ONLINE GUIDE TO PHILLY’S ARTS AND CULTURE LAUNCHES PUBLIC ART SECTION
Philadelphia CultureFiles™ Turns One Year Old — And Keeps Growing

Philadelphia, June 24, 2004 — Pop quiz: Where can hikers cross a gorge on a giant human finger? What does a walk-through photo album look like? At which war memorial can a whisper be heard yards away? Who is “Joanie on a Pony,” and where will she ride eternally? Lifelong residents and curious travelers alike can browse gophila.com/culturefiles to find out. After recently celebrating its one-year anniversary, the Philadelphia CultureFiles™ launches a new Public Art section — an online guide to one of the most extensive collections of outdoor sculpture in the nation. The 20 new files, highlighting more than 40 of Philadelphia’s public works of art, show why Philly is a walkable, touchable, outdoor museum.

A talented group of three Philadelphians created the Public Art CultureFiles™, including Ron Tarver, a 20-year veteran of the Philadelphia Inquirer and photographer of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans from World War II to the War in Iraq, who photographed many of the images in the section. Penny Balkin Bach, who wrote the introduction to the Public Art section, and Douglas Gordon, author of the individual Public Art CultureFiles™, have collaborated for many years as proponents of outdoor art. Gordon worked with Bach on her landmark book, Public Art in Philadelphia, and has assisted with various projects at the Fairmount Park Art Association, where Bach is executive director. Together with Sarah Monk, CultureFiles™ project manager, the team has created an informative, visual and enjoyable guide to Philadelphia’s outdoor art.

The Public Art section is only the latest of a great many developments to the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation’s (GPTMC) CultureFiles™, a project funded by the William Penn Foundation, in the past year. Since its inception, more than 500,000 visitors to the 300 fact-filled Web pages have proven its usefulness as a veritable “what’s what” of Philadelphia’s cultural world. New files include the National Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell Center, the Fairmount WaterWorks Interpretive Center and the Money in Motion exhibit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. New images of more than 80 CultureFiles’™ sites throughout the five-county region can be seen online and are available for marketing use by CultureFiles’™ participants. Finally, in keeping with the user-friendliness of the site, CultureFiles™ has added three more special-interest groupings to make searching the files as easy as possible: Gay-friendly Philadelphia, Lunch Hour and Happy Hour.

Created by more than 30 of the region’s top writers and photographers, CultureFiles™ identify the full spectrum of the region’s cultural offerings and present it in a concise and easily understood online “file” with compelling and dynamic photographs, essential to truly represent arts and culture. Introductory pages for each category make the user an instant expert on dance or jazz music, for example, with historical and contemporary background information.

The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, promotes understanding of and action on important issues facing the Philadelphia region, in order to advance dynamic and diverse communities that provide meaningful opportunity, and to improve the region's quality of life. Through its grant making and other efforts, the Foundation fosters rich cultural expression, strengthens children's futures and deepens connections to nature and community.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC), Philadelphia’s regional tourism marketing agency, is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to building the region’s economy and positive image through tourism and destination marketing. For more information about travel to Philadelphia, call the new Independence Visitor Center, located in Independence National Historical Park, at (800) 537-7676, or visit www.gophila.com. For information about arts and cultural attractions in the region, click on the CultureFiles’™ link.

Browse CultureFiles™ to find these answers to the pop quiz questions above:

• Hikers in the Wissahickon section of Fairmount Park can traverse Fingerspan, a bridge that resembles a human finger, complete with a “nail” at one end.
   

• Using images contributed by residents of Philadelphia’s vibrant Latino community, artist Pepón Osorio created a walk-through “community photograph album”—a little house (“casita”) with glass walls embedded with enlarged photographs that tell many stories about shared experiences.
   

• The stone seating areas at the Smith Memorial are known as the Whispering Benches because a whisper into the curved wall at one end can be heard at the other end.
   

• Joanie on a Pony is an inspiring sculpture of Joan of Arc on 25^th Street facing the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet cast identical monuments for Philadelphia and Paris, but only in Philadelphia is the heroine known as Joanie on a Pony.

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Note to Editors: For photos of Greater Philadelphia, visit the photo gallery of www.gophila.com/pressroom

June 2004

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