Once Upon a Time in Fairhill

Once Upon a Time in Fairhill by artist De’von Downes is located at the Julia de Burgos School in Philadelphia’s Fairhill neighborhood. During the programming school, a group of eight children worked along with teaching artist Julia Gutman to improve their literacy skills. Through their time together most of their stories and plays seemed to be based on the five senses; sight, smell, taste, hear, and touch. Each student wrote a story using all five senses to describe a setting and experience. Downes took small pieces from each of these stories along with the children’s drawings to bring them to life. The magic passageway, the neighbors being family, the cooking lessons, the “rainbow” birds all were parts of the stories the children created.
With the demographic of the neighborhood being predominantly Puerto Rican or Dominican, Downes worked to keep the murals as authentic and close as possible to represent the culture of the kids. Objects and people were labeled in both English and Spanish with no set first language to emphasize the differences of how language was learned in the households. The green/ street mural is based on Puerto Rico and features flowers from the area just as the pink features the national flower of DR.
The connection to literacy is the books themselves. Downes wanted to give the illusion of words flying off the pages, evoking the idea of an activity book versus a story book. The idea was to represent reading and learning to be fun and engaging. The mural suggests that one might come for the words, but then learn about the different cultures, too.
About the Project
This mural was created as part of the We Will Write the World, a project centered on increasing childhood literacy by encouraging playful learning through public art, billboards and murals. This project encouraged dialogue and interactions between grown-ups and children through large-scale public art pieces in the Literacy-Rich Neighborhoods of Fairhill, Germantown, Logan, and South Philadelphia.
The project integrated with the Reading Promise campaign, the nation’s most comprehensive early literacy campaign, which was designed for and with Philly families to effect Read by 4th goals which is grounded on the understanding that children who read well by 4th grade have a better chance at school and life success.
Billboards and murals produced throughout the project are centered around five Reading Promises: Make Reading Together Our Special Time, Talk It Up, Champion Your School Success, Create With You, and Protect Your Right To Read.

Youth Engagement
In spring 2022, the second phase of the project kicked off with teaching artists adapting an art-based curriculum for a series of workshops in school and afterschool programs involving children ages 5-12. Children participating in these workshops generated stories and illustrations to inspire Storybook Mural artwork. Lead teaching artists included: Lisa Jungmin Lee, Rebecca Miller, Julia Gutman, Sabriaya Shipley, Moneek Pines-Elliott, and Dominique Tocatlian.

Storybook Murals
Over the last year, mural artists were invited to produce child-friendly Storybook Murals in different locations across the four neighborhoods—maintaining continuity between them, similar to a storybook trail or story-based scavenger hunt. Mural designs use as a reference the materials generated in the spring 2022 workshops. Mural artists include: Rebecca Miller, Manuela Guillen, De’von Downes, Andre Chaney, Jihan Thomas, Khalid Dennis, and Daphne Smallwood.
Murals are located across the city at Logan Library, Jay Cooke Elementary, Germantown ArtHaus, Julia de Burgos School, Cosmi’s Deli, and Charles Santore Library.

In October, 2022, We Will Write the World went to the Please Touch Museum during the month of October—Mural Arts Month. The activation invited hands-on mural-making, and visitors had the opportunity to view billboard and mural artworks produced as part of the project, as well as the illustrations of young people who inspired the mural designs.
Each neighborhood team was made up of strong, community-based organizations and Reading Captains. These teams, along with strategists and communicators at Mighty Engine as well as local artists, are working together to develop messages and designs for the art pieces.