Streets Dept Partners with The Adult Swim Mural Project For New Series of Murals In Fishtown

Very excited to announce that Streets Dept Walls will be working again with our regular collaborator, Ginger Rudolph, to curate the latest edition to the Adult Swim Mural Project, which is coming to Fishtown this August! 

The Adult Swim Mural Project is an ongoing partnership between the public arts organization, Living Walls Atlanta and the massively creative cable TV channel, Adult Swim. The project was created to bolster the work, message, and careers of American Black artists. And over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be creating three amazing new murals in Philly’s Fishtown neighborhood with three incredible Philly-based artists: Nazeer Sabree, Branche Coverdale, and Zeinab Diomande. Our murals will be completed just in time for the 2022 Adult Swim Festival that’s taking place in Fishtown from August 5th through the 7th! The murals’ locations will be kept secret until that time.  

“Adult Swim has stood for authenticity, creative freedom, and the championing of artistic voice from its start,” Living Walls Atlanta writes. “Through their partnership with Living Walls, artists are trained in the process of mural-making as they gain experience in the full scope of creating public works of art and start meaningful conversations with the community at large.” The project started in December 2020 in Atlanta, Ga, and has since produced 15 murals by artists across Atlanta, New Orleans, and now Philadelphia. 

By fate or chance, while Ginger and I pitched a number of local artists for this project, the three selected ultimately ended up having one big thing in common. And that’s that they’ve all been part of the Mural Arts Philadelphia Fellowship for Black Artists! This is an annual fellowship of which Ginger is one of the curators and that I support with promotion and social media consulting. If you’re a Philly-based artist whose Black and you’ve yet to consider this opportunity, definitely check it out next year.   

Y’all, we can not wait for you to see the murals our artists are creating. In the meantime, here’s more about the artists: 

Nazeer Sabree

Nazeer Sabree is a contemporary visual artist from West Philadelphia. Nazeer’s work is generally and most notably focused on depicting the dichotomy of everyday life in black culture. The themes explored in his works are individual and shared cultural experiences, identity, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, social constructs, mental health, belonging, and African American history.

Branche Coverdale

Branche Coverdale is an artist based in Philadelphia. Originally a New Yorker, Branche works in an expressive and playful manner inspired from cartoons of his childhood with elements of the fantastical. Before moving to Philadelphia, he was a full time studio assistant for Takashi Murakami in NYC and studied at Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently working as a full time artist/illustrator.

Zeinab Diomande

Zeinab Diomande otherwise known as “Z The Rat” is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist. Diomande was born in 1999 in Virginia. Her family left the United States to relocate back to their home in the Ivory Coast where she grew up and spent most of her life. In 2018, she moved to Philadelphia where she is currently studying, majoring in Fine Arts Painting and Drawing at The University of The Arts. Zeinab was a 2021 AXA Art Prize finalist, and she has been a part of exhibitions internationally and across the country, in Abidjan, London, New York and Los Angeles.

This is the first Streets Dept Walls project to create permanent public art, most of the projects I work on or curate are temporary. So it’s meant a lot to me to not only work with Ginger again to co-curate a project as well as find homes for the artworks of these three brilliant artists, but to do it all in the neighborhood I grew up in and my family still calls home. 

Be sure to follow the artists (Nazeer, Branche, and Zeinab), follow Adult Swim and Living Walls, and of course Streets Dept Walls on social media to see sneak peeks of the murals as they continue to go up. And see past Streets Dept and Ginger Rudolph collaborative projects here: Love + Grit Storefronts Project, Sisterly Love Project.