Civic Views
2025
Polypropylene photographic prints subsurface mounted to acrylic and aluminum composite with aluminum frames and UV prints on aluminum composite displayed on construction scaffolding installed in the Philadelphia City Hall courtyard.
Civic Views was comissioned by Mural Arts Philadelphia and curated by Jameson Paige.
Civic Views is a public art project that celebrates Philadelphia’s municipal employees and their diverse perspectives on the city. The project brings together photographs taken from city government office windows with anonymous interview excerpts that highlight the pride, complexity, and contradictions endemic to public sector work. The photographs are reproduced at a 1-to-1 scale and hung to the exact specifications that replicate the experience of looking out of each window, opening tucked-away offices to public view.
Civic Views draws inspiration from Joseph Saxton’s 1839 daguerreotype, the oldest extant American photograph, shot from a window in the former U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. Martínez Poppe is fascinated by the daguerreotype’s unique role in capturing Saxton’s position as a civil servant while American self-representation was being transformed in the years leading up to the Civil War. By taking up this photographic history of the city’s public institutions and mapping it onto contemporary Philadelphia, the artist asks: how might we forge new ways of seeing the city, and ourselves, even when it may seem impossible to do so?
In the Spring of 2025 the project was displayed in the City Hall Courtyard as an expansive installation of photographs, text, and scaffolding. The series of scaffolding armatures created an allegorical map of Philadelphia and oriented the public to where these buildings are located across the city. 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 articulate the importance of the public sector and elaborate on central themes of the project. A recurring performance by the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble activated the installation through songs about the working conditions of Philadelphia civil servants
Taken together, the project endeavors to humanize the public sector by engaging the complex attitudes and urban landscape that compose and change the city while municipal government continues its work. At a time 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 aims 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.”
Installation and event photos by Areksun, Zach Hill, Steve Weinik, and Albert Yee, courtesy of Mural Arts Philadelphia.