Memories and Mementos

Memories and Mementos by artist David McShane is located in the Yorktown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Based around a central theme of people and their stuff, this mural adorning two sides of Safeguard Self Storage fills in the space where windows once were. Rather than creating three distinct images, it occurred to McShane that the mural imagery would have more continuity if one central image spanned all three windows. Also, the remaining five windows (that don’t contain murals) have two bands of ornate terra cotta tiles that subdivide each of them into three distinct areas. McShane decided that visually it would be good to continue these bands in the background of the mural imagery. The back of the building similarly has windows separated by columns. All four of these back windows contain mural imagery, with striped bands in the background.