Haiku Landscape
The project was the brainchild of two Philadelphia living legends and visionaries— city’s first poet laureate Sonia Sanchez and the Mural Arts Program’s Executive Director Jane Golden. Peace is a Haiku Song was an interactive, 21st century public art project began in 2011 as a way to engage the global community in an exploration of the haiku as a vehicle for peace and urban transformation.
Sanchez launched the project with a performance and workshop at The First Person Arts Festival in November 2011 at Christ Church in Old City. Her inaugural haiku “Let me wear the day well…” served as a broad invitation for others to respond with their own expressions of peace through Twitter, Facebook, and a dedicated webpage, peace.muralarts.org, that makes submissions available to the public via a searchable interface. Over the course of the year, over 500 poets, of all ages and origins, contributed haiku to the website. As Sanchez traveled to cities across the country throughout the year, she continued to introduce thousands of people to the project.
In Philadelphia, youth ages 10-22 enrolled in the Mural Arts Program’s art education classes were key collaborators on the project. In addition to writing haiku, participating in mindfulness workshops, they explored visual art forms with similar meditative foundations, such as photography and calligraphy. The students also designed temporary public art pieces including mini-murals, bus and subway posters, benches, and sidewalk art featuring peace haiku they composed. These temporary pieces serve as teasers leading up to a permanent peace mural on South Broad Street painted by reknowned muralists Josh Sarantitis and Parris Stancell.
This artwork, Haiku Landscape, is one of the temporary mini-murals produced as part of this project.
Location Note: Temporary project no longer on view at this location.