Harry Hayman on the Philadelphia Project That Let a Thousand People Rewrite the Declaration

The original Declaration of Independence was signed by 56 men. Two hundred and fifty years later, a Philadelphia project asked more than a thousand people what they would have written instead, handed each of them a block and a gouge, and put the answers on a library wall.

A question instead of a commission

The standard shape of an anniversary artwork is familiar enough to predict. A city or an institution hires an artist, the artist delivers a finished piece, and the public arrives to look at it. The public is the audience, and the work arrives already complete.

Printmaking by the People, the Mural Arts Philadelphia project now on the walls of the Free Library, inverted that arrangement. Rather than commissioning one artist to speak for the city on the occasion of the country’s 250th anniversary, Mural Arts ran a long series of public workshops and asked residents to answer the question themselves. The prompt handed to participants was direct: among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and what else.

Todd Bressi, the program manager who helped design and curate the project, told WHYY that it is the largest civic engagement project for the semiquincentennial in Philadelphia and likely in the country. That is a claim about scale, but the more interesting part is the method. Nobody was asked to attend a lecture about the Declaration. They were asked to write one.

Thirty five rooms across the city

The workshops ran through 2025 in libraries, schools, recreation centers and art centers, 35 of them, spread across neighborhoods rather than concentrated downtown. The Free Library listing for the resulting exhibition describes the show as documenting the voice of Philadelphians as expressed through the posters they made in those rooms.

Artists led each session, and the techniques varied by room and by group: letterpress, screenprint, linocut, gelli printing and cyanotype. The variety matters more than it might sound. A linocut demands a carved block and a decision that cannot be undone. A cyanotype needs sunlight and patience. Different processes suit different hands, and running five of them meant that a person who could not manage one could still leave with something printed.

What people added to the sentence turned out to cluster. Housing appeared often. So did health care, living wages and food. Beyond the material list came privacy, women’s rights, trans rights and what one report summarized as basic kindness. Suzanna Urminska, the Free Library curator who hung the prints, told WHYY she was struck by how many participants reached for the word love, and read it as a response to how much strain people are carrying.

Why the workshops were the artwork

There is a version of community engagement that functions as marketing for a finished object. The artwork is decided in advance, the public sessions build an audience for it, and the engagement is the wrapper rather than the substance.

This project ran the other way, and Bressi described the moment that made the difference. He calls it the A-Ha moment: a participant finishes a print, pulls it off the press, looks at it and realizes the thing in their hands is theirs. As he put it to WHYY, people said they did that, they said that, and that is mine.

Penny Hazelton, one of the participants, gave the sharper version of the same idea. In her words, a person does not know what they can do until somebody gives them the equipment and the encouragement. Both halves of that sentence are the budget line. Equipment is cheap and easy to justify. Encouragement is staff time in a rec center on a weekday evening, and it is the part that gets cut first.

Jeannine Baldomero, a Philadelphia artist who took part, put the civic argument plainly to the same reporter: the original document does not really apply anymore, a great deal has fallen out over 250 years, and the disparity is worth addressing. That is a strong position, and it is notable that the project did not resolve it on anyone’s behalf. It collected a thousand versions of the answer and hung them next to each other.

What a thousand prints add up to

More than a thousand prints now cover the wall of the Heim Center for Cultural and Civic Engagement at Parkway Central. Hung together, they do something a single commissioned work cannot: they show disagreement, repetition, handwriting, uneven carving and the range of what a city actually thinks when asked.

The project also produced a distillation. Rhonda Babb, a graphic designer, pulled phrases from the prints and compiled them into one poster, and found that the themes mapped closely onto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well being, quality education and climate action. That poster is headed for SEPTA bus shelters and rail stations, and Mural Arts has been looking for a wall large enough to carry a painted version.

Jane Golden, who led Mural Arts through the project, described the exhibition as holding the answer to questions the country is currently asking itself, with hundreds of posters by Philadelphians of all ages building on the legacy of the original signatories. Mural Arts has since announced that Emily Mello will succeed Golden as executive director, which makes this project one of the last at that scale under the founder who built the organization.

It also sits inside a wider set of Philadelphia responses to the anniversary that declined to be celebratory by default. Radical Americana, a citywide project that asked 45 artists to make new work rooted in craft heritage, took a similarly skeptical line on patriotic nostalgia. The city, in other words, treated 250 years as a question rather than a party.

Where to see it, and what it argues

Printmaking by the People: Posters for a Reimagined Declaration of Independence is free and on view at Parkway Central Library through the end of August. Creative Philadelphia and Metro Philadelphia both carry listings, and the project’s design and curatorial thinking is documented at Artful Places.

The argument underneath it is about what public money buys. Commissioning one artist is faster, cleaner and easier to write into a budget, and the result can be photographed on opening night. Running 35 workshops over a year is slower and messier, and nobody can promise in advance what will come out of it.

What came out of it is a thousand people in Philadelphia who now own something they made with their own hands about what freedom requires. That is a civic asset. It simply does not look like one until a person is standing in front of the wall.

A question instead of a commission

Thirty five rooms across the city

Why the workshops were the artwork

What a thousand prints add up to

Where to see it, and what it argues

Sources and references