The Association for Public Art and the Parkway Council are thrilled to unveil the finalists for our Art on the Parkway juried competition. Proposals from Rachel Hsu; Bumjin Kim and Team (Anna Lim, Nicholas Houser, and Daniel Ortega); and Sarah Peoples have been selected as the leading contenders for a temporary public art installation in Philadelphia’s Maja Park as part of the annual summer Oval festival.
Please share your feedback on the following proposals by filling out our brief survey. Your input will help inform this program as we move forward.
Proposal 1: The Weight of Our Living
by Rachel Hsu
Through the healing practice of reflexology, The Weight of Our Living connects emotional endurance to tactile experience by calling on visitors to remove their shoes and traverse across an undulating surface of river stones.
Rachel Hsu is an interdisciplinary artist who works with visual art, language, and poetry. Inspired by absence, relational ruptures, and slippages in translation, she engages the yearning that emerges from distance and displacement to make mental exertion and emotional endurance felt within one’s body. Her work has been exhibited nationally including Philadelphia and New York, and her writing has been published in Honey Literary. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a BFA in sculpture from Western Washington University. Originally from Seattle, WA, she is currently based in Philadelphia, PA.
Proposal 2: Prismatic Parkway
by Bumjin Kim, Anna Lim, Nicholas Houser, and Daniel Ortega
Prismatic Parkway transforms Maja Park into a vibrant, interactive space that celebrates Philadelphia’s cultural and artistic spirit through colorful installations and modular design, fostering community engagement and connections with nature.
Bumjin Kim is an educator, artist, and architect based in Philadelphia, who strongly believes that design can improve our society and culture. He is currently an assistant teaching professor in the Architecture program at Drexel University. He also runs a design lab called D.Fluence. Anna Lim is a licensed architect currently in Los Angeles. Dedicated to equitable design practices, she is passionate about engaging with diverse users across multiple scales. By day, she is a designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill focused on mixed-use developments and educational buildings. Nicholas Houser is a Philadelphia-based designer and educator dedicated to sustainable design and efficient prefab construction. He works at IK Studio in Los Angeles and teaches part-time at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. Danny Ortega is an architectural designer in Los Angeles with a Masters in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked at renowned firms like Morphosis, SOM, and Tighe Architecture, and his work has been featured in Metropolis Magazine, GA Document and Milan Design Week.
Proposal 3: City as Stage
by Sarah Peoples
This Art installation will welcome visitors of all ages to Maja Park with inviting, colorful, prop-like structures to encourage thought-provoking ideas of improvisation and ritualized performance, using the theatricality of our everyday urban experiences to create connections that will strengthen our community.
Sculptor Sarah Peoples creates lasting impact in the world with thought-provoking Art and community involvement. Most recently, she was included in Slow-Burning Rapture an exhibition at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education featuring six contemporary artists making sense of our ecological past, present and future. As Artist in Residence at Glen Foerd from June 2022 to September 2023, she created three impactful large-scale public artworks addressing environmental justice, collective consciousness, national identity, and our human connection to nature. She was recently featured in an online exhibition “The Meaning of Everything” by the Dina Wind Foundation. Peoples has presented various commissioned and non-commissioned public art works, including “Between Wind and Water,” at The Havre de Grace Maritime Museum in Maryland, “Plastic Waterfall,” an 18-foot site-specific-sculpture at the Cira Centre, and “Deconstructed Landscapes”, the DaVinci Art Alliance’s Everyday Future Fest in 2022.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Open Call for Art on the Parkway, co-organized by the Association for Public Art (aPA) and the Parkway Council, in partnership with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PPR), invites artists, designers, and other creatives to propose a temporary public art installation in Maja Park on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway as part of the annual summer Oval festival. Proposals are asked to explore the ways in which art can help create and define a sense of place.
Maja Park. Photo courtesy Parkway Council.
While the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is one of Philadelphia’s grandest civic spaces with a rich array of art and architecture—including many sculptures commissioned and maintained by the Association for Public Art—it has not reached its full potential as a public space. This year a coalition of organizations led by the Parkway Council along with city partners at Philadelphia Parks & Recreation and the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability are advancing a conceptual master plan for the Parkway that envisions its future as a great urban park.
This competition invites proposals that both celebrate the Parkway’s historic built environment and explore its future as a more inclusive and vibrant public space for all Philadelphians. Proposals must be durable and suitable for display in a public park open to the elements. The temporary installation will open on approximately August 1st and be on view through October 28, 2024.
Award
The selected proposal recipient will receive an all-inclusive award of $15,000.
Jurors
Renee Schacht
Co-founder and Executive Director, Tiny WPA
ff
Julie Bush
Landscape Architect, Ground Reconsidered
Joyce Chung
Curator, Asian Arts Initiative
Ginger Rudolph
Curator
Questions
For more information, read Open Call for Art on the Parkway FAQs and explore the conceptual master plan for the Parkway’s future. If your question is still not answered, email opencall@associationforpublicart.org.
Co-organized by the Association for Public Art (aPA) and the Parkway Council, in partnership with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PPR) and AIR Communities and Park Towne Place
About Association for Public Art
The Association for Public Art (aPA) is a non-profit organization that commissions and preserves public art in Philadelphia, while advancing the pivotal role art can play in creating and enhancing public space and civic life. For more information, visit associationforpublicart.org.
About the Parkway Council
The Parkway Council, a not-for-profit organization, works to accelerate the transformation of Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a great urban park for all. For more information, visit parkwaycouncil.org
