Afromation Avenue aims to make West Philly feel seen and inspired

As Marian Bailey began designing her work for the Afromation Avenue art installation, she thought carefully about a conversation she’d had with a longtime West Philly resident about violence in the community. He told her and the other Black artists working on the project how decades ago, community-based groups had been the ones leading violence prevention efforts in West Philly, not the city or the police. He wanted his neighbors, including the younger generations, to understand that they had the power to keep each other safe.

The rainbow-colored street sign that Bailey created after this conversation now sits in Malcolm X Park. “Keep the peace at home and in the streets,” the text reads over a stack of rowhomes.

“A lot of people really don’t feel safe when they walk outside and try to engage with their communities,” Bailey said, explaining what she’d heard from other community members when asked about the kinds of messages they would like to have around their neighborhood. This one was heavy, but it mattered. “I want people to feel seen. I want them to feel really inspired and I want them to take the things that they see and figure out how to apply [them].”

Afromation Avenue is a new project with Mural Arts Philadelphia, made up of 25 street signs that project positive affirmations to West Philly’s Black community. The signs are on 52nd Street between Market and Pine Streets, inside Malcolm X Park, and outside the Laura Sims Skate House off of Cobbs Creek Parkway.

Brittni Jennings and Kristin Kelly, the project creators behind the installation, first started experimenting with the power of positive affirmations after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The two friends are also educators, and each of them saw students struggling to process his death. “They were frustrated, especially at the high school level,” Kelly said. “Even my young kids, [they were] just not really understanding what had happened. And so we [decided] we need to find something [that brought] positivity and joy ... just to help our students lift their spirits a bit. And so then we came up with daily affirmations.”

"I hope it at least makes people stop to think and feel a bit of pride in their home and see something beautiful.”

Jennings and Kelly created books of Daily Afromations to share with their students, and they responded well to the encouraging messages. Inspired by that success, the educators decided they could do more. They pitched their Afromation Avenue street-sign project to Mural Arts Philadelphia, which facilitates about a hundred murals and other public art projects every year. Jennings and Kelly also suggested that the signs could aid in the city’s Read by 4th initiatives, by giving children a more print-rich environment.

“When I read their email, I jumped for joy,” said Jane Golden, the executive director of Mural Arts. “So on one hand, they’re looking at this through the lens of their students ... and then they’re looking at the city and how we navigate through it. ... They’re looking at public art and artists’ role in telling our stories, but also beautifying our environment. So it’s a very multilayered project that I really applaud.”

Kelly grew up in West Philly and wanted the project to be based there as a way of giving back. She and Jennings chose the sign locations strategically — 52nd Street because of its history as a thriving hub for Black businesses, Malcolm X Park for being a community gathering space and cultural epicenter, and Laura Sims Skate House for its unique legacy being designed by a Black architect. “Sometimes with gentrification and revitalization, people that live here get displaced. So we wanted to make sure that the project was honoring the folks that were here first and hopefully will stay here as things change,” Jennings said.

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Even with their success with affirmations in the past, the pair of educators knew that the project would be most impactful if the messages came from the community itself. Over this past summer, they and the two other artists involved with the project, Bailey and Lindsay Bedford, surveyed and spoke to over 50 West Philly residents of different ages and backgrounds. The artists asked people questions like: How does your community make you feel? What are some of your favorite memories of the neighborhood? What encouraging words would you lend to your community?

The artists got to work, crafting their designs and messages to reflect what they’d heard from community members and to honor the specific locations where they would be placed.

One of Bedford’s signs on the 52nd Street stretch of businesses reads, “You Have Inherent Value,” in a bright green and yellow color palette, which she said came directly from the label for a Jamaican sea moss sold at a nearby store.

Another one of her signs says, “Black Ownership = Liberation” over teal and purple geometric shapes. “It was really important after hearing the feedback from the community about the types of affirmations they wanted to receive from us, that people needed to feel a sense of agency and they needed to feel uplifted,” she said. “My background is in interior architecture and design, so that’s why I really gravitated to the architectural details of the neighborhood and this idea of Black [business] owners [in] these spaces that we inhabit and really [wanted] to celebrate that.”

Jennings and Kelly collaborated on their signs, which primarily went inside Malcolm X Park. They were inspired by the work of Emory Douglas, the artist behind the Black Panther Party’s iconic newspaper illustrations, and emulated his sun-ray patterns in the background of their signs to honor him. One design features three raised Black fists, declaring, “We Have Power If We Allow It!” in bold letters.

“What I was hearing [from community members] was that people ... [believed] we have the power to change this. No one else is going to do it for us, and we shouldn’t want them to do it for us,” Kelly said.

The Afromation Avenue signs were built to be permanent fixtures of the West Philly community, blending in with the everyday lives of the people walking along 52nd Street and hanging out in Malcolm X Park. Jennings and Kelly said they plan to continue their work with public art and affirmations, hoping to collaborate with other community arts initiatives in other cities, maybe even internationally.

“This is a small step,” Bedford said, “but I think what we provided brings a bit of happiness, just something special and nice to see, and I hope it at least makes people stop to think and feel a bit of pride in their home and see something beautiful.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the project creators’ titles, and the title of the books used in their project with students.