“Public art can create community attachment, if we overcome perceived barriers and open pathways for engagement,” aPA Executive Director Penny Balkin Bach explains, and further discusses in this ARTSblog piece how Museum Without Walls™: AUDIO – the aPA’s free interpretive outdoor sculpture audio program – was created with this very idea in mind.
Bach gives a detailed look at the planning process behind Museum Without Walls™: AUDIO and highlights the many ways in which the program has had a positive impact on the community since it launched almost two years ago.
Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval and Spring Garden Street (Iroquois Park)
Mark di Suvero’s monumental Iroquois has a robust energy and physical presence. The abstract sculpture is formed from painted steel I-beams, which are emblematic of the artist’s use of industrial materials.
Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, Logan Square, 18th and Race Streets
Commissioned for the 41st International Eucharistic Congress, which met in Philadelphia in 1976, Walter Erlebacher’s sculpture presents a figure of Jesus holding two pieces of broken bread.
For the bicentennial celebration in 1976, artist Robert Indiana lent the city a large aluminum sculpture of his “love” image. Indiana first produced this design as a painting in 1964.
Kelly Drive, south of Girard Avenue Bridge; across from Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial
Following the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) established a fund to create a fitting memorial.
Logan Square, Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 20th Street
The Honorable Samuel Beecher Hart, a Pennsylvania legislator and captain of the Gray Invincibles, proposed a memorial to the state’s African American military men who had served the United States in wartime.
