just exist for capitalism, in my opinion. So we need to make sure that our local, especially our local governments and cities and towns across the country are funding

00:27:22 Speaker_01
and creating in these public art programs because it's really important. A lot of the projects I work on right now are through Mural Arts Philadelphia. They're the partner I work with, the nonprofit partner I work with, and a lot of it's city funding.

00:27:35 Speaker_01
So every two years I do this project called To the Poles where we build walls in Love Park, which is a central park here in the city of Philadelphia. And we hire six artists to create six temporary murals about why they vote.

00:27:47 Speaker_01
And they are selfie walls. And the idea is people are supposed to come out, take selfies in front of them, take photos of it. And just like the, I voted sticker.

00:27:55 Speaker_01
It's something that you can share with your, with the people around you about that you vote, right? It's, it's nonpartisan. So you don't have to say who, why, what, or why you're voting, but it's just like, I vote. Right.

00:28:05 Speaker_01
Cause one of the reasons people vote is positive peer pressure. And the more they see those messages, they're more likely to vote.

00:28:10 Speaker_04
Now for more on political sociology, you can see our 2020 episode about voter turnout and suppression.

00:28:16 Speaker_04
And we also had a Stephology episode about voting from 2018, but the audio was really rough and it was a lot about the 2018 congressional elections in the U.S. But we also have a two-part nomology episode on constitutional law. It's a two-parter.

00:28:30 Speaker_04
In one part, I read you the entire constitution of the United States with some added footnotes. So enjoy. But yes, pro-voting murals.

00:28:39 Speaker_01
And if we did that with Coca-Cola, I mean, Coca-Cola gave me money. I won't be mad, but you know, who knows what it would be? It wouldn't be a voting thing. It'd be something about Coca-Cola. Yeah.

00:28:46 Speaker_01
So we need, we really need public funding for these programs. Otherwise it will all be tourist attractions, which again, nothing ends with tourist attractions. I think those are valuable.

00:28:56 Speaker_01
It's really valuable to be able to live in a city and go, Oh, you know, I've never seen this big muralist. Let me go here and see it.

00:29:01 Speaker_01
But if you're not supporting the local artists there, if you're not creating murals, you know, for the communities around them, you know, you're missing out.

00:29:08 Speaker_04
What about in the mural capital of the world? Conrad gets asked this, and he said there are a bunch of murals near the Gaborhood. Dr. Sarah McAnulty has helped spearhead a few biology-themed ones in Fishtown.

00:29:20 Speaker_04
Like Our Aquatic Neighbors is located at Trenton and Norris, and there's one called River Critters at Franklin and Belgrade, next time you go to Philly. But overall, there are 5,000 peppered throughout the city. Kind of like if Pokemons were murals.

00:29:35 Speaker_04
Go find them.

00:29:36 Speaker_01
So if you wanna get a real sense of the murals, you have to take like a trolley tour or something to go around the city and see them all.

00:29:42 Speaker_01
In Philly, it's much less about creating these tourist attractions and more about like, how can we use public art, hire local artists, work with local communities to tell the history and stories of our cities through our public art?

00:29:56 Speaker_04
Do most murals have an agenda of some kind either to raise an appreciation for something that's depicted, to make the experience of walking down that street better? Do you find kind of like a common motivator for a lot of mural artists?

00:30:13 Speaker_01
Wow, the way you phrased that question makes me think of Percy Street in Philadelphia for a specific reason.

00:30:17 Speaker_01
But I would say the overarching answer to that is murals are here to reflect us, to reflect our lived experiences, to reflect our histories, to reflect our hopes and dreams for the future.

00:30:26 Speaker_01
Even the abstract murals are here to excite us in ways that maybe, you know, make our brain chemistry work a little different so we can open up different pathways in our mind. Who knows? The way you phrased that makes me think of Percy Street.

00:30:38 Speaker_01
So Percy Street is this weird alley here in Philadelphia. You know, Philadelphia is mostly a grid system. So if you're on any street in Philly, you can see all four intersections.

00:30:45 Speaker_01
But Percy Street, the way it's carved out, when you're in the middle of Percy Street, you can't see either end of the street. And it's near Pat's and Gino's. I'm sure every listener might know that we have cheesesteaks here in the city of Philadelphia.

00:30:57 Speaker_04
I'm familiar with it, heard of it.

00:30:58 Speaker_01
As a vegetarian, I will not comment.

00:31:01 Speaker_04
There's gotta be some vegetarian.

00:31:02 Speaker_01
Oh, there are, there are.

00:31:03 Speaker_04
Are there any, what's a good, just a quick internal aside into this Percy Street comment. Is there a good vegetarian cheesesteak, vegan cheesesteak in the city?

00:31:11 Speaker_01
I think Govindas. Let's say Govindas. I don't know if they're still there. Here's the secret about being a Philadelphian. You don't eat that many cheese sticks.

00:31:18 Speaker_03
I know, I imagine.

00:31:19 Speaker_01
Well, and also, if you want a cheese stick in Philly, everyone's neighborhood shop is their favorite place. It's none of these places you would have heard about. Maybe Jim's, I've heard good things about Jim's, but anyway.

00:31:28 Speaker_04
But that's a cheese stick aside, but Percy Street.

00:31:29 Speaker_01
But Percy Street. So yeah, it's this weird street where it's near Pat's and Gino's. So there's nightlife over there. Pat's and Gino's is famously open 24-7.

00:31:37 Speaker_01
So what the neighbors around the street started noticing was people would go back there, maybe take

00:31:43 Speaker_04
Pee and poop.

00:31:43 Speaker_01
Sure.

00:31:44 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah. Okay.

00:31:45 Speaker_01
Outdoor latrine. Getting fights back there. What are the qualities that you wouldn't want happening behind your bedroom window?

00:31:52 Speaker_03
Oh, okay. Yeah, I got it.

00:31:54 Speaker_01
So they had this really smart idea where they hired an artist named Drew Bellew and David Gwynn to collaborate on a mural. They raised money and they did this light installation mural.

00:32:02 Speaker_01
So David Gwynn is a painter and Drew Bellew, I might be pronouncing his last name wrong. I'm so sorry, Drew.

00:32:08 Speaker_04
It's spelled very French because it's French, but you say Drew's last name Bellew.

00:32:12 Speaker_01
is a light insulation artist. So the mural has sort of this geometric-y kind of background with bright, beautiful colors. And then at night it lights up because there's like neon tubes or LED tubes. I always say neon and they go, no, it's LED.

00:32:26 Speaker_04
I know, I know.

00:32:28 Speaker_01
What do I know?

00:32:28 Speaker_04
I feel like neon is a descriptor for the quality of the place.

00:32:32 Speaker_01
Yes, exactly what it looks like. Right. And it became a tourist attraction. And I wrote an article about it. And I mentioned how this is a really interesting way to address, you know, a street where what's the alternative?

00:32:46 Speaker_01
Like, how would you make that street safer? It's a funny way to make that street safer to make it a tourist attraction of sorts.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
So instead of people going back there to take a pee after they go to Pat's and Gino's, they're going back there to take selfies. And There's a whole nother conversation about how we should have more public restrooms, that aside. I've written that too.

00:33:04 Speaker_01
I'm a freelance writer still for WHOI, which is our like NPR affiliate. I wrote a whole article about it, but it was a really interesting way to think about public safety. Like can public art be used to create a safer street?

00:33:15 Speaker_01
And Percy Street has now become a walkable street with like maybe like a half dozen murals and they're kind of rotating. It's really interesting, Percy Street. What's the intent behind murals?

00:33:25 Speaker_01
It really depends on the project, depends on the funder, it depends on the artist, it depends on the community around it. But one way or another, yeah, it's about reflecting who we are and making our public space better, I think.

00:33:38 Speaker_04
So this mural is titled Electric Street, and it features blocks of brightly painted stripes and zigzags, and each one is outlined in these soft purple and green glowing tubes of light.

00:33:53 Speaker_04
And it looks as though you turned a corner into an alleyway, and then suddenly you're just like in an arcade in 1992.

00:33:58 Speaker_04
And I'm sure you get asked this all the time, so forgive me, but just to get people excited about the notion of murals, do you have a couple

00:34:08 Speaker_04
murals that you have seen in the world or that are just like some ones that you really remember that just Made an impact that kind of lodge in your mind

00:34:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I'll bring it home to Philly. I'll start there. There's a mural here called Common Threads by Meg Saligman. And, you know, I have a streets department podcast. It's kind of on hiatus right now, but I also produce the mural arts podcast.

00:34:28 Speaker_01
And I got to interview Meg about that. It's a really interesting story. In the early nineties, she saw this wall. It was the sunset. Just imagine it. She's driving down Spring Garden Street, which is like a four lane street here in Philadelphia.

00:34:39 Speaker_01
She sees this five story wall on the side of what used to be a former school. Now it's whatever it is, apartments. And the sun was setting and she goes, I want to do a mural on that wall.

00:34:47 Speaker_01
This is back in the day when mural arts has yet to become mural arts. It's still the Andy Graffiti Network. And they're doing sort of smaller projects around the city.

00:34:53 Speaker_04
So this was originally conceived in 1993, although it would be four years before completion.

00:35:00 Speaker_01
And she goes, how am I going to do this?

00:35:02 Speaker_01
She spends the next couple of years going to local high schools around the wall, figuring out what the wall could be, figuring out what the mural could be and knocking on the wall owner's door saying, can I do it? He says, yes.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
The theme of the mural ends up being connecting performance artists here in the city, dancers, contemporary dancers from the schools around there with maybe like Victorian dancers.

00:35:23 Speaker_01
And that the idea of like performance art through like the decades, common threads, we're all sort of connected in one way or another.

00:35:30 Speaker_01
And she applies for like a bunch of different grants because each of the grants she'd get would give her $5,000 and it just wasn't enough to do this huge mural.

00:35:36 Speaker_01
She gets to the end, she starts painting it by hand by herself, realizes she needs a bit more money for scaffolding.

00:35:43 Speaker_04
down to no money, Meg petitioned the Mural Arts Program, then the Anti-Graffiti Network, and they funded the rest of it. And it still stands on the corner of North Broad and Spring Garden streets.

00:35:54 Speaker_04
And it's this gorgeous kind of sepia-toned scene, this diverse array of people in corseted and bustled gowns, intermingling with people in then-contemporary late 1990s. fashion. And it's huge and detailed and ornate. It's stunning.

00:36:12 Speaker_04
And when Dr. McAnulty drove me past it later, I gasped a gasp. I was like, whew, look at that.

00:36:18 Speaker_01
And it really changed mural making here in the city. So in the 80s and early 90s, a lot of what the Andy Graffiti Network here in the city was doing and a lot of the murals created in the city were very quick.

00:36:31 Speaker_01
It was sort of like, hey, here's a problem wall. Let's do something real quick. Like the tire place, for example. We have two seconds to think about this, let's just do a mural depicting the business that's inside, right?

00:36:42 Speaker_01
And what Meg did, spending those years she took to think about the idea, work with the community, create it, and the final result, I beg people as you're listening to this, go search Meg Saligman, Common Threads. The mural is stunning.

00:36:54 Speaker_01
It changed mural making in the city. It got international press, was beloved by everyone. And as I believe Jane Golden talked about later, the Executive Director of Mural Arts, it opened up new funding.

00:37:04 Speaker_01
All of a sudden people were saying, wait, murals cannot just be covering up things we don't like, but actually like a huge, really interesting thing for the city and neighborhoods that they're in.

00:37:13 Speaker_01
And this is where like public art gets really interesting because I've seen so many murals that when you first asked that, my mind went to this artist named Hot T. who is, he works with yarn, and he did this installation in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

00:37:26 Speaker_01
If you've never been to Asbury, it's a great little beach town, very queer, very fun, very artsy. They have a fun little mural wall, and they hired Hot Tea for two summers in a row to do this yarn installation.

00:37:36 Speaker_01
So they have this architecture, I think it's like a, I don't know, some very important part of what the boardwalk used to be. It was kind of run down, but it's this beautiful old architecture, and he did this hanging yarn installation. The yarn,

00:37:50 Speaker_01
hung from the ceiling I want to say 20 feet down and it was like a full block of it and every whisper of wind would move the installation so it was almost like the sea but in the air and colorful and I was so drawn to it because of that delicateness of it because they said look

00:38:08 Speaker_01
The way this is hung and with the wind from the beach, this could last a day. This could last two days. And then the funders were fine with that. They were like, this is a risk we're taking. This is great. So I went up right after it was installed.

00:38:19 Speaker_01
It was incredible. And it ended up lasting all summer. They had to detangle it almost every day. But that ephemerality was so just my mind, I don't think could totally wrap around it. And it was just so interesting to me.

00:38:30 Speaker_04
What do you think the most famous mural in the wall is? Is it The Last Supper? In the world? Yeah, in the wall. The most famous mural in the world, I need to fact check this, but I don't know if The Last Supper is a fresco.

00:38:43 Speaker_04
I don't know if that counts as a mural. But what do you think are some murals, when people think of murals, they go, like these?

00:38:50 Speaker_01
I would bet you that most people don't think about murals. And if you said, what's the most famous mural in the world, I don't think people would have an answer.

00:38:58 Speaker_04
I know, I'm wondering.

00:38:59 Speaker_01
What would be your answer?

00:39:01 Speaker_04
I feel like if I had to guess, I was going to say Banksy. I was going to say either that or On The Swing. But yeah, the Banksy balloon heart.

00:39:09 Speaker_01
Definitely. I think you said who's the most famous street artist. I think he would rise to the top, maybe Obey. But I think when you ask people about murals, I think their mind goes to the ones around them.

00:39:22 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:39:22 Speaker_01
And maybe that's good. You know, murals are so personal. And local.

00:39:27 Speaker_04
That's the whole fucking point is that you cannot take a mural on a touring exhibition. It is so location based.

00:39:35 Speaker_01
And it's a really interesting question to ask, too, because art is so personal, too. So it's like, what's the most famous TV show in the world? I don't know, but I know what I watch, right?

00:39:44 Speaker_01
The reason I started this blog is because I was walking around, right? I broke my leg. I decided not to bike. I was walking around with my camera. And I really started to appreciate and notice things more and be curious about them.

00:39:56 Speaker_01
That's all this effort is, is I'm curious about these works around me. and this world around me and like, why, why paint this? Like, why was this painted? How was this painted? What's the next thing that's going to be painted? Yeah, I'm just so curious.

00:40:09 Speaker_01
And I think that's, what's really interesting about this work. But the murals in our neighborhoods are really like one of the easiest ways for folks to connect with like visual art painting. And this is so important.

00:40:22 Speaker_01
I really hate that we live in a world where like some people think art's not for them. Art is Everything! Are you picking clothes to wear every morning? That's art. Are you deciding how to do your makeup every morning? That's art.

00:40:33 Speaker_01
Are you deciding what car you drive? That's art. This is all art. It's all expression. It's all fun and creativity. And don't put a wall between you and paint on a wall just because it's paint on a wall. It's just such a great way.

00:40:45 Speaker_01
Art makes you feel things and we deserve to have these feelings. We deserve to go explore how things make us feel and react. open up new pathways in our mind, right? That's how I think about finding these murals. Everyone's like, Pokemon Go.

00:40:58 Speaker_01
You know, it's like every time I find one, I'm like, oh, this is a new one. Then I want to find everything out about it. Or first I want to sit there and be like, how does this make me feel? Okay, what is this, what is this saying to me?

00:41:08 Speaker_01
And then I'll want to investigate and see what it's about. But yeah, like just go connect with art.

00:41:14 Speaker_04
That's such a good point and it's so bonkers to think of how expensive a lot of art and how private the acquisition is.

00:41:21 Speaker_04
Once that very expensive piece of art is acquired, then it's put away somewhere very safe where it can't deteriorate and usually one or two people can see it.

00:41:30 Speaker_04
Whereas the idea of a piece of art that's so public that has almost no protection from the elements and that is

00:41:38 Speaker_04
so democratized in terms of who can see it, anyone can see something on a public street, how much power that image has, I feel like is the beauty of it, is the reach. You know what I mean?

00:41:49 Speaker_01
Just stand in front of something and go, how do I feel?

00:41:51 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:41:53 Speaker_01
Okay. And then next one. You don't have, you know, it's not a test at the end of the day. Maybe that's where school gets us wrong. Cause the only thing I remember about art school or art class was like names and dates. Yep.

00:42:03 Speaker_01
It's probably the least important part of art.

00:42:05 Speaker_04
Yeah, I know. Okay. Before we get to your Patreon questions, we're having so much fun yammering just a few more technicalities of murals. Are most murals titled? You mentioned Megs.

00:42:14 Speaker_01
That's a great question. It's about 50-50. A lot are not titled. Yeah. Okay.

00:42:18 Speaker_04
I wasn't sure about that. And then also, can we touch on briefly the etiquette of why murals don't get tagged as much as a blank wall?

00:42:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, it goes back to how we started this, like the number one rule of creating in the public space commissioned or non-commissioned permission or no permission is you don't go over someone. It's just a long-standing rule.

00:42:41 Speaker_01
If a mural goes up, you don't go over it. It's just respect at the end of the day.

00:42:44 Speaker_04
So yeah, you don't go over someone else's work, it's code, you don't do that. And it's generally respected, although there is some pretty great global exposure if you tag a still wet Banksy, which happens.

00:42:58 Speaker_04
But typically, street artists show mutual respect, even if it's just not stickering over someone else's sticker, you don't do it. And just in case though, there are coatings like mural shield, or there are novel hydrogels that are impregnated with

00:43:14 Speaker_04
gentle paint dissolvers, according to the 2021 paper, selective removal of overpaintings from street art using an environmentally friendly nanostructured fluid loaded in highly retentive hydrogels.

00:43:25 Speaker_04
Although other vandalism removal methods can include, news to me, laser ablation, ultrasonication, plasma spray, thermal spray, dry ice blasting, and soda blasting. And that removes the top few microns of overpaint to restore the mural.

00:43:44 Speaker_04
Do you, is there ever a backlash against funded public art, like, well, that was a tagging space for the community, and now we've got commissioned art piece, so there isn't that available real estate for local graffiti.

00:43:58 Speaker_04
Is there ever any tension with that?

00:44:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think you have to be really intentional about the spaces you use or the spaces you don't use. A lot of the murals, probably most of them in Philly, are on the side of row homes. You know, Philly has this great architecture for murals.

00:44:12 Speaker_01
We have blocks and blocks of row homes, which are, what's another word for them? Like brick homes?

00:44:17 Speaker_02
I don't know.

00:44:19 Speaker_01
And wherever there's an empty lot or if there's a lot before an intersection, the side of it will have no windows so it's like a perfect wall for a mural.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
A lot of like where street art and graffiti is happening is on abandoned like warehouse structures and construction materials where it would be like harder and possible to create murals.

00:44:38 Speaker_01
There have been instances like about 10 years ago and part of that project was it covered a lot of tags and big graffiti pieces along the Amtrak corridor.

00:44:49 Speaker_01
According to the project's creator, they talked with folks in the graffiti community to make sure they didn't go over the tags of anyone who had passed on to protect their tags. Because if you see a tag that's old,

00:45:02 Speaker_01
There's a lot of respect for that artist and or potentially the artists or that writer has potentially passed away, unfortunately. But it's still got a lot of pushback. It was sort of like, this is our spot. This is a graffiti space. So get out of here.

00:45:15 Speaker_04
this was the German-born installation artist Katerina Gross whose work looks like pigmented explosions went off and detonated these huge sprays of color over each other.

00:45:26 Speaker_01
Part of her idea was to do these big sort of abstract strokes that kind of look like if a giant came down from outer space.

00:45:34 Speaker_01
and painted this with crayons painted the soundtrack corridor big crayons so her intent was the graffiti will come back and it will cover this eventually but it came back real quick so there was a lot of tension there so yeah i think just the creators and everyone's got to be on the same page yeah and sometimes you know

00:45:51 Speaker_01
Folks in the graffiti and street art world just want to do graffiti and street art, but then some of them want to come into the mural world, want to get jobs and get opportunities. So find those people too and support them.

00:46:00 Speaker_01
I've seen so many artists, so many street artists go from doing wheat paste or yarn bombs to doing huge mural projects with mural arts or other folks.

00:46:10 Speaker_04
and now do both you know it can be a way to get people's attention you know creating street art questions from the audience questions but before your questions let's contribute to a few worthy causes and this week Conrad shows the William Way Center which provides everything from social groups networking events counseling and support services to

00:46:28 Speaker_04
art exhibitions and cultural experiences for the LGBTQIA plus communities throughout greater Philly. And Conrad says they do incredible work and they also have a whole art gallery. So they support local artists as well.

00:46:41 Speaker_04
And because this episode would not have been possible without the knowledge and the intros from

00:46:44 Speaker_04
Squid scientist, community organizer, and street artist, Dr. Sarah McAnulty, were also sending a donation to her nonprofit, Skype a Scientist, which matches scientists with groups and classrooms for free. They're amazing.

00:46:58 Speaker_04
And right now, Skype a Scientist needs our help. So to fund their program in 2025, Ology's toothologist, Sarah McAnulty, is selling these extremely adorable frog facts advent calendars.

00:47:09 Speaker_04
Every day you scratch off a sparkly sticker to reveal a new frog fact. They're so cute, so wholesome, and if she sells 5,000, she can fund Skype a Scientist for all of 2025. let's help her. I really want to help her. Get one at squidfacts.net.

00:47:27 Speaker_04
They're 25 bucks, squidfacts.net. Get one for every child in your life. You will change their life. They will always know about frogs. So let's sell out her frog facts advent calendars. You deserve one. Everyone deserves one, squidfacts.net.

00:47:41 Speaker_04
Okay, thank you to sponsors of the show who make those donations possible. Okay, so onto your questions, which you can submit via our Patreon, patreon.com slashologies. Many of you wanted to know how murals and public art can affect change.

00:47:56 Speaker_04
And I'm looking at you patrons, Sarah DeJesus, Sinead McDonald, Nico Price, Maddie Gordy, Becky DeSassi, Seagrass Scientist, Matt Herschel, Michelle Boyle, Lisa Saint, and Emily Stauffer.

00:48:05 Speaker_04
So revolutions, labor movements, civil rights, pandemics, how does public art change us as a whole? A lot of people had questions about murals and their community.

00:48:16 Speaker_04
In Shelby Reardon's words, is there a way to measure the value a mural brings to a community? And have murals been used to change public opinions of certain parts of cities? How is that looked at critically?

00:48:30 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And there are, I mean, certainly there's value, right? That's why there's public and private funding for this art form. There's real value.

00:48:40 Speaker_01
I mean, colloquially, that's why these business districts will often create these murals and sometimes selfie murals to attract people, right? Murals, especially in dense quantities, will attract people, right?

00:48:52 Speaker_01
So these mural districts end up popping up places. For community, it's different, right?

00:48:56 Speaker_01
It may be harder to measure, but in Philly, for example, I'll give you, we're in Fishtown, there's a mural here created by Kyle Yaney that celebrates Philly's trans community, right?

00:49:09 Speaker_01
So Kyle worked with the Morris Home, which is, I think, the country's only place where if you're trans and recovering from addiction, it's the only place you can go, where they have housing. So they're hugely important.

00:49:24 Speaker_01
And worked with the organization and folks from that organization for about a year, found a wall here in Fishtown, and now there's this incredible mural that has words from a lot of the trans folks who participated in this mural making process.

00:49:39 Speaker_01
It says, we will survive, we are strong, we are frustrated. I'm paraphrasing here because I don't remember the words exactly,

00:49:46 Speaker_04
So this is at the Morris Home, which is a residential recovery program specifically serving the transgender and gender expansive community. And the mural reads, we're trans, we're survivors, we are joyful, we feel rage, we are universal.

00:50:00 Speaker_01
but all the different emotions that folks in this community felt. So how do you measure that?

00:50:06 Speaker_01
How do you measure, you know, particularly now being a trans person in this world, the value of like seeing yourself and your community represented in a mural that's not tucked away anywhere.

00:50:15 Speaker_01
It's on Frankfurt Avenue, which is a big street here in Philadelphia. It's huge. Lots of people pass out every single day. So I imagine that for the folks in that community, it's really valuable. Or I can tell you as a queer man,

00:50:27 Speaker_01
I love that we have a gayborhood with lots of murals that celebrate gay men and queer culture and LGBTQ rights and different victories that we've won over the years. And I think that's where it gets really personal. It's hard to measure the personal.

00:50:40 Speaker_01
I'm not doing lightning round, am I? No, no, no, no.

00:50:42 Speaker_04
That's a great answer. And on the way to get a breakfast sandwich, we passed a great ad painted on masonry for fire extinguishers, and it was peeling, and it looks like it's been there for a while. Ghost sign.

00:50:57 Speaker_04
I mean, it looks like art at this point, but there's also old advertisements on masonry buildings in like downtown LA for like cigars, like 5 cent cigars.

00:51:07 Speaker_04
And I'm wondering if something deteriorates enough and it no longer has a purpose to advertise a brand, does it become like an artifact Do you know what I mean?

00:51:18 Speaker_01
People email me all the time about ghost signs.

00:51:21 Speaker_04
Patron John Worcester asked, have murals replaced the billboards that you used to see on top of buildings? But as Conrad explains, those old signs aren't always hastily replaced. Same with the painted ones on the side of buildings. I love them.

00:51:35 Speaker_01
So like a lot of old advertisements were like painted onto walls. And then, yeah, when that company is long gone and they, you know, it's, yeah, they call it ghost signs and there's a whole contingent of people who love them.

00:51:45 Speaker_01
Oh yeah, ghost signs, people love them.

00:51:48 Speaker_04
I never knew there was a word for them.

00:51:50 Speaker_01
We love nostalgia. Yeah. You know, it fits in that nostalgia.

00:51:54 Speaker_04
It's like apocalypse light. It's like archeology. Michaela Humiston and Tarina both wanted to know, how does an artist scale a mural? Marissa and Hester Dingle wanted to know, how are designs transferred from the drawing board to a wall?

00:52:08 Speaker_04
And Archie George, this is a great question. What tricks do muralists use to preserve perspective on this tall vertical surface? And I've always wanted to know that. A bunch of people asked that. Camille Krauss, Olivia Eliason, and Crystal Simons.

00:52:22 Speaker_04
How do you make a mural where you don't stand back and go, everyone looks a little fucked up here?

00:52:27 Speaker_01
Unless that's the point.

00:52:28 Speaker_04
Right.

00:52:28 Speaker_01
Or maybe it's the point if you did fuck it up. This is a great question. How have we not talked about this yet? So there are a couple of ways to make murals.

00:52:36 Speaker_01
You can paint directly onto the walls we talked about before with spray paint or, you know, outdoor paint. You can also do it with something that's

00:52:44 Speaker_01
Colloquially, well, I'm really stuck on that word, known as parachute cloth, which is basically wallpaper. So if you paint directly onto the wall, most people will project. Very few murals are gigantic.

00:52:55 Speaker_01
Most are a couple of stories tall, and you will go out at night. This is what I'm doing tonight, by the way, at Front Street with our muralists there.

00:53:01 Speaker_04
What?

00:53:02 Speaker_01
You go at night.

00:53:03 Speaker_04
Come with me for a field trip episode at this location. That episode will be out very soon.

00:53:07 Speaker_01
You project onto the wall, you trace it out, and then when all the tracing's done, you can start painting during the day, basically coloring the lines. That's the most common way to do murals like that.

00:53:18 Speaker_01
Parachute cloth, on the other hand, is large sheets of cloth that you can take into a studio, you could project on the parachute cloth, you could print out pieces of paper and trace from the paper.

00:53:31 Speaker_01
The difference between parachute cloth and painting directly on the wall is often, there's two reasons why you might do it.

00:53:37 Speaker_01
Painting directly on the wall is cheaper, but it can deteriorate quicker, especially if you don't have that final clear coat that goes on top that protects it from weather and sun.

00:53:46 Speaker_01
Parachute cloth, on the other hand, can be more durable, can last a bit longer. You'll still need that clear coat on top.

00:53:51 Speaker_01
But what it also allows is for if your mural program is more community oriented, what you can do is you can have the artists work for however long they work to create the design.

00:54:02 Speaker_01
And then the community, the neighbors, whoever, you know, helped influence the mural can come out and paint it with the artists. So in Philly, there's a lot of community paint days for that reason. And there's also kind of a fun aside here.

00:54:13 Speaker_01
If the neighbors paint the mural themselves, they're less likely. likely to complain about it when it goes up. So one of the things that's, you're never going to satisfy everyone, right? Like art is very subjective.

00:54:23 Speaker_01
So the idea of creating permanent or semi-permanent public art on your block, like someone's bound to not like it. So if you invite everyone out to be a part of the process, they're more likely to like it when it goes up.

00:54:33 Speaker_04
They're like, I made it, I love it.

00:54:34 Speaker_01
Kind of subversive, but I love it. Yes, exactly. I did this little piece in the corner, I did that rose, yeah.

00:54:40 Speaker_04
I'm the artist, therefore I love it. So right before we recorded this, Dr. Sarah McAnulty had mobilized a bunch of locals to help paint a mural in her neighborhood.

00:54:50 Speaker_04
And the pictures, it looked like nice, sweaty fun, 10 out of 10, find a muralist to help out, make some friends. And Adam Weaver wanted to know though, How do you connect your murals to the communities that they're displayed in?

00:55:04 Speaker_04
Do you speak to people on the street? Do you host town hall sessions? Do you sit at a bar and collect ideas?

00:55:10 Speaker_04
As well as, let's see, Spencer James Parks says, if you wanted to propose a mural to your city, what department of the city do you have to say, hey, I have a great idea. I got a wall over here. Put something cool on it.

00:55:24 Speaker_01
Oh, this is a great question. And it's really going to depend on your city. So there are plenty of cities that have mural programs or art commissioners. It's really different everywhere.

00:55:34 Speaker_01
If you live in a city or a town that doesn't have some sort of art commissioner, doesn't have like a mural program or something like that, your best bet would be to reach out to your city council person.

00:55:45 Speaker_01
your local representative and have a conversation with them. Most city council people, especially if you have a good one, are really opening to listen to this.

00:55:52 Speaker_01
There's also the potential that there's a private organization in your city or town that's doing it that even your city council person could probably point you to.

00:55:59 Speaker_04
Okay, cool. Lizzy Carr wants to know, what's up with those butterfly wing murals? I feel like every other business I go to now has one on the wall.

00:56:05 Speaker_01
It's Instagram. Instagram changed the world. Yeah. All of a sudden, there were artists that would create stuff that could come down overnight.

00:56:11 Speaker_01
You know, when I first started the blog in 2011, like Instagram was very new and it was very sort of traditional street art styles, lots of stickers in Philly. We have this huge sticker culture, a lot of handmade stickers, we paste.

00:56:22 Speaker_01
But around 2013, when Instagram was really hot, you saw artists take more risks. because they knew that even if their piece was up just for a couple of hours, it would get photographed a ton, especially if it was like big and interesting enough.

00:56:35 Speaker_01
You know, one example of that is a yarn bomber here in Philly named Ischnitz, who famously yarn bombed the Rocky statue, which is outside, I'm sure you've heard of it. Outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

00:56:46 Speaker_01
She yarn bombed a sweater on him that said, go see the art. And of course it was very non-commissioned. I like that language. And so it got ripped off very quickly, but enough people photographed it where those photos now live forever online.

00:57:02 Speaker_01
And that's the weird conversation we're going to have is like, now the public space is the internet.

00:57:06 Speaker_01
So like a street art, quote unquote, installation that takes place in the real world could have a longer life in the public digital space after it's created than when it's actually up.

00:57:17 Speaker_01
It's a different, interesting way to think about street art where you can take more chances.

00:57:20 Speaker_04
Yeah. On that note, Greg Wallach wants to know, does breaking the law matter if you're making things really cute?

00:57:27 Speaker_04
What kind of trouble with the law could a muralist get into, or is that a thing where a cop might show up and say, I have bigger problems than this?

00:57:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, let's be real here. Okay, so they use Lord Muralist, and I would use mural as on the commission side. So if you're making a mural, if you're making public art, it's commissioned, so you have approval.

00:57:48 Speaker_01
What I think your questioner is asking about is the non-commissioned side. Yeah, it is

00:57:56 Speaker_01
illegal to do stuff without permission in the public space, even if it's an abandoned building or construction material, depending on where you're at and sometimes who you are.

00:58:06 Speaker_01
You might get more criticism from a police officer that's driving by or a wall owner. Even in Philly where street art is pretty beloved, I've been out with artists where someone will come up and try to stop them and usually the artist will just stop.

00:58:24 Speaker_01
So yeah, there's definitely risk involved there and you got to know your city and your town to know it.

00:58:29 Speaker_01
I mentioned before that in Philadelphia and a lot of cities, a lot of street artists, non-commissioned artists, graffiti writers will go on abandoned buildings or construction materials often because there's usually like, eh, do it kind of mentality around those spaces, especially in big cities where, as your questioner alludes to, there are more important issues to address.

00:58:51 Speaker_01
You know, if your concern is about a sticker on an abandoned building, why not go question the person who abandoned the building and say, why don't you reinvest in the city as opposed to worrying about the sticker?

00:59:01 Speaker_04
Can you imagine if we had an episode on abandoned buildings, Syke? We do. It's the domicology episode, which we will link in the show notes, an entire episode about abandoned buildings.

00:59:11 Speaker_01
So definitely, like, it's not without risk doing that non-commissioned stuff. It's why I'm particularly in favor of places like free wall spaces. So in Philly right now, we have this place at 5th and South Street. It is a free wall space.

00:59:25 Speaker_01
It's a construction wall that's put up around where a fire happened on a famous cheesesteak place, Jim's.

00:59:30 Speaker_01
And the neighborhood association and the wall and the building owner has given approval for street artists and graffiti writers to come out and do whatever they want to the construction material while reconstruction of the buildings happening for the next however long couple months a year.

00:59:44 Speaker_01
I love that, you know, and the walls become this magnet for artists and, and photographers and people over the last couple of months.

00:59:52 Speaker_04
Okay, so I made fun of LA earlier for having too many photo op murals, but I shouldn't because as they say, no cap, LA, actually a bonkers artsy place. It's great.

01:00:02 Speaker_04
And LA has been called the mural capital of the world too, but both Philly and LA have Wikipedia footnotes acknowledging that the other one gets called that. So I'm going to consider them sister cities in that distinction.

01:00:15 Speaker_04
In LA, we got a lot of blank stucco that can host people's dreams and visions, but we also have a lot of very expensive real estate that sits empty while the cost of living soars out of reach for like everyone.

01:00:39 Speaker_04
So very rich developers bankrupting luxury projects means, I guess, free wall space for those brave enough to confront their fear of heights and also potential arrest.

01:00:50 Speaker_01
So if you are in a city or a town where maybe there aren't free wall spaces, maybe you could talk to your city council person and fight for them. We want to have these places to reflect ourselves. And look, you can set guardrails there too, right?

01:01:04 Speaker_01
Like you can have rules for your free wall space, no derogatory language, no curse words, no nudity. You can make the rules, whatever they are. Cause certainly we wouldn't want someone to put something up that was harmful to anyone.

01:01:16 Speaker_01
But yeah, I think the more free wall spaces in cities and towns, the better.

01:01:21 Speaker_04
And I feel like this dovetails with a question a few people had. Hannah Boyd asked, how is it that some street artists like Banksy are praised for their work when other artists are viewed as vandals?

01:01:30 Speaker_04
And Tim and Ashley Flintoff asked, does the difference relate to issues of racism and classism, especially in urban environments? Michelle Lee asked that as well. And Gemma asked, how has anti-black racism affected black muralists?

01:01:44 Speaker_04
What are the conversations like, you know, in different cities and also just as time goes on since you've been doing this?

01:01:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely. This is like any sort of graffiti or street art panel I watch or participate in, you hear that often from artists and writers who are Black that they get more stops, more criticism from police, unfortunately.

01:02:08 Speaker_04
So we've talked about the same factor in many episodes like wildlife ecology with Karina Newsome about doing field work in the marshes in Georgia and being forced to stay on plantations as university housing.

01:02:22 Speaker_04
And check out the Black AF in STEM episode that was sparked by an incident in Central Park in which a woman named Amy Cooper verbally assaulted birder Christian Cooper, no relation to each other, with slurs. So it's not just in art.

01:02:36 Speaker_04
This is obviously systemic.

01:02:40 Speaker_01
Absolutely. That is why folks like Banksy and Obey were able to get away with it and potentially other artists weren't. One of the reasons why I'm really in favor of this free wall space, right?

01:02:52 Speaker_01
Like we deserve to have spaces in our public space that we can be creative on.

01:02:57 Speaker_01
The other thing I would say too is make sure, if you're interested in this, which I hope everyone is, find out who's making the public art in your town and make sure that they're selecting from a diverse array of artists.

01:03:09 Speaker_01
as well, make sure, you know, that it's not just all white men who are getting the public art sculptures in your town, that your monuments aren't just to white men. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation.

01:03:17 Speaker_01
And that the artists making those monuments are diverse. It's another way to sort of push back at this systemic racism that's involved in sort of all many parts of American life, all parts of American life, including this part.

01:03:29 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:03:30 Speaker_01
You know? Yeah, I mean, look around. That's another reason to be curious about the public art in your town, the murals in your town. Not only what are they depicting, what stories are they telling, but what stories are missing from the town you're in.

01:03:41 Speaker_01
You know, we live in Philadelphia where I think we have a really good mural program that has done a lot of great work when it comes to diversity and inclusion. But when you look at our monuments, for example, there are almost no monuments to women.

01:03:54 Speaker_01
And I don't know if this is a fact, but women were in history. Did you know that? Been around.

01:04:00 Speaker_04
Seriously? Publicly or mostly just making soup at home?

01:04:07 Speaker_01
In Philly, it's just that one flag, I think, the one woman did, I forget her name. Mrs. Ross. Oh, good for her. Betsy.

01:04:12 Speaker_02
Good for her.

01:04:14 Speaker_01
And that's actually where you could kind of like, things get a little blurry. There is the Betsy Ross House, but there's a project called Monument Lab that I encourage everyone to look at. They're doing a lot of really great work.

01:04:23 Speaker_01
They started in Philly, now they're around the world.

01:04:25 Speaker_01
asking the question about what is an appropriate monument for the current age, what is an appropriate monument for your city right now, just literally holds a different weight in our physical space, in maybe how we honor it or pay, you know,

01:04:38 Speaker_01
It feels heavy. Now that's particularly interesting here in Philadelphia. We live in a city that's majority black. So the fact that most of our monuments don't represent any of that history is really a problem that will slowly hopefully be fixed.

01:04:52 Speaker_01
Harriet Tubman monument we built here in Philadelphia soon. I think there's a commission open for that. Yeah, but I think there's like three or four monuments to women, bronze statues of women in Philadelphia from history, very little.

01:05:02 Speaker_01
Meanwhile, hundreds of men.

01:05:03 Speaker_04
Well, at least there's a couple.

01:05:05 Speaker_01
There's like a dozen to Benjamin Franklin a lot.

01:05:06 Speaker_04
Jesus, Louisa. So that's the past, but what's ahead, asked patrons Kazia Sword and Sarah Bowen. And looking to the future, some people ask questions about the future of murals.

01:05:16 Speaker_04
Katie Stalter wanted to know, what role might technology play in creating large murals? And I was talking to Sarah McAnulty about QR codes in murals, being able to find more information out. Are we seeing any technological changes? What's coming next?

01:05:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm of two minds of this. Certainly we've seen technology assist in helping people understand murals or explore murals in different ways. So QR codes might lead people to a page that has maybe audio interviews.

01:05:44 Speaker_01
You know, if the mural is about some history, you can maybe click the QR code and go to somewhere where you could hear archival

01:05:51 Speaker_01
audio of some interview with some person from that piece of history that's being documented in the mural and it can add that extra layer, which could be really interesting. There's also like augmented reality murals.

01:06:00 Speaker_01
There's a new mural in Philly right now where if you download a certain app and you put it up to the mural, the mural will come out and be all kinds of 3D.

01:06:08 Speaker_04
And this is an augmented reality for the mural Dreams, Diaspora, and Destiny on Lansdowne Avenue in Philly, and the artist's statement reads that 3D visual elements extend and enhance the experience of an otherwise flat work of art, and spatial audio is tied to every augmented object, providing a narrative theme with music and sound bites as the space is explored.

01:06:31 Speaker_04
So the digital element can add more texture and dimensionality or context if you choose to opt in and look at it. But you don't need to and Conrad says that's a point.

01:06:41 Speaker_01
The point in the future of murals is that IRL experience, that in real life experience, paint on a wall, how does it make you feel? We're so overloaded with content every day.

01:06:52 Speaker_01
The last thing I wanna do is go to a mural and then click a QR code and watch 500 videos. I'm already on TikTok enough.

01:06:58 Speaker_01
So I think the future of murals is what it's been, which is not only paint on a wall, but the future might be who are making these murals, right? We were just talking about diversity when it comes to murals.

01:07:09 Speaker_01
Hopefully there's more diversity, you know, if your city or town has not had a mural program that's been very inclusive. in the histories or the artists that it hires, hopefully it gets more inclusive.

01:07:19 Speaker_01
But yeah, the future of murals is the future of humanity, because all it does is reflect us.

01:07:24 Speaker_04
And your advice to muralists, toss an ad on there, toss a handle on there, so people can find you?

01:07:30 Speaker_01
Sure. So you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter at streetsdep. So it's streets with an S-D-E-P-T, like short for department.

01:07:38 Speaker_03
Okay.

01:07:38 Speaker_04
What about for muralists? Do you think that they should put their handles on things?

01:07:42 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:07:42 Speaker_04
Yeah. So people can find you?

01:07:44 Speaker_01
We live in that Instagram era and people want to credit the artist.

01:07:46 Speaker_01
A lot of murals will have plaques on the side, which sometimes might include that handle, but most murals I'm a part of curating, the artist will include their handle just because it's too important. People are taking photos of the mural.

01:07:56 Speaker_01
Most people are not going up to the plaque, so you might miss it. Just have it in the corner. Why not?

01:08:01 Speaker_04
Okay, that's a good idea. What is something that the public gets wrong about murals and public art a lot?

01:08:06 Speaker_01
That they're permanent.

01:08:08 Speaker_04
Oh, that's so existential.

01:08:10 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:08:10 Speaker_04
Because nothing is.

01:08:13 Speaker_01
You know, nothing is, period. So when it comes to paint on walls, murals, development can make a mural go away. Time and weather can make a mural go away. Disinterest from the community can make it go away.

01:08:27 Speaker_01
Murals, even if they have all the best materials in the world applied to them, that coat I'm talking about, the parachute cloth, will still need to be touched up every decade or so.

01:08:39 Speaker_01
So if a decade goes by, two decades go by, and the neighbor is no one really cares about anymore, might refresh. In that sense, murals can be that semi-permanent stamp in time where they're gonna come and go.

01:08:51 Speaker_01
Some might last, like Common Threads, for example, the one we talked about earlier from Meg Saligman, was so beloved that when it started to show signs of deterioration, fundraising happened, it was updated, I don't wanna say repainted, but it was fixed, and then a building was gonna be built in front of it.

01:09:08 Speaker_01
The neighbors freaked out, started a petition, got whatever, the developer changed the plans of the building so that the mural would still be able to be seen.

01:09:15 Speaker_04
Oh my God.

01:09:15 Speaker_01
Now, since that developer has lost funding and he's gone away, so maybe a new developer will come in and do the same thing. Yeah, most murals are gonna come and go.

01:09:22 Speaker_04
Well, what's the hardest part do you think about creating a mural? Is it prepping the wall? That's what my guess would be, prepping the wall or having people throw milk cartons at you if they don't like your work.

01:09:34 Speaker_01
Most of the projects I curate and work on, I'm working with artists who've never created a mural before, and it's their first mural. And most of the projects are temporary.

01:09:41 Speaker_01
But even in the temporary situations, the biggest concern is, what is the mural about? So even if you have a lot of freedom, some projects need to represent one thing or the other, right?

01:09:50 Speaker_01
Like if we're creating a mural in the gayborhood, maybe it's themed around queer history. But a lot of the projects I work on, we're building walls somewhere, and maybe the general theme is voting, go. Oh my God, I don't know what to do there.

01:10:02 Speaker_01
It's always that. I think the most challenging part is like, what do I want to say to the world? It's what we all do every day. I'm on this podcast. You create a podcast. It goes back to that, like, what are you wearing every day?

01:10:12 Speaker_01
What do you want to say to the world with your actions, with what you choose to put out there? You know, most people have social media and post things every day. Like, what do you want to say to the world? So I think some people maybe are

01:10:22 Speaker_01
less intentional or thoughtful about it, but artists really are. I mean, I think they feel that weight of like, not only will people judge me, but just like, I have this opportunity. What do I want to use it for?

01:10:31 Speaker_04
What about your favorite thing about murals?

01:10:34 Speaker_01
I really love how, you know, I think ads in the public space work and advertisers spend millions of dollars on them because they make you feel things and feelings change our behavior.

01:10:49 Speaker_01
When we, Swoon is a really incredible artist who came from the street art world in New York City in the 90s. She did wheat paste back then, got very famous from it, and now does projects around the globe.

01:11:01 Speaker_01
I interviewed her for my podcast, I think in the first season. Swoon, very incredible person. And she said something really interesting that has always stuck with me on a panel once where she said, you know, take climate change for example.

01:11:12 Speaker_01
We know it's here. The climate crisis is here, we know the numbers, we know the science. And yet we still are doing so little, you know, to change the future that's on our doorstep.

01:11:24 Speaker_01
Numbers and stats and articles and journalism are so important, but they rarely make us feel things in our heart and in our souls. So art can do that, right? Art can make you feel something. And then that feeling that will change your behavior.

01:11:38 Speaker_04
For more on the intersection of art and climate, you can check out the nonprofit functionalmagic.org, which makes these gorgeous collectible gig posters. with climate messages.

01:11:49 Speaker_04
And we have a whole interview with founder Andy Hall, who, because of that episode and you oligites, was able to raise $25,000 for rainforest conservation on his first print run. So we also have a field trip episode with him coming up.

01:12:03 Speaker_04
So functionalmagic.org. But yes, dream big and don't quit, as they say.

01:12:08 Speaker_01
So when I think about the projects I want to create with like the streets, department walls, part of my project, you know, I think about the voting project. How can we create art that can make people feel things, right? Feeling is really important.

01:12:20 Speaker_01
And when we feel things, we change.

01:12:22 Speaker_04
I wonder if there's anyone listening who's like, you know what, I'm going to make a mural. I hope so.

01:12:26 Speaker_01
You know, and can I put that in another point of view too? I don't know if I mentioned this, but I'm a gay man, 38. So when I was growing up, when I was in high school, no one even talked about gay. It was really hard to come out.

01:12:37 Speaker_01
Luckily I had great parents. Like my experience was fine. I lived in a big city that was pretty accepting of it. But the idea of gay marriage was insane. And look, it was never gonna happen.

01:12:47 Speaker_01
Not that it was insane, but just that it was insane that it was never gonna happen. And the idea of like gay rights, that a politician would ever be on the side of gay people was so outlandish.

01:12:57 Speaker_01
But over the last like 15 years, we saw like modern family. And I know it's like, you could roll your eyes at it. Cause like they couldn't even kiss for the first couple of seasons. It's so annoying. Mitchell, do you take Cameron to be your husband?

01:13:10 Speaker_01
I do. But, you know, if you live in a small town or anyone who votes, you might not know a lot of gay people. You might know one, you might know none.

01:13:19 Speaker_01
So being able to see through art the experience of gay life, out of nowhere opened up the floodgates for people's emotions towards queer people, towards gay people.

01:13:30 Speaker_01
And now we have like overwhelming approval for gay marriage and for gay rights, generally speaking. So that's the value that we can create with art in the public space. You know, the public space advertisers use it to sell us Tylenol.

01:13:42 Speaker_01
God bless Tylenol. If you want to work with me, let me know. But we can also use the public space to share the lived experiences of folks from our community, from the folks around us, and maybe open up our hearts, minds, and souls a little bit.

01:13:55 Speaker_01
You know, what is the experience of being elderly in this country? It seems, from what I hear, very isolating. Can we create public art that reminds people like, hey, there are elderly people in your community that might be alone right now.

01:14:07 Speaker_01
Maybe you would volunteer at some community center, or make a friend who's outside of your age group. Why don't we have older friends? Maybe a mural depicting the lack of murals to black and brown histories in your city, whatever it might be.

01:14:19 Speaker_01
I think that that's the power of art. Art is really powerful.

01:14:24 Speaker_04
And I think it's so wonderful that you are celebrating it and cataloging it and amplifying it. I will leave us with one last listener question. Gordon Haas wants to know, Allie Ward, I assume you've talked with toothologist Sarah McAnulty.

01:14:41 Speaker_04
She's working on a mural in Philadelphia right now with muralist Sean Martorana. That's right. Yeah. Have I talked to Sarah about it?

01:14:50 Speaker_03
Yeah. Hey. We did a mural. It's in Fishtown.

01:14:55 Speaker_01
I just thought it was funny that that was particularly mentioned. That's a mural that's supposed to teach us, like, hey, this is our river. Don't put stuff down the drain, you know?

01:15:03 Speaker_01
So yeah, the mural reminding us, like, oh, yeah, the river's right there. This is what's there. Life is precious.

01:15:08 Speaker_04
Thank you so much for letting me ask you one million questions forever. I couldn't have enjoyed this more.

01:15:12 Speaker_01
This was great. I really enjoyed this interview. And yeah, I encourage people, go be creative. And don't put that wall between you and the art. Art is nothing but feelings. Go feel stuff. Go feel stuff.

01:15:22 Speaker_04
You're the best. Yay! So ask articulate people artsy questions and vice versa.

01:15:30 Speaker_04
And thank you so much to Conrad for letting us ask you so many and for letting me tag along for that upcoming field trip episode to watch some local muralists doing their thing on a summer street in Philly.

01:15:39 Speaker_04
And thank you again to Dr. Sarah McAnulty of skypeascientist.com for the intro and for hosting me in your house in Philly while we gallivanted around town on some science safaris.

01:15:47 Speaker_04
You can go to squidfacts.net to get a handcrafted frog facts advent calendar. Let's sell 5,000 because someone told her there's no way she could do it. And for 25 bucks, you can help prove that jerk wrong.

01:15:58 Speaker_04
So you can also find Conrad's work at streetsdepartment.com. And we'll link the charities in the show notes. And we have more links up at our website, alleyward.com slash ologies slash toycographology, which is all linked in the show notes.

01:16:12 Speaker_04
We are at ologies on Instagram and X, and I'm at alleyward on both. We have kid-friendly episodes up on a new feed with a spinoff show called Smallogies, which you can find wherever you get podcasts. They are classroom safe, kid-friendly episodes.

01:16:25 Speaker_04
We put them up every week. There's a new green logo designed by Portland artist Bonnie Dutch, and you can seek her out for your custom art needs.

01:16:32 Speaker_04
Bonnie Dutch is working on a new mural right now in Portland for Uptown Properties on Southwest Capitol Highway. You can go check it out, wave to her as she's painting.

01:16:41 Speaker_04
Bonnie Dutch also does amazing customs like pet portraits and illustrations, so B-O-N-I Dutch. Also Hay Arden, who works at Uptown Properties. Aaron Talbert admins our Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

01:16:54 Speaker_04
Kelly Ardoire does our website. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is managing director and did so much extra research and fact checking for this episode. Thank you, Susan.

01:17:03 Speaker_04
Jake Chafee is our wonderful assistant editor, and putting it all together is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn of the band Islands made the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

01:17:12 Speaker_04
And so I'm recording this in a closet in New York. It's so noisy outside my hotel room, but I'm in the closet and I'm surrounded by pillows.

01:17:18 Speaker_04
So I came out here because the UN is meeting up in New York right now and there are a bunch of climate events around it. But when I was asked to come out here and do this fireside chat for the Wildlife Justice Commission this week,

01:17:29 Speaker_04
I was like, I'm not going to get on a plane and go do a climate event. That seems counterintuitive. However, it is also our favorite diabetologist, Dr. Mike Natter, his wedding is this weekend. So I was like, okay, I can pair that.

01:17:42 Speaker_04
And I'm also doing a couple of different interviews while I'm out here. One of which will be up 1st of October. So I'm having a little bit of a gallivanting around New York this weekend. And hence I'm recording this in a closet.

01:17:52 Speaker_04
And the other thing, the other secret about this is that we actually did this interview not this past summer, but the summer before. It was right before I got pneumonia and went into the hospital.

01:18:01 Speaker_04
And if you listen to our recent episode on suicidology in which we discuss mental health, I took a little break just to chill out and get my stress levels down.

01:18:09 Speaker_04
So this episode has been a long time in the making, and I'm really stoked to get it up finally. But I've got a bunch of things I have to go to this week, and I did not have time to dye my hair before I left LA.

01:18:17 Speaker_04
So I had to pack my hair dye with me, and now I've got to go. and ask the hotel folks if they have any old rags I can use on my hair or some paper towels. And the reason why I know that I can do that is because I've had to do it before.

01:18:29 Speaker_04
Many times I have left L.A. with hair dye in my luggage and been like, well, I'll do it on the road. We'll do it live. Okay, bye-bye.

01:18:37 Speaker_03
Hackadermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology.

01:18:58 Speaker_02
I need to see all the murals.