While the 85,000 square foot How Philly Moves mural at the airport is hard to miss, it’s almost to impossible to convey how many people have been involved with this project in various ways.

This little portrait series highlights a few of the people who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help make the mural a reality.
Images courtesy of JJ Tiziou Photography.

Anna Drozdowski of Ladybird, ever an amazing juggler of many things, was instrumental in facilitating the 2010 shoots and generally being an amazing resource to JJ Tiziou Photography.

Jenn McCreary is Director of Communications at Mural Arts, and together with Cari Feiler Bender of Relief Communications, they’ve helped the project get such great press.

Jay Wahl ran the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts at the Kimmel Center, which included the How Philly Moves projection project on Broad Street. (see a video of it here!)

Rina Cutler, who serves as the city’s Deputy Mayor for Transportation & Utilities, had the inspiration of using the parking structures at the Philadelphia International Airport to create a massive mural serving as a new gateway to the city.

Andrew Stober, who works with Rina, was instrumental in facilitating the logistics between all of the different parties involved in making such an ambitious project a reality.

Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer at the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, was one of the many enthusiastic supporters of the project.

Chris Petrowski is a surveyor who created the three-dimensional models that allowed photographer/designer JJ Tiziou to transform his images into something that the muralists could paint while compensating for perspective distortions inherent in the challenging surfaces of the airport parking structures.

Seth Turner is the Director of Operations at Mural Arts, supporting the whole mural team and all of the other mural projects throughout the city. 

Before you can start a project of this scale, you have to make sure that everyone’s on the same page. Corinne Militello is one of the attorneys at Ballard Spahr who provided support to Mural Arts with their contracts and negotiations.

Maureen Weir runs things at The Gallery at Market East, where the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust generously donated vacant retail space to serve as the studio in which the mural segments were painted. This centrally located space allowed for some amazing community paint days.

Frank Morelli and the City of Philadelphia Streets Department were responsible for the survey crew who provided accurate measurements of the nooks and crannies of the parking structures.

Herman Ledger worked with Frank and Chris at the Streets Department to make sure that the survey data created an accurate 3d model of the parking garages to use in the mural design.

Rachel Kantra Beal is JJ Tiziou Photography‘s first employee- in addition to providing a lot of fantastic general operations support, she did an amazing job of organizing and running the most recent round of How Philly Moves community dance photo sessions where over 140 new participants were included in this project.

Tjai Abdullah was one of the main muralists, also serves as a guide in ever growing mural tour program.

Anthony Peel was another core member of the mural team — They’ve all spent so much time working so hard on this project…

… but we kind of love this shot of him just chillin’.

As the muralists worked, Chris Ambolino and the whole crew from the Big Picture Alliance caught it all for their upcoming documentary: “Gateway”. You can catch a preview of their amazing behind-the-scenes footage and time-lapse of the installation featured in the permanent exhibit in the B/C baggage claim, or see some preliminary helicopter footage.

Efrain Herrera, another member of the mural team, happens coincidentally to be the nephew of one of the dancers featured in the mural.

Virgilio Perez is another one of our main muralists. He and Tjai both came to Mural Arts through their Restorative Justice program, as featured in this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Thomas Walton and the core group of muralists were assisted by hundreds of people through the community paint days. Literally over a thousand people have had a hand in the mural.

You can find a couple fun shots of muralist Charles Newman in this gallery that shows some of the process of installing the mural at the airport…

… that gallery also features shots of muralist Laura Velez way high up in the lift. You can’t be afraid of heights if you’re making a seven-story tall mural!

This fantastic team of muralists was led by Jon Laidacker, who translated JJ‘s images and design into paint and coordinated the execution and and installation of the mural.

Not represented in these images but equally critical in bringing this project to fruition are all of the dancers and volunteers who made the photo sessions happen and the many special contributors who have supported How Philly Moves in its various incarnations. Special thanks are due to project manager Judy Hellman and the entire team at Mural Arts, and their partners and supporters that have enabled this ambitious project. Huge thanks to all of them, and to you.

And then of course there’s photographer/designer JJ Tiziou, caught in this shot by Jon Laidacker.

JJ’s philosophy that everyone is photogenic led him to start photographing How Philly Moves in 2008, and he’s thrilled and grateful to see this project evolve with so much community support. The most recent incarnation of How Philly Moves were funded by over 600 backers on Kickstarter and there’s a wealth of new images to share with the community. JJ can’t wait to see what happens next…