After 42 years of defining what art means to Philly, Penny Bach is retiring

“Where else can you stand amid three centuries of sculpture?” Penny Balkin Bach asked on a blustery day standing on Philadelphia’s Eakins Oval. Behind her, the recently reinstalled Iroquois — a nexus of orange-red steel I beams, constructed by Mark di Suvero between 1983 and 1999 — stretches skyward. Further down Kelly Drive, Emmanuel Frémiet’s 1890 Joan of Arc sits astride her horse. Between them a third work gleams — Roxy Paine’s 2011 Symbiosis, depicting a silvery sapling supporting an older collapsing one.

This multi-century feat was made possible by the Association for Public Art (formerly known as the Fairmount Park Art Association, founded in 1872) — the first private, nonprofit civic organization in the United States dedicated to creating a “museum without walls.” And from 1980 up until earlier this month, Penny Bach served as its first and only executive director.

For more than four decades, Bach has been instrumental in championing, expanding, and shaping what Philadelphia knows to be art. In 1987, Bach led the first Public Art in America conference to discuss and develop ideas and practices; in 1992 she published Public Art in Philadelphia, which contextualized more than 100 of the city’s public sculptures. Beginning in 2010, she spearheaded the free, award-winning, Museum Without Walls: Audio guide to 75 public art works featuring the voices of over 160 people. Meanwhile, she mounted ambitious exhibitions — both permanent and temporary — in unexpected venues throughout Philadelphia.

Bach grew up in West Philadelphia spending her weekends visiting the city’s many cultural institutions.The (now closed) Atwater Kent intrigued her the most, “because it was somewhat obscure,” she said, and it was dedicated to Philadelphia’s history. She went on to earn a degree in painting and printmaking at Tyler. Later, Bach designed her major at Goddard College — unwittingly equipping herself for her eventual career — acquiring a master’s degree in visual communications and social organization.

Years before she joined the Association for Public Art (aPA), in 1972, Bach was the art coordinator for Parkway’s School Without Walls program. Just steps away from where Iroquois stands, Bach and her students helped create what was then the world’s longest artwork. Assisting artist Gene Davis, they painted a 414-foot-long series of colorful stripes called Franklin’s Footpath which ran for several blocks, leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2014, deep into her tenure as aPA executive director, Bach enlivened the Parkway with Candy Coated’s temporary installation Magic Carpet. In the vicinity of Davis’ long-gone painting, Philadelphians of all ages encountered vibrant colors on the Parkway — this time in the form of oversized game boards and sandboxes filled with shocking pink sand.

“Sometimes earning bureaucrats’ approval can dilute projects,” said Philadelphia-based curator Julie Courtney, “but Bach would keep hammering to get it done.” Sculptor Jody Pinto, who trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, remembered encountering the various difficulties they ran into when realizing her Fingerspan — the 18,000-pound steel bridge in Fairmount Park. Pinto wanted to build a split-tongued walkway that was impossible to install at the sites they considered. Then the Friends of the Wissahickon reached out hoping the installation could replace a dangerous ladder traversing a pathway through a wooded ravine. Via Bach’s connections, Samuel Harris, an architectural engineer, collaborated to develop the bridge concept into a practical structure.

Bach’s ongoing support ensured that the artist’s vision was upheld, and Pinto credited her “ways of approaching and bonding with an artist to achieve what they can clearly see in their own minds.”

In 2012, she led aPA’s interactive light installation, Open Air. Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer mounted his largest project to date as 24 searchlights transformed the air over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from late September until mid October that year.

Bright beams swirled across the night sky, lancing and pulsing to the rhythm of messages — “the shout-outs, poems, songs, rants, dedications, proposals” concocted by a spectrum of Philadelphians. 400,000 people sent messages through the system and the spectacle was visible for a ten mile radius. The number of Philadelphians who became a part of that artwork through witness, is incalculable.

“How do you help people find meaningful occasions with a random set of possibilities?” Bach asked herself and others through her career. While there were more than a few projects that never came to fruition, the best part of her job, she said, overrode “the bureaucracy, the naysayers, the worrying, the funding.” The best part was working with the artists, through the uncertainty and surprise as they thought things through.

“How can you know what it means to be here?” begins the sometimes visible and sometimes invisible words that are embedded into the surface of a retaining wall along the Schuylkill, as a part of Stephen Berg and Tom Chimes’ 1991 installation Sleeping Woman. “How clever and unusual,” said Courtney, of Bach’s impetus to invite a poet and painter to collaborate. Despite a collapsed portion that fell into the river, this thousand-plus-foot-long unpunctuated composition has outlasted both of its creators, poet Berg and painter Chimes.

“It’s because of efforts like these that we have a renaissance city,” Pinto noted.

Courtney agreed. “The city is much richer” for Bach’s involvement, she said as she pointed out how Bach took this “old organization [which will celebrate its 150th year on Dec. 13, honoring Bach with an award] and brought it into the 21st century.”

“Nobody dies or lives by public art,” acknowledged former aPA intern and current board member Jennifer Rodriguez, now the Greater Philadelphia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s president & CEO. “But a city without public art is a city without soul.” Bach’s life work, she says is “not something to be taken for granted. It’s a real, real, heroic effort.”

Bach, who will be retiring at the end of this year, will miss aPA and its expansive group of friends and collaborators, but “I’ll certainly remain in the orbit of public art,” she said. She looks forward to “being untethered, enabling work on special projects and open-ended travel.” The aPA Board has established a committee to search for her successor.

What would she say to the next generation of public art execs, I asked. “Watch and learn; we have among us a cohort; follow your instincts; hit yourself onto people who are exciting, important, creative!”