The People’s Budget: Year 2

Year Two: People’s Budget

Produced by Mural Arts Philadelphia and facilitating artist Phoebe Bachman, A People’s Budget FY23 brought together a group of artists to collectively reimagine Philadelphia’s city budget. Selected artists Blanche Brown, Eugenio Salas, Samantha Rise, and Maia Chao worked collectively to visualize five core components of the city budget building off of the themes from the previous year: How we exchange and steward, how we heal and protect our community, how we learn and grow, how we live and share space, how we govern and administrate

The goal was to advocate, negotiate, collaborate, and dream of a city budget that is more just, equitable, and sustainable. Through these negotiations, artists created a series of posters wheat-pasted across Philly and held a People’s Budget Festival, in May, 2022 that invited the public to imagine what they want to see from the budget.

Artists, Phoebe Bachman, Blanche Brown, Samantha Rise, Eugenio Salas, Maia Chao, worked with design by M Slater, to create a series of posters for the project. They elicited budget priorities from city officials, grassroots organizers, and advocacy groups and then designed them onto posters that were wheat-pasted across the city.

The artists also created their own interpretive posters which included photographs of immigrant businesses, a collaborative piece of music, a poem about budget line items, and a diagram of who makes decisions on the budget. Artists also annotated the existing budget, highlighting key bits of information and questioning the existing structure.

People’s Budget Festival

As part of A People’s Budget FY23, the collaborating artists produced a fun, interactive festival about the city budget. At the Festival, Philadelphians were invited to quite literally take a seat at the table to create the People’s Budget. The artists created a multi-sensory experience that included a delicious meal cooked by Mercado de Latinas, music by local performers, and games to better understand the budget. The festival was hosted at Kingsessing recreation center, highlighting the need to fund public spaces.