Hanging Garden

Hanging Garden by artists Frank Hyder, Henry Bermudez, and Paul Santoleri is located in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mural, a checkerboard arrangement of lush, tropical forest images–fish swimming, flowers growing, eyes peeking through thick, ripe foliage–is unexpected in the urban environment. With its saturated colors and full, undulating rhythms, the mural is like a flower springing out of a crack in a concrete wall.

The mural began in a drawing exercise similar to the surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” drawings. But unlike the surrealists, Bermudez, Hyder and Santoleri didn’t draw on each others’ drawings. They sat side by side drawing their own imagery on the theme of the tropical forest, and stopped when they had 15 panels that pleased them–about five by each artist. They assembled the panels in a manner they liked, and after that it was straight to paint–no computer software, no scaling up by gridding. They worked the wall as if it was 15 enormous canvasses.

The mural was created as part of the Murals in Motion program sponsored by the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director’s Office.

Location Note: Mural is located on the upper floors of the west side of the building at 621 N 2nd Street and is best viewed from the southbound lanes of I-95, just past the splitoff for I-676.