Civic Views
A project by Emilio Martínez Poppe
MAY 23 – JUNE 11, 2025
A timely and ambitious public artwork highlighting Philadelphia’s municipal workers and their perspectives on the city will be on view in the City Hall Courtyard.
About the Project
Mural Arts presents Civic Views, a temporary public art project celebrating the city’s municipal employees and their diverse perspectives on Philadelphia through a poetic picturing of their office windows. Created by artist Emilio Martínez Poppe, the project represents the culmination of three years of photographing and interviewing staff from over twenty Philadelphia civic agencies. Presented in Philadelphia’s City Hall Courtyard, Civic Views will be accompanied by a robust series of public programs highlighting the work of scholars, artists, labor organizers, elected officials, and city employees as they articulate the importance of the public sector. The project’s centerpiece, an expansive installation of photographs, text, and scaffolding, will be on view in the City Hall Courtyard from May 23 – June 11, 2025.
“Philadelphia’s civil servants are as diverse as the city they work for. While the journey to public service is varied, the commitment to it is shared by the individuals I interviewed across a vast array of positions. This project aims to capture how the experience of this work shapes our views on the city. By revisiting the perspective of the nation’s oldest surviving photograph today, the project draws attention to the conditions that shape our notions of what a city is, how it should look, and who it is for. While these definitions shift across positions in city government, it is clear that expanding the ability to make meaning out of the city is a shared responsibility. Like the public sector work and infrastructure I am documenting, I believe public art shares this responsibility and can offer new ways to understand our connections and capacities to transform the city together,” said artist Emilio Martínez Poppe.
Civic Views is a temporary public art installation that leverages photographs of city government office windows and impactful excerpts from interviews with a wide range of civil servants to map their diverse views on a changing Philadelphia. Photographs are reproduced at a 1-to-1 scale and hung to exact specifications that replicate the experience of looking out of each window, opening these tucked-away offices to the public’s view. The photographs are paired with a selection of anonymous interview excerpts on text panels that highlight the pride, complexity, and even contradictions endemic to public sector work. Interviews chart how employees came to work for city government, how they see their public service, as well as how family and friends perceive their careers, and their wishes for Philadelphia and its citizens. These elements are mounted on a series of scaffolding armatures that create an abstracted map of Philadelphia and orient the public to where these buildings are located across the city. Taken together, the project endeavors to humanize the public sector while using scaffolding to emblematize the public attitudes and urban landscape that are constantly changing in the background of the city government’s work.
The full scope of the project includes over thirty staff interviews and over forty window views. The project has been produced in close collaboration with the City of Philadelphia, which has graciously opened its doors to Martínez Poppe’s camera and microphone.
In a moment when the public sector is increasingly vulnerable to scrutiny, restructuring, and privatization, Civic Views champions the people, buildings, and ethics that keep city government running. The project seeks to shake off the abstracted, monolithic view of government to better understand it at a human scale, hoping to reignite a deep value for what we call “public.” Like many of Mural Arts Philadelphia’s projects, Civic Views presents thoughtful ways for experiencing public art as an interdisciplinary effort engaged in many conversations at once—history, urbanism, photography, architecture, civil service, and public space.
After its debut in the City Hall Courtyard, a selection of Civic Views photographs will migrate across the street to long-term public view at the Municipal Services Building’s Concourse Level in partnership with the Department of Public Property. The project will also lead to a substantial book documenting the full index of photographs Martínez Poppe captured, as well as essays from leading artists, scholars, and the project’s organizers exploring art’s relationship to the city. The book project will be announced with additional details later this year.
City Agencies included in Civic Views
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority
City Archives
City Planning Commission
Creative Philadelphia
Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services
Department of Parks and Recreation
Department of Public Property
Department of Revenue
Department of Streets (Sanitation)
District Attorney’s Office
Fire Department
Free Library of Philadelphia
Office of Children and Families
Office of Economic Opportunity
Office of the Mayor
Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability
Philadelphia City Council
Philadelphia Housing Authority
Philadelphia Police Department
Philadelphia Water Department
School District of Philadelphia
Civic Views Public Programming
Opening Reception
Friday, May 23 | 12 PM – 3 PM | City Hall Courtyard
Speaking program and performance by the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble. Light lunch will be served in celebration of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Panel Discussion: The Image of the City
Wednesday, May 28 | 5:30 PM – 7 PM | City Hall Courtyard
A conversation on photography’s relationship to the public’s imagination of the urban landscape, local photographic history, and the diverse powers of representation. This talk will include Dr. Michelle Smiley and Smithsonian curator Dr. LaCharles Ward.
Public Sector Office workshop
Friday, May 30 | 5:30 PM – 7 PM | City Hall Courtyard
Public Sector Office, a self-organized group of current and former public sector employees, will lead a workshop for local civil servants that reflects on each participant’s findings of eccentric and idiosyncratic artifacts in government offices. The workshop will be followed by a happy hour at a neighborhood bar.
City Hall Serenade
Monday, June 2 | 12 PM – 12:30 PM | City Hall Courtyard
Performance by members of the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble.
Panel Discussion: The Form of the City
Wednesday, June 4 | 5:30 PM – 7 PM | City Hall Courtyard
A conversation between State Senator Nikil Saval and art and urban studies scholar Dr. Shannon Mattern on the architecture, design, and infrastructure of the city. They will discuss the reflexive relationship between spaces of civil servant work, the maintenance and delivery of public services, and the shifting perception of the public sector.
City Hall Serenade
Monday, June 9 | 12 PM – 12:30 PM | City Hall Courtyard
Performance by members of the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble.
Panel Discussion: The Labor of the City and Closing Reception
Wednesday, June 11 | 5:30 PM – 8 PM | City Hall Courtyard
A conversation championing the work of public sector employees led by labor organizer Paul Prescod and. Conversation is followed by a Closing Reception for Civic Views, including a brief speaking program and performance by the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble.
About the Artist
Emilio Martínez Poppe is an artist who is concerned with the right to the city and the struggle of public memory. Through a social and research-led practice spanning photography, sculpture, text, and installations, he explores the spatial mechanisms and ideological conditions that reproduce state and capital infrastructures. Martínez Poppe has previously exhibited work at Petrine, Paris; the Queens Museum, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia; and de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam. Martínez Poppe earned an MFA and MCP from the University of Pennsylvania, a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, was a studio fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and a member of BFAMFAPhD. He is a member of the Pinko collective and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Graduate Communications Design department at Pratt Institute. His work has been supported through artist residencies at Abrons Arts Center, Pratt Institute, NEW INC, SOMA Mexico, and through grants/fellowships from The Laundromat Project, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, PennPraxis, and the UPenn Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. Martínez Poppe received the Charles Addams Memorial Prize and the Paul Davidoff Award from the University of Pennsylvania.
