In Miguel Horn‘s 2021 artwork ContraFuerte, his figures, made from aluminum plates, appear to be holding up a bridge between two buildings. Located on Cuthbert Street, an alley off of 18th Street in downtown Philadelphia, it was created as part of the city’s Percent for Art program.
For additional information on the work, check out this article from WHYY.
Ava Blitz created this glass mosaic, Pink, in 2012 for Philadelphia International Airport. It is part of Philadelphia’s Percent for Art Program.
From Art at PHL-
Philadelphia artist Ava Blitz works in various artistic disciplines including sculpture and photography. In either medium, Blitz is inspired by nature and natural forms. In her sculptural work, she is known to mass similar objects together to suggest continual growth and to emulate the abundance of repetitive forms found in nature. Her sculpture is often large-scale and abstract with minimal detail to capture nature’s basic essence and to encourage the viewer’s imagination. Blitz also photographs nature, usually imagery that she has taken while on walks near her home. The photographs, typically of trees, feature variations of dense, lush foliage. Using digital photography, Blitz is able to heighten the color and alter the imagery to emphasize the beauty and mystery that inspires her artwork.
In Pink, Blitz has incorporated her photography and her interest in nature, abstraction, and repetition to create a glass tile mosaic. She describes the artwork as “playing with the edge between realism and abstraction to create a magical forest or garden – a virtual reality that viewers can enter, explore, and experience on multiple levels.” Seen from a distance, the branches and pink blossoms are recognizable. Yet up close, the tree dissolves into an abstraction of tactile, colorful, iridescent glass tiles.
Nonstop (2107) by Arden Bendler Browning was commissioned by Philadelphia’s Percent for Art Program and is on view at Philadelphia International Airport.
From Art at PHL about the work-
Philadelphia artist Arden Bendler Browning is known for creating large-scale, highly energized, gestural paintings inspired by her urban surroundings. Browning’s paintings are mostly abstract, yet include hints of realism with the suggestion of architectural structures, roadways, telephone poles, and green spaces. Browning’s paintings envelop the viewer with their scale, intensity, and sense of movement. Her imagery is derived from photos taken while traversing the city. The photos enable her to see the city from various vantage points and, as she has described, “jump through time and space.”
Browning’s paintings visually capture that sense of timelessness as she often conveys a disorienting landscape where colors and shapes collide and overlap, where only glimpses of reality come into focus. She speaks of the urban environment as “a vast sea of fluctuating boundaries arguing claim to the demarcation of space.” This statement also describes Browning’s work as she depicts the urban landscape using an amalgam of colors, shapes, and painterly marks adrift and influx.
Browning has said, “Nonstop is multifaceted and dense, full of action, and vibrancy in unexpected places with pockets of space and clusters of commotion. It is just like Philadelphia.”
Browning is currently part of the group exhibition, The Landscape: Lost and Found at Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston, on view until 3/28/26.