Philadelphia - Art City

I didn't really have a sense of Philadelphia beyond Benjamin Franklin and Independence Hall before we went. I had never realized that Mannequin and Trading Places were set there, and I had never read any books set there.

One book on my reading list that might have helped is Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir. It's not about the city, and I think a lot of it happens in New York, but each Alexander Calder has art that was referenced on our tour.

http://www.phillyhistory.org/blog/index.php/2008/06/from-sculptor-to-mobile-creator-three-generations-of-calder-artists/ 

I was most familiar with the youngest, Alexander "Sandy" Calder, known for his mobiles, but it was the grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, who figured most in our time there. We were near City Hall, and passed around or through it every day, seeing some of the 250 figures he sculpted, including the crowning statue of William Penn which often helped us with navigation. We passed by Swann Fountain, designed by Alexander Stirling Calder, multiple times.

Knowing more about the family would have made seeing their work more meaningful, but also it might have introduced us to how rich in art Philadelphia is.

We knew about the Rodin Museum, and it was a place that we thought we might get to, though time did not allow it. There was so much more.

http://www.rodinmuseum.org/

We knew about the Rocky steps, and we kind of knew that they led up to a museum, but we did not know that the Philadelphia Museum of Art was chartered for the 1876 Centennial Exposition. that it has over 227,000 works, or that it needed an annex, the Perelman Building, to hold it all.

http://www.philamuseum.org/ 

We did not know about the mural program:

http://www.muralarts.org/collections/featured-murals

As it was, we did not have nearly enough time to do any of that justice, but it's a reason to go back. There is still a lot about the city that we haven't fully appreciated.

http://www.visitphilly.com/museums-attractions/philadelphia-museums/