Skip to content

New online database for Mural Arts projects

The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program tomorrow will introduce an online interactive database of the city's murals. The database, dubbed Muralfarm.org, will allow users to search for pictures and mural information by artist, theme, date, location, neighborhood and other key terms.

The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program tomorrow will introduce an online interactive database of the city's murals.

The database, dubbed Muralfarm.org, will allow users to search for pictures and mural information by artist, theme, date, location, neighborhood and other key terms.

"It's a new, exciting way for people to access art," said Lindsey Rosenberg, the program's director of special projects.

Mural records will contain photographs of murals and, in some cases, the way a site looked before it had a mural.

Muralfarm.org is not the first database of its kind in Philadelphia, but it will have features that previous versions didn't offer. "As we've been growing, so has our need to create a larger database," Rosenberg said.

The mural program was created in 1984 to remedy the city's graffiti epidemic by turning destructive graffiti into a sight for city eyes. It has produced almost 3,000 murals.

The new site will use geographic-information-systems (GIS) technology. Each mural will be assigned a latitude and longitude, enabling users to locate murals near certain areas by entering an address or intersection.

Center City software firm Avencia Inc. helped produce the site.