This museum has no walls, but it can talk

Whether you're there to vent your frustration at City Council, report for the drudgery of jury duty or, worse yet, winding up on the other side of the court system, there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy about visiting City Hall and its neighboring municipal buildings. But, instead of tweeting your complaints the next time you find yourself there, you can now use your smartphone to explore the stunning public artwork in and around the historic building.

What was the inspiration behind Robert Indiana's iconic LOVE statue?

Who are all those people memorialized in statues surrounding City Hall?

And why exactly is there a giant clothespin across the street?

These are some of the questions answered by Museum Without Walls, audio tours of some of the most prominent public artworks in Center City and throughout Fairmount Park that are accessible via cellphone and mobile app, or by download or streaming.

Launched in 2010 by the Association for Public Art, Museum Without Walls recently added 30 new artworks to the program, including much of the sculptures on and around City Hall, as well as pieces along the Ben Franklin Parkway, at the Horticulture Center, in West Fairmount Park, and in Manayunk.

The APA, founded in 1872 as the Fairmount Park Art Association, was the first organization devoted to public art in the United States and continues its mission into the 21st century with this new and unique program.

"We commission, preserve, and promote and interpret public art in Philadelphia," explained APA assistant director Laura Griffith. "This is just a new tool that we're using to do the things that we've always done."

Museum Without Walls offers a variety of voices discussing the artistic, historic and cultural impact of the city's public art, one of the most extensive and impressive collections of any city in the country. Voices newly added to the program include Mayor Nutter; "Clothespin" artist Claes Oldenburg; Philadelphia Museum of Art director and CEO Timothy Rub; and David Kim, violinist and concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

"The idea was not to have a traditional audio tour with a single-person narrative," Griffith said. "It was to create more of a conversation between people who we look to as having an authentic voice. . . . They all have some kind of connection to the art."

Among the voices is one very familiar with the artwork of City Hall - Greta Greenberger, tour-guide director for City Hall, who offers insights into the William Penn statue that stands atop the building. "City Hall is one of those buildings that's in your face about its public art," Greenberger said.

"When you approach this building, even in a car, you sense the rhythms and the patterns and the textures that all of these statues produce. I like to think of City Hall as a museum of sculpture."

Greenberger honed her discussion of Alexander Milne Calder's Penn statue by recalling the frequent questions of visitors on tours of the building. First and foremost? The common misperception that it's Benjamin Franklin, not William Penn, perched up there. And she feels obligated to give a sense of scale to the 37-foot-tall sculpture.

"It's hard for people to grasp the fact that this huge statue, which looks so small from the ground, is so huge and so beautifully detailed," she explained. "You really can't get a sense of scale and intricacy from the street."

City Hall is ringed by sculptures of notables from our city's history - former President William McKinley, department-store pioneer John Wanamaker, Civil War generals John Fulton Reynolds and George McClellan, prominent 19th-century lawyer John Christian Bullitt and locomotive manufacturer Matthias William Baldwin.

"They were all selected by different groups for different reasons," Griffith said. "Each one has its own story to tell, and that's what makes this audio program so much fun."

The surrounding blocks offer more well-known artworks covered by the audio tour: the monument to former Mayor Frank Rizzo, in front of the Municipal Services Building; Jacques Lipchitz's nearby "Government of the People"; Indiana's eponymous statue in LOVE Park; and, of course, Oldenburg's "Clothespin."

The latter statue was sponsored by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority's Percent for Art program, which requires developers to commission art as part of their projects. Founded in 1959, the program was the first of its kind in the nation.

"The mission of the program is to improve the urban environment through public art," said Julia Guerrero, director of Percent for Art. "When you go to a museum, you're expecting to see great art, but with public art you get to have these chance encounters with art all day long when you're walking around. To me that's its greatest value."