- [Announcer] Live from your public media studios, WVIA Presents "Keystone Edition Arts," a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts."

And now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts," where we'll explore the big picture.

Paul Lazar prepares the way - [Narrator] Murals have been painted for thousands of years to reflect human experiences, past and present, and society's ideals.

In the 1920s and '30s, Mexican artists like Diego Rivera painted murals on public buildings to promote a new united and forward-looking country and for all to enjoy not just those who could afford to buy art.

These muralists inspired American George Biddle, a practicing artist who had worked with some of the best mural painters in Mexico.

In 1933, he wrote a letter to newly elected President Roosevelt, suggesting the government create opportunities in federal buildings for American mural painters to improve the quality of American life.

This letter influenced the development of the Treasury Department section of painting and sculpture, which commissioned over 1,600 murals and sculptures for post offices between 1933 and 1943.

A period when the country faced the economic challenges of the depression.

The commission served to help artists financially while raising awareness of American art styles and boosting morale.

Patricia Rainer tells us in the National Postal Museum's newsletter that post offices were located in virtually every community and available for viewing by all postal patrons, which made post office murals a truly democratic art form.

In our region, these historic post office murals are in Honesdale, Scranton, Hancock, Wilkes-Barre, Selinsgrove, and many other communities.

For "Keystone Edition Arts," I'm Paul Lazar.

- When artist Michael Palato takes us on a tour of his monumental portrait mural in Williamsport, we see hand prints everywhere.

When he invited a group of students to add their hand prints to another of his murals at Penn State, Cassidy Holmes was thrilled saying, "I've lived in State College for the past 10 years, so this really is my home.

And to have my mark on something in my community means a lot to me."

I will be able to walk past that mural and see my hand print among hundreds of others for years to come.

And that's really special to be part of a community like that.

Now we're part of a larger story.

Murals tell our stories and sometimes, they include us in those stories.

That's engagement and community engagement and public art are key for Lisa Murphy, who is completing her doctoral studies examining mural activity in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

She's joining us.

She's a teacher, artist, and member of the Street Art Society of Northeast Pennsylvania.

Also at the table, Leslie Collins, who serves as the president and CEO of Scranton Tomorrow, where she works with community-building initiatives, including the mural arts program.

And with us on Zoom, Debi Burch president of the Board of Lycoming Arts and Arts in the Neighborhood chair in the Williamsport area.

Thank you all for joining us in this mural talk that we're going to engage in.

Lisa, you've been creating not only murals on your own, but you've been creating a formal framework to help us understand mural activity better.

Tell us about the focus of this research that you've been doing and what you've been discovering.

- Sure.

The focus of my research is about community engagement in murals.

So we put a lot of emphasis on murals being great for communities, but how do those images represent the people who are in those communities and whose voice is it that is being shown through the murals?

Who gets to decide what goes on the walls?

And how does this en engage the people who are there?

Who's being represented?

So my research really looks a lot into the process of how murals are put in walls, how murals are initiated, who is included in that process, and how the imagery that are produced in the murals resonate with residents who see these murals on a daily basis.

- And you have engaged in a very interesting data collection process to find out how community residents really do feel.

What did you do?

- Sure.

So as a researcher, I'm not studying bacteria in a Petri dish.

I'm studying people and murals.

And as an artist, the best way for me to really think about this and research this is just simply to use art.

So the research method that I used is called Photovoice.

And for Photovoice, I find research participants, I train them on basic photography skills.

I give them ideas of where to look for for murals in their community.

And then I gave them basically a two-week homework assignment.

Go out into the community and photograph which murals represent your sense of community identity, who you are as you live in your community.

And photograph something that's not in one of our local murals that you feel like is kind of missing from the canon of murals that are out there, that represents your sense of community identity.

All of our participants went out, took photographs, came back, and then collectively, we analyzed them because they're the ones who are taking the photographs.

It's their story that's being heard.

So they're the ones who are going to help me analyze the data.

So we collectively looked at all of the photographs that were entered through Photovoice and came up with data.

We did a content analysis, which simply means we looked for what was in the photographs.

Was it a picture of a person, a bird, a kite?

And then we did a thematic analysis where they tried to really interpret the photographs and see what kind of underlying meanings or themes they could find.

And those were all presented in an art-based way as well.

- And we were going to, we're gonna ask you about that exhibition.

That was a culmination of part of that.

But what were the themes that you found then?

What kinds of images were grabbing people in our area?

'Cause it was what counties?

- So the study was Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, and it was primarily the Hazleton all the way up to Forest City.

If you kind of draw a straight line through the anthracite coal fields.

So my study is anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And it followed murals because if you start down at Hazleton and you check for murals on a map, so part of my preliminary research was finding the murals, putting them on a map and figuring out, you know, drawing my boundary regions from my study.

Starts at Hazleton, trickles on up through Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, Scranton, and all the way at the end to Forest City.

- Did anybody take a picture of Thomas Edison in Hazleton?

- Nobody selected that one for my study.

But that is an iconic, you know, probably, I don't know if it's actually the first but a good movement of mural activity happening in Hazleton.

- But what other themes have emerged?

- So, right, themes.

So the transformation and evolution of Northeastern Pennsylvania was the first theme.

And what this is, is it's kind of a duality between people who have lived here with their families from multiple generations, feel very strongly connected to our regions industrial past.

Whether you had a coal mining grandparent, or not even necessarily coal mining, it'd be people who worked in the Times building in Scranton or any of the different industries, silk mills, they feel very connected to that.

And that is a very important part of their identity.

But we are also experiencing in our region an influx, a change in our demographics.

We have an influx of other people coming to the area who don't necessarily, it's not that they don't know the local history, but they're not connecting to it because it's not necessarily an important part of their identity.

And they're kind of looking forward to, you know, they think of this region as like, potential.

You know, I love it here.

You know, it's outdoors.

It's all of these fresh, fun themes and what can be, - Okay, but then you gave us an art exhibition 'cause you've been doing it all in terms of art.

- Sure, yes.

So it's an art-based study.

So I used art to collect my data, and then because it's community-engaged research, I need to communicate my findings with the community.

I could write up a big 100-page paper dissertation and have nobody ever read it because who wants to sit there and read it.

But what I did instead was an art exhibition.

It's an installation, it was at AFA Gallery in Scranton, and it was an immersive data visualization experience.

It's kind of a very complicated way to explain, but I used string to represent different themes that were conveyed through the photographs.

And now the participants are the people who came up with these themes and threaded all of these themes together, and they came up with these three overarching canopies.

So NEPA evolution was just one of those canopies.

Social responsibility was another canopy.

And then the final canopy was holistic wellbeing.

So kind of like a recreation, mindfulness, health, kind of theme that emerged.

- Well, that's very exciting.

And you're not a doctor yet, but yet you're on your way.

- Not yet, soon.

- Thanks so much, Lisa.

- And greetings, Debi.

We're wanting to ask our congratulations on the milestone.

You've all just celebrated the 65th anniversary of Lycoming Arts and 25 years for First Fridays.

And that says so much about Williamsport commitment to public art.

We just want you to tell us, please, first about Lycoming Arts mission, please.

- So, Lycoming Arts, we feel very strongly about connecting the community with the artists and the artists with the community.

We feel as though we are kind of the bridge for that to happen.

And we have so much art here, music, visual, you know, performance.

There's a plethora for us to work with.

And so, yeah, that's our goal is get the art out there, get the people to the art and you know, I think like these murals that you were talking about on the buildings, it's for everyone, right?

It's not just for the people who can afford it.

So that's our goal.

- That's good.

And specifically subset, First Friday, of course, is bringing everybody to downtown to celebrate the arts, right?

- Right.

And again, like you said, it's our 25th year.

We're very excited about that.

We close the streets and at once a month, on the first Friday of every month, we bring in artists and craftspeople.

Everything has to be, you know, made by hand.

You know, there's not other kind of just generic sales things, but everything has to be, you know, a craft or an art.

We include culinary.

So we have the Taste of Williamsport, which has morphed into the Spirit of Williamsport.

So the bars now get on board and they add some sort of culinary treat for people.

So we have, you know, around 140 vendors every month.

We have three stages that we fill with bands.

We have, you know, food trucks that we're very careful and conscious about not overdoing the food trucks so that, you know, the restaurants aren't, you know, impacted in a negative way.

But we try to get everybody down here, we're bringing about 6,000 people a month downtown.

So it's been a boon for the city, and certainly, people are starting to notice us.

I mean, we've been trying to determine where people are coming from and we've had people from New York and Ohio and as far away as Florida that have come to our event.

Pretty sure they were coming through anyway, but, you know, we'll take it.

- [Erika] What a shot.

- [Debi] We really enjoy it.

It's been good for us.

It's been good for the artists and it's been good for our community.

- What are some of the themes that, for example, in the pieces of public art, you have sculpture around, for example, shad run that's along the river, that would be an environmental theme.

Are there various themes in some of those public pieces of public sculpture, for example?

- There are, shad run obviously is pretty self-explanatory because we do have a shad run up the river.

And that used to be right at the, where you came across the bridge.

It was moved when the little league pieces sculptures were installed, and so shad run was then moved, and we have it in what we call Market Square now, which is where a lot of people congregate.

So that's kind of a good thing.

We have germination, Roger Shipley did germination and that was a piece, you know, talking about where we've come from and where we're going.

And we have, David Stabley did a piece mosaic mural on a building at the beginning of what we call Avenue of the Arts.

It was pegged Avenue of the Arts during the governor's ball in 2008 that we held here.

And so that depicts all the different arts, and it's in a mosaic that's actually installed into the brick of a building, which is very cool.

So, yeah, they tell stories.

They do.

- They do.

And the idea of a vision then.

At a key point, like 65 years, you say, "Well, we'll work on a pocket park, we'll have plans for other things."

What's in your vision for the short term, perhaps, Debi?

- So for outdoor art, yeah, the pocket park has been a couple years in the making.

And part of that is there's a community garden, and then the pocket park is part of, it's right outside the hospital.

So it's meant to give kinda solace to people who might be going through difficult times there, gives them a place to go and be peaceful and kind of regroup.

And in addition to then, you know, right with the community garden, with, you know, the excitement that goes on there with the kids and stuff.

Seeing things grow and going in and being allowed to tend things.

You know, that that's kind of a fun, interactive experience for everyone.

And a needed experience as far as the pocket garden goes.

We have, you know, I know you've talked to Corey, so, you know, we have film festivals coming up.

We work with Bucknell and do a firefly event every summer, because locally, we're one of the last places in the country that still get fireflies.

A lot of people don't recognize that, but light pollution is a real thing and fireflies are gonna go away.

So we try to educate and include kids, and there's movies and, you know, there's all kinds of stuff to, you know, just kinda educate about the fireflies.

We also, what else do we have come?

Oh, we have a storytellers festival.

So for authors and illustrators and just, you know, people that are carrying us over, you know, when you're hanging out at night and you can't sleep, you need a book.

So we have storytellers, the second annual storytellers is coming up.

So we're out there in many forms, I would say - Congratulations then on that, and we'll send people to your website so they can find out the array of things that are available.

- That's great.

Thank you.

- Again, Bravo on that.

And welcome, Leslie.

We know that Scranton received national attention for the office mural, right?

But there are so many other examples, compelling images out in the city.

What are the various ways that you have and how have you conceived of the mural program under Scranton Tomorrow?

- Sure.

So Scranton Tomorrow actually has been in existence since 1992.

And we have been charged for over a decade of really focusing on the downtown business district.

And maybe back in about 2019, we realized that we were actually missing a very significant piece of community building and community engagement.

And I had a conversation with Rose Randazzo, you may know Rose.

She in her past, facilitated the Pittston mural program.

And so Rose and I had a conversation about mural arts for a formal comprehensive program for downtown Scranton.

It didn't take us very long to agree that yes, we definitely needed to move forward with the endeavor.

And since 2019, 2020, we have been running full steam ahead with the Scranton Downtown mural arts program.

So we do see what Lisa was talking about.

It certainly is a community builder in every respect.

And we also believe that it is a significant economic driver for the downtown and supports tourism as well for our tourism partners.

- Yes, well, everybody has a favorite, I'm sure, or can't pick a favorite, but there is one that is really distinctive because it's so locally based and yet it has ripples that are international.

Tell us about The Hive.

- Yes, The Hive.

We love the good of The Hive, and for people that haven't seen it, they should look at our website and check out the good of The Hive.

The mural was produced by a national, actually our worldwide artist, Matthew Willie.

And not only is he an artist, but he is an environmentalist and he is an activist as well.

So the good of The Hive, the mural itself is on the back of Civic Ballet on Franklin Avenue.

It's on the rear of the building and it is all about the plight of the bee.

And so it's an interesting story where the health and wellness of our bees, our bee community, so the health and wellness of one individual bee has an overall effect on the health and wellness of the entire hive.

That then affects the entire community of bees.

We related that to the health and wellness of our own community.

So the health and wellness of one individual within our community relates to the health and wellness of our entire community.

And that has been an interesting opportunity for us to build not only community engagement, but community partnerships.

So we worked very closely with the Wright Center, with the Visitors Bureau, with Lackawanna County, the City of Scranton.

The partners were endless, the Civic Ballet.

So that's another great example of not only the purpose of the mural being health and wellness of your community, but also the partnerships that grew out of that, the collaboration that grew from that one singular project.

And we're also assisting Matt Willie in his goal of painting 50,000 bees throughout his career.

He painted not only for us in Scranton, but he has painted at Burt Bees, the Smithsonian, the United Nations, various countries around the world.

So we are really thrilled that we have a piece of Matt's work in the city of Scranton.

- That's true.

And you have that pollinator garden that you have young people there digging away and learning about the we the importance of that.

- We do, we do.

So another facet of that particular mural, so a gentleman on our staff, on our team is Steve Ward.

He serves as a master gardener in the Master Penn State.

Master Gardeners are an unbelievable partner of ours.

And we had students from Scranton Prep from Scranton Preparatory school spend a week with us for service work.

And so we had them build a pollinator garden and Steve taught them horticulture and the importance of the bees and the pollination.

And they did a magnificent job on building this garden, which is, they actually come back and maintain the garden with us too.

- Now Lisa talked about history.

So you have the trip house, there's one across, isn't there across the alley for?

- There is.

Now that mural was created by Eric Bussart and Michael Gilmartin at the Trip House.

That is not one that falls with under the scope of Scranton Tomorrow's downtown mural arts program.

But we certainly support it.

- [Erika] Surely.

- And it's absolutely magnificent.

But our murals do range anywhere from, you know, really talking about our history.

So they are educational tools.

So we have the Martin Luther King, the Dream mural, which obviously is a national topic, but we brought it back to our community.

That was Eric Bussart and Emmanuel Wisdom that put that mural together.

And then also, history is our big band mural, which is our latest mural and our dance or mural.

- That's wonderful.

Now there is, again, I asked Debi about the idea of the vision.

So then, do you put out calls?

Do you have ideas?

How about that give and take with the next wave of mural?

- Sure.

So because we have so many partners within the community, we do a lot of outreach and have conversations with our partners and what's meaningful to our partners and to the individuals that they serve within our community.

So that is how it's very grassroots-driven.

Scranton Tomorrow is a grassroots organization.

We also have a Design and Mural Committee, Mural Arts Committee, and that committee has a number of artists and designers and architects and people within the community and various partners.

They start to come up with themes and then we work with other organizations.

So we actually have a very large mural in the process for 2026.

- It's 2025.

- It's secret until we?

- Well, it might be be we.

- We'll wait for the unveiling.

- Yes.

- Drum roll please.

That's wonderful.

Do you have a map in Scranton of the murals or do we find- - On our website, on the Scranton Tomorrow website, you can find a full listing of all of our murals.

Also the Visitors Bureau, Lackawanna County Visitors Bureau has maps as well.

- Okay.

Now Lisa, we turn to you with your researcher's cap still on.

What have you heard from Debi and Leslie that resonates with your research?

- So believe it or not, bees and insects came up a lot in my study.

They are symbols that resonate with a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons.

For example, the bee actually kind of relates to local history because there's like a busy as a bee, like a little bit of like a blue collar work ethic kind of thing.

The bee is incorporated in the Wilkes-Barre city seal.

So it's even part of Wilkes-Barre city history.

And then, you know, social responsibility and environmentalism.

A lot of people are very interested in about like, you know, the longevity of bees and sustainability and community, high building and fireflies also, you know, coming from- - Fireflies, right.

- Right.

So it's an interesting tie in.

- Yes, yes.

And Debi mentioned the pocket part being next to the hospital so that there is that sense of the people who are ailing or might be needing that calm and that healing, natural spot to go.

And you mentioned the whole partnership with the Wright Center and the wellbeing of one bee and the community, right.

So there's that, the holistic, right?

That's another theme.

- Yes, and a lot of research suggests that murals create good environments that foster mental health.

So there's actually a more of a connection between bright colors and positive mental health and communities too.

- Wow.

Wow.

What will you do with your research?

I mean, we know you're not gonna publish it in a tomb, that's going to gather dust, right?

- Right.

So it's illustrated actually.

So I have a graphic dissertation that will be illustrated and working towards publishing it so that it's accessible to people locally.

- There you go.

There you go.

Well, we'd like to thank you for being with us and it's just a wonderful time.

Lisa, Leslie, Debi, thank you.

And you, for watching.

This and every episode of "Keystone Edition" is available on demand on our YouTube channel.

And now as a special audio podcast, so you'll never miss an episode.

Visit wvia.org/keystoneeditionarts to stream episodes or subscribe to the podcast.

For "Keystone Edition," I'm Erika Funke.

Thank you for watching.

Now, there is a recent mural by Eric Bussart dedicated to the Jazz Agents Scranton, featuring the celebrated Scranton Sirens.

We have music here from the WVIA TV documentary about the band that included Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

And here are some of those images.

(lively music)