Pearls!
Pearls! was a placemaking initiative in 2013 that reimagined how a tiny street in Philadelphia could be re-imagined as a cultural space at the intersection of the expanding Asian community, incoming young urban professionals, and people for whom a social services center, with food and emergency housing, is critical to their survival. Artists Walter Hood and Ben Volta collaborated on the short-term intervention. Bressi managed the project for Mural Arts Philadelphia.
Date | 2013
Client | Mural Arts Philadelphia, Asian Arts Initiative
Collaborators | Walter Hood, Ben Volta
Pearls was a creative placemaking project that took place in 2013 in the Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. The following description is from a blog post that I wrote at the time.
Artist Ben Volta is in the final stages of preparations for PEARLS, an early action project for the Pearl Street creative placemaking initiative in the Callowhill neighborhood just north of Center City Philadelphia.
Pearl Street dates from Philadelphia’s earliest days. Just four feet wide (plus sidewalks), it runs four blocks between 10th Street and Broad Street. Callowhill, just north of Chinatown, is a rapidly changing confluence of the expanding Chinatown community, young urban professionals, and the homeless. It is characterized by loft-style studio space, new infill apartments, and a smattering of long-standing bars and new restaurants tucked into tiny old buildings. It is threaded by an old railroad viaduct that community advocates hope can become a community park.
Pearl Street connects all of this.
Midway along the street is the headquarters of the Asian Arts Initiative – a gallery, a theatre space, classrooms, and workspaces in an old loft building. Asian Arts, with funding from the Education Foundation, has launched a project to turn Pearl Street into a connective urban space, filled with artistic activity and urban greening, as an antidote to busy Vine Street and the Vine Street expressway a half block away.
AAI has organized a community block party on September 28 to imagine possible futures for this street. The Mural Arts Program is collaborating by organizing a kick-off art project that will signal the change that could occur. I’ve been assigned to manage that project and have been working with Volta to get it done. (I’m also working with project coordinator Kristen Hankins and Mural Arts director of public engagement, Jenn McCreary).
Volta’s concept consists of three parts. Before the block party, crews will lay down a color field on the street. Second, Volta and his team will paint a ribbon, whose design is inspired by the flow of music and of water, along the street, using a vinyl stencil technique that I am looking forward to learning. Finally, on the day of the block party, Volta will organize a community event in which visitors can take luminescent pearls, painted on various materials, and glue or wheatpaste them all around the alley.
At the block party, designer Walter Hood from Oakland, CA, will reveal schematic plans for a long-term re-envisioning of Pearl Street as an activated and greened urban space – a prototype for city life in the future. Hood has been working on that aspect of the project most of this year and has made several trips to Philadelphia to meet and brainstorm with various constituencies along the street.
