PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia’s city budget is both vital to residents’ quality of life and hard to understand. Mural Arts is trying to make it more engaging by explaining it through art.
Opening Friday at 5 p.m. in the northwest corner of LOVE Park is their new installation, The People’s Budget Office. The “office” is a shipping container that’s been fitted with a desk and chairs and adorned with file cabinet planters filled with colorful spring flowers.
“It’s a space where folks can come in and get a debrief — what is being funded, what is being proposed, and are those things that align with what you want to see for the city, or are there different things that you want to see for the city?”
Artist Phoebe Bachman says a rotating series of artists will help visitors understand the parts of the budget they’re interested in and allow them to give feedback that’ll be used in the city’s participatory budgeting effort.
“It’s really a space for us to dig in with one another and collaborate and see, what could we build together?”
Bachman says visitors will also contribute to the art itself. On the side of the container facing 16th Street, 200 pages of the actual budget have been arranged in a kind of poster, which visitors can annotate with their own funding priorities.
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“And then we’re going to wheat paste them on, on top of the existing budget. It’s about getting our hands dirty and actually trying to imagine what a just budget could look like.”
Mural Arts has been working with the budget office since the city adopted participatory budgeting after the 2020 protests. They’ve tried quilt-making and a two-day festival but this is the first ongoing physical space where residents can both learn and give feedback.
The People’s Budget Office will be at LOVE Park through May 20. More information can be found here.