Life Reflects Nature: Memories of the Past, Traditions of the Present
“The comments of change, movement, migration, adaptation and memory were common throughout all of the interviews conducted by the ethnographer. Memories of playing on the beach, gathering cattle and working on the land with their fathers, visits back to the homeland to meet family, creating gardens in Philadelphia that remind them of their homes left behind, continuing to instill the traditions and tell stories to their grandchildren and others who are willing to hear them.
“Both Jose Ali and I used these stories to present them in some way in the mural. You can read the mural from any direction (right to left or left to right). Nature was ever present in the stories, the connection to the land was important. We chose to incorporate images from the original homelands of the members of the Mann Older Adult Center – tropical rainforests, the beach and dirt pathways.
“Beginning from the right, the images of the leaves are abstract with little detail. The entrance is “elaborated” with mosaic tiles and continues onto the beach scene. The water is calm and vibrant (represents tranquility) the waves gradually become larger as it moves through the wall. An older woman is scene holding flowers that float away from her hand. This woman is a longtime member of the center, Doña Nicolasa; she represents age, and the past. The flowers moving away from her hand become her voice and she sends messages that travel throughout the other images in the mural.
“The scene of the young boy and the father is a moment captured of the homeland. It is a passing moment and could be interpreted as a memory. The flowers become butterflies that enter into the following image of an older man (Don Jose another member of the Mann Center) who is sowing seeds in what seems to be the land in the U.S. He could be that little boy with his father who is planting his seeds in this new adopted land. The butterflies become the migrating birds that hover over the Philadelphia landscape, representing the migration and movement of people in the city.
“The final image is of a large hand holding a photograph of and older man and a young girl. The image is from Puerto Rico (the little girl pictured is a long time resident of North Philly). This is also a memory and a moment emphasized with a written letter in the background.”
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.”