Delia King's Mandala and the Art You Were Not Looking For

I was already running late. Chess night starts at seven, South Philly Chess fills the back of Lucky 13 on South 13th Street fast, and I had my jacket half on when the corridor wall stopped me cold. A row of figures in near black, each one traced with a thin white outline, arms across shoulders and one hand raised high, standing against a field of gold and cream shapes that fold into each other like paper stars. The ceiling above them is painted too. The old molding runs straight through the middle of the whole thing. I stood in that hallway long enough that being late stopped mattering, found the small metal plaque bolted to the wall, read it twice, photographed it, and went to chess anyway. I lost. That is the entire night, and it is also the thing I keep trying to say about this city. I love rando art. The piece you go looking for is an itinerary. The piece that catches you on the way to somewhere else is the one that changes the city for you.

A Hallway on the Way Out of Bok

The building is Bok, the old vocational high school that takes up a full block at 9th and Mifflin in South Philadelphia. It is open to the public most days through a visitor entrance on Dudley Street, and on an ordinary afternoon you walk past a glassblower, a photography studio, a daycare, an art school and a stairwell headed for a rooftop bar without anybody making a ceremony of it. Scout, the firm that bought the place in 2014 and has been restoring and running it since, has more than 200 businesses working inside 340,000 square feet of former classrooms. I go there for other reasons entirely. I was not there for art.

Up close the figures are not flat shapes at all. Inside each dark body there is a whole second drawing: rust red lines cut and looped across a torso, scattered dots, a shape that reads like a flower on one hip, and on one woman a raised hand with every finger drawn separately, knuckle by knuckle. The gold behind them is not one gold. It is pale yellow, cream, deep ochre, a grey wedge where the wall turns, a brown band along the floor. And along the base of the wall runs a line of lettering, half of it hidden behind the figures’ feet, speaking about the compartments we get sorted into, the social ones and the political ones. I could not read the whole sentence from where I stood. I liked that I could not.

What the Plaque Says, and Who Gets Named on It

The plaque is small, scuffed, fixed at eye level, and it does the thing I wish more public art did. It names everybody. The work is called Mandala. The copyright line reads 2012, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and Delia King. Under that, assisted by Tjai Abdullah and Michael Whittington. Under that, special thanks to Steven Teare. Sponsored by PECO, the Exelon utility. Created in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate program and students at Edward W. Bok Technical High School. There is a fourth seal along the bottom of the plate, the School District of Philadelphia and its School Reform Commission, and I want to come back to that one.

No Place for Hate is a school program the ADL runs on bias and bullying, self directed by each building, working with students, teachers and family members, and it is active in more than 1,600 schools around the country. That is the frame this wall was painted inside. It was not decoration commissioned to brighten a corridor. It was a school working on its own climate, and an artist handed the wall.

Mural Arts Philadelphia’s own record for Mandala gives the address as 1901 South 9th Street and marks the piece Off View, with a note that the school closed and the building was repurposed. The Public Art Archive carries the same entry. I read all of that at home, hours after standing in front of it, and the gap between the record and my evening is one of my favorite things about Philadelphia. The catalogue is not wrong. The mural did leave the school, because the school left. It simply never left the wall.

Delia King’s Reasons for Painting a Mandala

Here is what Mural Arts says about how the piece came to be, and almost none of it is guessable from looking. King drew her inspiration from life at Bok and from the building’s Art Deco architecture, and proposed a mandala. The form figures heavily in sacred art within Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions, and the intent was to give whoever stopped in front of it a sense of peace. The basic pattern shifts as it passes through each silhouette, because although we are made of the same stuff, we are each unique. She worked with student input for three months to settle the components, and the silhouettes in the finished wall are the students who helped her paint it. The final mural holds dozens, if not hundreds, of colors.

That last fact is the one I would have gotten wrong. From ten feet away I would have sworn the wall used four colors and a lot of discipline. The whole argument of the piece lives in the part you have to walk toward.

King has been working across this city for a long time. Her artist page at Mural Arts lists seventeen projects, and two of them sit close to the heart of the neighborhoods that raised them. Hearing Our Voice went up in Brewerytown in 2007, at 1756 North 29th Street, a tribute to Faith Ringgold built around her Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, with thirty four portraits painted by student participants ringing the central image and a quilted border holding it all together. The Garden followed in 2013 at the recreation center at 12th and Cambria in North Philadelphia, equilateral triangles in a tight palette arranged as abstract flowers, carrying lines from a poem called My Rock by Lady K Smith. It was restored in 2022.

The walls are only half of her practice. Her own studio site leads with reverse glass painting, which is exactly what it sounds like and much harder than it sounds. You paint the image backwards onto the rear face of a sheet of glass, laying down the last details first and the background last, and the viewer sees the finished thing through the front. In 2018 the Barnes Foundation chose her as one of four artists for its Let’s Connect residency, October through December, with a working studio inside the building and open hours for anyone who wanted to come talk. The Barnes described her simply as a reverse glass painter and muralist living in Southwest Philadelphia. Her submitted piece was a two layer reverse glass painting answering a 1900 Picasso of men gathered on a corner in Paris, reworked as men on the block trading jokes.

The School Under the Mural

Bok opened in 1938. It was raised between 1935 and 1938 by Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration and designed by Irwin T. Catharine, chief architect of Philadelphia’s public schools from 1920 until he retired in 1937, who put up 104 new school buildings inside the city limits in under twenty years. Yellow brick trimmed in limestone, piers and pilasters pushing your eye upward, the Moderne edge of Art Deco that he moved toward late in his career. The building went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, along with the rest of the Philadelphia public schools submission.

For three quarters of a century it taught trades. Hidden City’s history of the school describes training in everything from bricklaying to hairdressing, instructors walking students through gas masks during the Second World War, and later years that added cosmetology, a television studio inside the building and screen printing. Scout counts 3,000 students at its height, studying wallpapering, auto mechanics and every skilled trade the city needed filled.

Now hold the dates next to each other. King finished Mandala in 2012. In 2013 the School Reform Commission closed Bok, one of twenty four Philadelphia schools shut that year. The seal at the bottom of that credit plaque belongs to the body that signed the closure, and it is still screwed to the wall a few feet from the students’ own outlines. The building sat empty for two years. WHYY covered the sale when Scout finally closed on it, and Philadelphia Magazine told the longer story of what the place turned into afterward. The bar and restaurant on the top floor are named Irwin’s, after the architect. Somebody in that building was paying attention.

The Art You Were Not Looking For

Mural Arts runs 50 to 100 public art projects in a given year and puts about 15,000 residents and visitors a year through tours of the outdoor gallery. Those tours are genuinely good and I have taken them. But no tour was ever going to put me in that corridor at ten to seven on a weeknight with my keys already in my hand.

That is the part worth saying out loud. The art you go looking for arrives pre framed. You have read the description, you know the artist’s reputation, you have decided in advance roughly how impressed to be, and the work has to climb over all of that before it reaches you. The art you were not looking for arrives with nothing in front of it. There is no expectation to measure against, so whatever you feel standing there is actually yours. And because it caught you mid errand, it attaches itself to your route rather than your calendar. I will never again walk that hallway without slowing down. That corridor is different for me now, permanently, and it cost nothing and nobody planned it.

Think about what is actually on that wall. A piece about being built from the same material and coming out different every time, painted by a woman who spent three months letting teenagers shape it, their own outlines standing there more than a decade after their school was closed out from under them, in a building that kept the artwork when it lost the institution. Nobody charges admission. Nobody puts up a sign at the door telling you it is there. It waits in a corridor for somebody who is on the way somewhere else.

Philadelphia is full of this. Not the famous walls, the other ones. Go slowly through buildings you have no reason to look at closely. Read the plaque, because the plaque names the assistants and the students and the utility that paid for it, and all of those are the reason the wall exists. I got to chess late and I lost my first game. Easily worth it.

Sources and references

About the Author

Harry Hayman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur, music producer, and cultural advocate. Through his work with the Feed Philly Coalition, he explores and documents the creative, culinary, and civic life of a city he believes is one of the most inspired places in America.