I walked by this mural over on Chestnut St between 7th and 8th Sts yesterday. It's mostly made out of tiles! Tiny about 1/2" tiles on what seems to be 2' x 2' square boards which were then transferred onto the side of the building. I'm told that the northern half of the mural was painted by inmates from a nearby jail somewhere.
More photos of Philadelphia on my photoblog
Speaking as a representative of the Mural Arts program...
The left half was painted by inmates at Graterford and installed on the wall, the right half is glass tile. The right half was assembled by philly public school students overseen by lead artist Josh Sarantitis and assistant Eric Okdeh.
Posted by: steve | March 07, 2006 at 04:28 PM
Great work Steve, I've done smaller inside murals but nothing that large.
Posted by: coadunate | March 07, 2006 at 05:24 PM
It's a really beautiful design. Do the artists begin with a computer generated prototype?
Posted by: Linda | March 07, 2006 at 05:24 PM
Philadelphia has great public art. There are a lot of wonderful murals in North Phila. and Germantown particularly.
Posted by: Ann Bartow | March 07, 2006 at 06:55 PM
Hi,
I'm the artist who designed the mural. The tile is 3/4" glass-mosaic. Over 1 million pieces. The left side was partially painted by artists at Graterford Prison. Students at 5 public elementary schools helped with some of the glass work. The design is a symbolic representation of the legacy of slavery and its abolition. The original artwork was hand rendered and photo-collaged in photoshop and then using a proprietary program that we invented the image was translated into glass tiles (pixels).
enjoy...
Posted by: Josh Sarantitis | March 07, 2006 at 08:23 PM
by the way.
nice shot of the mural.
what camera did you use?
Posted by: Josh Sarantitis | March 07, 2006 at 08:27 PM
Josh forgot to post his website:
http://www.zographos.net/
--wifey
Posted by: Julia | March 07, 2006 at 08:37 PM
The program Josh used is here: https://tilepile.dev.java.net/
It's open source, so you can download it and check out the source code, if youre feeling geeky. You can also use it to make your own tile murals.
Well, you need tiles, tile grids, a large computer monitor, and lots of patience, too. :) And it's not horribly easy to use at the moment. I'm going to rewrite it when I get the time.
Posted by: Greg Barton | March 07, 2006 at 08:51 PM
beautiful
beautiful
beautiful
thank you to each artist
Posted by: orionATL | March 07, 2006 at 09:55 PM
wow, thanks, Albert -- haven't seen this one yet, but will divert my usual commuting path to catch it tomorrow. I mean, wow!
Posted by: acm | March 08, 2006 at 01:22 PM