Artists want us to make Philadelphia’s city budget better. From inside a shipping container in Love Park.

Inside a bright red shipping container inside Love Park, a collective of artists is trying to get Philadelphians interested in one of the driest civic processes in our city: the annual budget.

You may be tempted to stop reading here, but that’s exactly the challenge that the artists are trying to tackle.

“The budget, while it seems very boring, is incredibly interesting because our lives really depend on it in the city,” said Phoebe Bachman, a Philly-based artist running the People’s Budget Office with the Mural Arts Coalition through May 20.

Visitors who drop by the shipping container — which opened Friday and is plopped between the long flower beds at Love Park — can attend artist-run workshops on budget issues, like funding for libraries, schools, and criminal justice reform. They can access research material to brush up on their knowledge of how the city operates, and even watch live city council budget hearings.

The intent is to make a boring process more transparent — through engaging art.

“Whether that’s the public transportation you’re taking to work, or the potholes that you’re driving and biking over — or the after-school program or pool and library you visit, it’s all integrated into our lives,” Bachman said. “So it’s really important for folks to have that kind of civic awareness and understanding of how the budget operates.”

This is the third iteration of Mural Arts’ annual public art budget workshops, launched in 2021 as a response to the previous year’s Black Lives Matter protests, where questions about police funding and the department’s role in the city dominated the public conversation.

During the 2021 and 2022 budget hearings, artists hung up wheat-paste posters around the city and hosted teach-ins across the city to help Philadelphians imagine a city budget that prioritized supporting residents instead of punishing them.

Artists-in-residence at this year’s installation will hold panels with Philadelphia public school students. They’ll collect testimony from residents around the city about how they use public libraries — some of the last free common spaces in the city — and turn those responses into art prints. They’ll create posters supporting alternatives to incarceration and ways to reduce the harms of gun violence and drug use.

At the shipping container, a poet will set up an old-fashioned typewriter where visitors can bang out their ideas for a cleaner city — on paper made with flower seeds. Participants can take these home and plant them.

Most critically, the artists say, city residents can share their own concerns about what our city should be prioritizing. Street sweeping has been popular among visitors so far, said Bachman. So have shelter for the homeless, better after-school programs, and more public art.

“Part of this is to provide a transparency to the budget,” Bachman said. “And the other part is to provide creative opportunity for folks to really say what they want to see funded — to prompt those questions and conversations.”

Information about The People’s Budget can be found at: https://www.muralarts.org/artworks/a-peoples-budget/