Phila.'s Penny Balkin Bach wins national award for public art

By Stephan Salisbury, Inquirer Culture Writer

Posted: February 15, 2013

Penny Balkin Bach, longtime executive director of the Association for Public Art, has received the 2013 Public Art Dialogue Award for her contributions to the practice of public art in the United States, PAD announced Thursday at its annual meeting in New York City.

Bach, 66, has launched a number of influential projects in Philadelphia over the years, including Museum Without Walls, downloadable audio programs tied to three dozen public sculptures on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and Kelly Drive.

In the late 1990s, she also began New Land Marks, a pathbreaking program that aims to knit together communities and establish a sense of place through new works of public art. Most recently, New Land Marks in 2010 dedicated John Kindness' The Labor Monument: Philadelphia's Tribute to the American Worker in Elmwood Park in Southwest Philadelphia.

Most spectacularly, perhaps, Bach and the Association for Public Art brought Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Open Air to the Parkway as part of the 2012 Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. The work, widely publicized, brought a dramatic interactive light display, guided by voices and GPS locations, to the urban twilight.

Bach has also written several books, including what is arguably the most comprehensive compendium of public art in the city, Public Art in Philadelphia, published in 1992 by Temple University Press.

The Association for Public Art, a private nonprofit organization, was known as the Fairmount Park Art Association until last year. It was founded in 1872 to commission, preserve, and promote public art in the city. The organization is responsible for much of Philadelphia's notable public artwork, particularly sculptures and quasi-architectural pieces found within Fairmount Park, including the Parkway and the river drives.

For more than a century, the association has initiated and carried out much of the conservation of the city's public sculpture. It is an affiliate of the College Art Association, with a membership made up of art historians, artists, curators, administrators, educators, architects, landscape architects, and others.

Contact Stephan Salisbury

at 215-854-5594, ssalisbury@phillynews.com, or @SPSalisbury on Twitter.