Civic Views was a temporary public art project celebrating the city’s municipal employees and their diverse perspectives on Philadelphia through poetic documentation of their office windows. The project represented the culmination of two years of Emilio Martínez Poppe photographing and interviewing staff from an array of Philadelphia civic agencies. Presented in Philadelphia’s City Hall Courtyard, Civic Views was accompanied by a robust series of public programs highlighting the work of scholars, labor organizers, elected officials, and city employees as they articulated the importance of the public sector. The project’s centerpiece, an expansive installation of photographs, text, and scaffolding, was on view in the City Hall Courtyard from May 23 – June 11, 2025. It is currently on long term view across the street in Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building.
Civic Views combines photographs of city government office windows and excerpts from interviews with a wide range of civil servants to map their diverse views on a changing Philadelphia. Photographs are reproduced at a 1-to-1 scale and hung to exact specifications that replicate the experience of looking out of each window, opening these tucked-away offices to the public’s view. The photographs are paired with a selection of anonymous interview excerpts on text panels that highlight the pride, complexity, and even contradictions endemic to public sector work. The interviews chart how employees came to work for city government, reflections on the work they perform, how family and friends perceive their careers, and their wishes for Philadelphia and its citizens. These elements are mounted on a series of scaffolding armatures that create an abstracted map of Philadelphia and orient the public to where these buildings are located across the city. Taken together, the project endeavors to humanize the public sector while using scaffolding to symbolize the public attitudes and urban landscape that are constantly changing in the background of the city government’s work.
In a moment when the public sector is increasingly vulnerable to scrutiny, restructuring, and privatization, Civic Views champions the people, buildings, and ethics that keep city government running. The project seeks to shake off a monolithic view of government to better understand it at a human scale, hoping to reignite a deep value for what we call “public.” Like many of Mural Arts Philadelphia’s projects, Civic Views presents thoughtful ways for experiencing public art as an interdisciplinary effort engaged in many conversations at once—history, urbanism, photography, architecture, civil service, and public space.
The full scope of the project includes visits to over twenty municipal agencies, over thirty staff interviews and over forty window views. The project has been produced in close collaboration with the City of Philadelphia, which has graciously opened its doors to Martínez Poppe’s camera and microphone.
After its debut in the City Hall Courtyard, a selection of Civic Views photographs migrated across the street to long-term public view at the Municipal Services Building’s Concourse Level in partnership with the Department of Public Property. The project will also lead to a substantial book documenting the full index of photographs Martínez Poppe captured, as well as essays from leading artists, scholars, and the project’s organizers exploring art’s relationship to the city. The book project will be announced with additional details later this year.