Civic Views

Civic Views combines photographs of city government office windows and 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. The interviews chart how employees came to work for city government, reflections on the work they perform, 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 symbolize the public attitudes and urban landscape that are constantly changing in the background of the city government’s work.

Read the blog about the project, which includes an interview with the artist: https://muralarts.org/stories/what-is-a-civic-view/