KATIE RAUTH

"What is your opinion on the street art culture in Philly?"

"Well, I don't know much about most of the off the grid street art in Philly such as taggers and that kind of culture, but I am very familiar with the Mural Arts Project. The Mural Arts project is a really good way for people to get involved with the community which is a really nice aspect of it. I actually heard something on NPR the other day and about how it brings all these opportunities for employment, community outreach which is very important. If you ever realized where the mural go in the city you'll see that they are always placed in low income areas or where there is low income housing to try and lift the communities a little bit. I have mixed opinions on this in general, but the idea that street art and a community outreach art program can have that impact and effect on some of these places is really an amazing thing. It causes lower crime rates, brings more people to the area, and brings so many jobs to people that wouldn't have an impact or have such a big hand in the art community also makes it really cool. There are tags all over the city that I realize, but not any that I really know of in the sense of a large community of graffiti tagging. There are some places you can go like the Divine Lorraine for example, its at Broad and Perish and used to be this old hotel, it's a huge beautiful building and now it's abandon and is covered in graffiti now. You drive up and down Broad Street and you see a lot of it and sometimes it's hard to tell what is street art and what is the mural arts project, and it's pretty interesting. It's all very Philly. You see it and you're like "oh, I'm in Philadelphia,". It's even topics of conversation within Philadelphia residents, people will just go up to their neighbors and ask them if they saw the new piece around the city. But I think my favorite one would have to be the one on the back of the Divine Lorraine. It's by a woman street artist, I'm blanking on her name but she does these cute monster looking chicks, there's this one, the one that's on the back of the Divine Lorraine that's just a simple big green monster hand with red fingernails and she has a tag, "you go girl" which she always uses. I researched her and she tags all over New York and mostly on the west coast like up and down California, so it's pretty cool that Philly got one of her tags."