“The neighborhood designed the murals. I simply listened to what people shared and drew upon decades of experience as an artist to translate those stories into mural designs the community could see itself in and feel proud of.” — Nile Livingston, visual artist, collaborator on the Highmark Mann Center mural series, and Founder & Creative Director of Creative Repute
Since opening in 1976, the Mann has grown into one of the country’s largest nonprofit outdoor performing arts centers, presenting performances by internationally recognized artists while investing heavily in education, neighborhood partnerships, and public access. Every year, more than 400,000 visitors pass through its gates, while another 30,000 young people participate in free educational and community programs through the Mann’s Institute for Creative Arts and Community Impact. Today, the organization is also leading a $70 million campus transformation, reflecting one of the largest investments in its history and a long-term commitment to serving future generations. For many, the venue is a destination for unforgettable performances. For the people who live nearby, it has become something much more enduring. It is part of the neighborhood’s rhythm. The music doesn’t stop when the concert ends. It drifts through the trees, across front porches, and into the memories of the families who have called this part of West Philadelphia home for generations.
That distinction shaped every decision behind a the twelve-piece mural series commissioned through our long-time partner, Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Highmark Mann Center. Since 1984, Mural Arts Philadelphia has produced more than 4,300 public artworks, helping establish Philadelphia as the Mural Capital of the World. Created by artists Nile Livingston and De’von Downes, the twelve murals transform the Highmark Mann Center’s entrance gates into a visual story about memory, music, and neighborhood identity. The project was managed by Conrad Benner of Streets Dept and grew from an original commission of ten murals into twelve after stakeholders embraced the direction of the work and expanded the series.
For Livingston, the commission represented the convergence of two lifelong pursuits. As Founder and Creative Director of Creative Repute, she helps organizations uncover and communicate the stories that already exist within the communities they serve. As a visual artist who grew up only minutes from the Highmark Mann Center in West Philadelphia, she returned to a place that had quietly shaped her long before she began building brands, facilitating strategic planning sessions, or leading creative teams.
Before a single sketch was drawn, we spent months learning.
Over the course of several months, Livingston and Downes met with Highmark Mann Center staff, historians, neighborhood residents, and community partners while studying A Century of Music Under the Stars, a recently published history documenting the institution’s first fifty years. The goal wasn’t to collect ideas for illustrations. It was to understand how people experienced the Mann when they weren’t sitting in the audience.
The conversations revealed a side of the venue that rarely appears in marketing materials.
Neighbors described grilling with family while concerts floated through open windows on warm summer evenings. Others remembered sitting on their front porches long after sunset, recognizing songs before they could ever see the performers. Parents talked about children chasing lightning bugs across nearby lawns while orchestras echoed through Fairmount Park. Several longtime residents recalled the Mann’s practice of notifying nearby neighbors when performances were expected to run late, a small gesture that reflected the organization’s understanding that it wasn’t simply operating in a neighborhood; it was part of one.
Those conversations gradually reshaped the project.
The murals would celebrate more than performances.
They would celebrate the people whose lives have unfolded alongside them.
The National Endowment for the Arts has found that people who participate in the arts are more likely to volunteer, engage in civic life, and build stronger connections within their communities. Public art, in that sense, does more than transform physical spaces. It strengthens the social fabric that connects people to one another. That made the stories shared by neighbors feel even more significant. They weren’t simply memories of concerts. They were evidence of how a cultural institution had become woven into everyday community life.
A Neighborhood Built Around Culture
The Highmark Mann Center occupies a unique place within Philadelphia’s cultural landscape. Unlike many performing arts venues surrounded by office towers, parking garages, or entertainment districts, it sits within the expansive landscape of West Fairmount Park, bordered by tree-lined streets, historic rowhomes, schools, churches, and generations of families who have experienced the venue not only as audience members, but as neighbors. Fairmount Park itself spans more than 2,000 acres, while the entire Fairmount Park system exceeds 9,200 acres, making it one of the largest urban park systems in the country.
The surrounding Parkside neighborhood has long been recognized for its remarkable architecture, cultural diversity, and resilience. Originally developed after the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the neighborhood later experienced many of the same forces that reshaped American cities throughout the twentieth century, including suburbanization, disinvestment, population loss, and the lasting effects of redlining. Today, despite sitting beside one of Philadelphia’s richest concentrations of cultural institutions, many Parkside residents continue to face economic challenges. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly one in three residents in portions of the neighborhood lives below the federal poverty line.
Together with nearby communities, Parkside forms the heart of Philadelphia’s Centennial District, home to the Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts, the Please Touch Museum, Memorial Hall, the Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center, the Horticulture Center, and numerous other cultural destinations. Collectively, these institutions welcome approximately seven million visitors each year, making the district one of the largest concentrations of arts, culture, and public space in the region.
That contrast has helped reshape how many institutions within the Centennial District think about their role today. Rather than serving only visitors, organizations like the Highmark Mann Center have increasingly invested in education, workforce development, neighborhood partnerships, and community engagement. The mural project grew from that same philosophy: recognizing that the people who live beside these institutions should also see themselves reflected in them.
Numbers help explain a place. They rarely explain how it feels to live there.
For the people who live here, these landmarks aren’t attractions on a map. They’re woven into everyday life. They’re where children attend summer camps, families spend weekends, neighbors exercise, volunteers give their time, and memories accumulate over decades. They aren’t simply destinations. They’re part of the neighborhood.
That perspective became one of the most valuable discoveries throughout the creative process.
As De’von Downes and I continued meeting with Highmark Mann Center staff, historians, and community members, those lived experiences began to shape our understanding of the institution in ways no creative brief ever could. One story naturally led to another until individual memories started revealing larger themes. The Mann wasn’t remembered solely because of the artists who had performed there. It was remembered because of the experiences those performances created beyond the stage.
By the time we began sketching, we weren’t asking ourselves what the murals should look like.
We were asking a different question.
How do you paint the feeling of growing up with the Highmark Mann Center as your neighbor?
When Stories Become Design
One of the things I enjoy most about public art is that people often assume the work begins with drawing.
In reality, drawing is one of the last steps.
Long before the first sketch appeared on my iPad, the murals already existed in fragments of conversation. They lived in the memories neighbors shared, in historical photographs, in stories passed between generations, and in quiet observations that surfaced only because someone took the time to ask.
As those conversations accumulated, so did a clearer understanding of what this project was really about.
It wasn’t simply documenting performances.
It was documenting the ways performances become part of people’s lives.
That realization became the creative framework for the entire series.
Rather than organizing the murals chronologically or around famous performers, we organized them around experiences that repeatedly surfaced throughout the research. Some celebrated childhood. Others reflected neighborhood traditions, overlooked workers, imagination, or the emotional connection people develop with places over time. Each mural tells its own story, but together they form a portrait of the community surrounding the Highmark Mann Center.
Several works explore what it means to experience music from outside the venue. One depicts a young girl listening to a concert through her bedroom window, inspired by neighbors who described hearing performances from their homes throughout the summer. Another shows an older couple grilling in their backyard while music drifts across Fairmount Park, reflecting the many stories we heard about concerts becoming part of family cookouts, conversations, and evenings spent outdoors. In both pieces, the audience isn’t seated inside the venue. They’re living alongside it.
History found its way into the work as well.
While researching A Century of Music Under the Stars, I learned more about the artists whose performances shaped the Mann’s legacy, including one of Aretha Franklin’s final appearances in Philadelphia. That discovery inspired a composition honoring not only an extraordinary performer but also the lasting emotional connection audiences carry long after the lights come down and the stage is empty. Institutions are often remembered through milestone events. Communities remember how those moments made them feel.
Other murals grew from memories that initially seemed unrelated to music at all.
As a child growing up nearby, I remembered the lightning bugs that filled Fairmount Park on summer evenings. During the design process, those memories evolved into a visual metaphor. The glowing insects became symbols of concertgoers holding lighters in decades past and cell phone flashlights today. The technology changed. The shared experience did not. Across generations, people continue searching for ways to express joy, gratitude, and connection together.
The series also celebrates people whose names rarely appear in headlines.
One mural features a custodial worker sweeping outside the Highmark Mann Center gates while playfully holding a broom like a guitar. It’s a small moment, but one that recognizes an often-overlooked truth: cultural institutions are sustained not only by artists and audiences, but also by the employees who arrive long before the first guest and remain long after everyone else has gone home. Groundskeepers, maintenance crews, custodians, security personnel, event staff, and countless others quietly shape every visitor’s experience. Their work deserved to be part of the story too.
Not every mural looks toward the past. Several embrace imagination as a way of thinking about the Mann’s future. One composition features a spacecraft formed from flowing musical notes hovering above the Philadelphia skyline. Rather than imagining escape, it represents possibility. Throughout our conversations, the Highmark Mann Center emerged as an institution that continues to evolve while remaining deeply connected to its history. The artwork reflects that same balance, honoring legacy while remaining optimistic about what comes next.
Although each mural can stand on its own, none of them were designed to exist in isolation.
From the beginning, De’von Downes and I approached the installation as a single composition stretching across the entrance gates. The twelve murals were intentionally arranged in alternating sequence so the colors transition gradually from deep purples into greens, oranges, and yellows. Five flowing lines inspired by sheet music move continuously across every panel, visually connecting one story to the next. Visitors may pause in front of a single mural, but the installation encourages them to keep walking, discovering how each artwork contributes to a larger narrative.
Looking back, I don’t think the murals are best understood as twelve separate paintings.
They’re twelve conversations.
Each one began with someone sharing a memory that might have otherwise remained private. Our role wasn’t to improve those stories. It was to give them a place where thousands of people could experience them together.
Beyond the Murals
By the time the final designs were complete, I found myself thinking less about the artwork and more about the process that produced it.
The murals were never the starting point.
Listening was.
As both an artist and the founder of Creative Repute, I often move between two very different worlds. One day I’m painting at the scale of a city block. The next I’m helping an organization rethink its brand, facilitating a strategic planning session, or working with a client to improve how people experience their website. On the surface, those projects have very little in common.
The process, however, is remarkably similar.
Every meaningful creative project begins long before anyone opens a design program. It begins by understanding people. McKinsey & Company has reported that organizations that place design and customer insight at the center of decision-making consistently outperform industry peers, reinforcing the business value of investing in research before execution.
That idea sounds simple, but it requires a willingness to slow down. Creative professionals are often hired because they’re expected to have answers. I’ve found that the best work usually begins by asking better questions instead.
Who has been part of this story from the beginning?
Whose perspective is missing from the conversation?
What do people value that hasn’t yet been documented?
Those questions rarely produce immediate solutions. They produce something much more valuable: context.
Context changes everything.
Without it, creative work can be visually compelling while remaining emotionally disconnected from the people it’s intended to serve. With it, even the smallest design decisions begin to carry meaning because they’re grounded in lived experience rather than assumption.
Looking back, none of the murals that became central to this series were assigned in the original scope of work. No one requested a mural about listening to concerts through an open bedroom window. No one suggested celebrating neighborhood cookouts, honoring custodial staff, or transforming childhood memories of lightning bugs into symbols of collective experience. Those ideas emerged because the community shared them first.
That realization reinforced something I’ve come to believe throughout my career.
Creativity isn’t only about making something new.
Sometimes it’s about recognizing the significance of something that has been there all along.
We become stewards of them.
In many ways, that’s what this project represents to me.
The finished murals are certainly something I’m proud of, but they aren’t the most meaningful outcome of the experience. What I’ll remember most are the conversations that shaped them. The laughter that accompanied stories about neighborhood cookouts. The pride people felt speaking about a place that had been part of their lives for decades. The realization that one institution could mean something entirely different depending on whether you arrived with a ticket in your hand or groceries in your car on the way home from work.
Those perspectives don’t compete with one another.
Together, they create a fuller picture of what the Highmark Mann Center has meant to Philadelphia for generations.
As organizations continue looking for ways to build trust, strengthen relationships, and create experiences that resonate, I believe there is value in remembering that some of the most meaningful insights don’t emerge from conference rooms or brainstorming sessions. They emerge from conversations with the people who already have a relationship with the work.
Sometimes the best creative brief has already been written.
It’s simply waiting to be heard.
A Shared Story
The twelve murals now stretching across the Highmark Mann Center’s entrance. Over the next decade, assuming current attendance stays consistent, more than four million visitors are likely to walk past these murals before taking their seats. Some people will recognize the performers and landmarks. Others will see their own childhood reflected in a front porch, a backyard cookout, or a summer evening beneath the trees of Fairmount Park. Many will simply enjoy the color and movement as they make their way toward a concert.
My hope is that neighborhood residents experience something different.
I hope they recognize themselves.
Because in the end, the murals were never about illustrating the Highmark Mann Center.
They were about illustrating the relationship between a cultural institution and the community that has grown alongside it for generations.
That relationship existed long before the first sketch was drawn, and it will continue long after the paint has weathered.
The neighborhood designed the murals.
I was simply fortunate enough to help tell its story.
I’m deeply grateful to Catherine M. Cahill for her leadership and vision; to Toby Blumenthal, Deion Payton, Frank Machos, and the entire Highmark Mann Center team for welcoming us into this process; to Shawn Hatten for photos and documentation of the process; to Jane Golden and our longtime partners at Mural Arts Philadelphia for continuing to demonstrate how public art can strengthen communities; to Conrad Benner for his thoughtful project leadership; to my friend and fellow artist De’von Downes for his creativity and collaboration; and, most importantly, to every neighborhood resident who generously shared their memories, stories, and trust with us. This project reinforced something I’ll carry into every future collaboration: the most meaningful creative work doesn’t begin with an artist, a designer, or a creative brief. It begins with people. Our responsibility is simply to listen carefully enough to help their stories find their way into the world.
