Philadelphia street art series #2
Street art is proof that some voices won’t be ignored. They’ll sing anywhere, at any time, like tree roots forcing their way through the joints of an underground pipe in search of water. Throughout Philadelphia, there is a group of unknown artists who leave artwork behind on street signs, in train stations, on park benches and, in some cases, simply leaning on a curb.
Some of the work is good. Time was taken to create a piece of durable substance. Other works are spontaneous, fleeting and fragile. Rain would nearly destroy some — and perhaps that’s the point. A third group is that of the accidental. All over the city, people leave behind beauty, weirdness and, ultimately, a wonderful little piece of themselves.
I found the artwork above bolted to a street sign just east of the corner of 5th and Callowhill, in that unnamed section of Center City between Olde City and Northern Liberties. Perhaps this piece of anonymous art is appropriate to its anonymous neighborhood. The primary image — the long-haired warthog — was spray-painted through a template onto a piece of weathered wood. The red-orange icon below the hog is, at once, incongruent and completely perfect; skater culture meets the artist’s inner Oedipus.
The piece is more palpably odd than most street art I find. It occupies a small asphalt and concrete desert, next to a five lane super highway with traffic lights at the end of every block. In comparison to other parts of Center City, people rarely walk down this street. They fly by in cars. I found it on a weekday in August, around noon, when the sun was blistering. I’ve since driven by in the dead of winter, at 3 a.m., and the artwork is still hanging, alive and well. When you’re sitting at a traffic light at night, and you know the warthog is watching, it’s more creepy than the twenty-five closed circuit cameras mounted on buildings in the same block.
Take a walk, take a socket wrench.
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