Celebrando Nuestra Cultura – Celebrating Our Culture

Celebrando Nuestra Cultura – Celebrating Our Culture by Jason Slowik is located in the Fairhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. The project began with the idea to create something positive, uplifting, and meaningful in the community. The mural design was developed with the intention of reflecting, and celebrating the arts and culture of this community. The design incorporates images of local dancers, musicians, and artists. The mural also incorporates writings by local poets, and original paintings by local visual artists. The base colors of the mural gesture to the name of the street, the “bloco di oro” or “golden block”.

This mural is pat of the My North Philly project that traced the stories of four communities — Nicetown, Kensington, el Norte de Filadelfia, Strawberry Mansion — in North Philadelphia through the oral histories that inspired the creation of seven landmark murals. At the beginning of 2005, the Mural Arts Program began a new odyssey. The My North Philly project aimed to collect the stores that residents of North Philadelphia told about their neighborhoods and to give those words a lasting life through a series of murals. Out of the myriad North Philadelphia neighborhoods, four communities –two east and two west of Broad Street — were chosen with an eye to the history and diverse experiences of the area and Mural Arts established partnerships with neighborhood churches, libraries, resident associations, and community groups. Over the next three years, artists and oral historians from the Program reached out to folks in these communities, taped and transcribed oral histories and group discussions, and pored over the themes, images, and events that interviewees described. By autumn of 2007, seven murals had been painted, one final mural was in progress, and more than ninety North Philadelphians had told their stories — the stories of their North Philly. Though neither the people who told their stories nor the murals that those stories inspired speak for all of North Philly, they capture, in a personal way, some of the lived experiences of the place that many Philadelphians just call “home.”