Shine Mural - and Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's tallest scaffolding to date!

 The mural was painted entirely inside the studio.  This is a section of the N row in progress.  You can see there are ten 5'x5' sheets tacked to the wall.

 A view of the scaffolding from across Lehigh Ave.

 Lucia is drawing level lines on the primed wall that form the grid that the 5' x 5' sheets are then pasted to.

 

The scaffolding sits from 1.5' to 2.5' away from the wall, so you have to do some crazy moves to prevent yourself from falling sometimes.  This is Erin.  She's looking a little awkward but she's probably something like 6 stories off the ground only wearing a hardhat.

 Looking down (see the three peoples tiny hands working on other levels of the scaffolding?)

 and looking up at the basket of the boom lift/the letter "S".

Below are other people's photos:

 

The view from the boom lift, which was used to reach parts of the wall that were higher than 8 stories

 

These two murals are a part of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's Porch Light Initiative, which is a pretty neat program:

The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) introduce The Porch Light Initiative, a three-year initiative that situates art and human connection at the heart of recovery and healing in three North Philadelphia neighborhoods

Together with individuals receiving treatment for behavioral health challenges, we are building teams of behavioral health service providers, artists, and community residents to address trauma in our most underserved communities alongside the associated issues of drug addiction, mental illness, and other behavioral health issues.

Rise and Shine are two murals of the three murals (the third is the top image of the above image) of the North Philadelphia Beacon Project.:

Created as part of the three year Porch Light Initiative in collaboration with Sobriety Through Out-Patient (S.T.O.P.), the mural The North Philadelphia Beacon Project reflects the creativity and effort of hundreds of community members, S.T.O.P. staff and service recipients, volunteers, and artist James Burns.
The choice of the word RISE evolved from 5 years of work with the recovery community. At roughly 40’ high, on the north-facing wall, the word RISE is visible for miles. Inherent in the word is the idea of recovery. RISE is painted atop a color grid, which houses portraits of community members and participants in the program. Artwork created with the artist and community in weekly workshops is re-presented within the large letters in a collaborative collage form. This collage work also exists on the south-facing wall within the color grid, where the word SHINE is paited at over 80' tall.
Within the color grid lives collage from individual participants.  Inside the large letters are quotes and phrases from the projects' many contributors. The phrases are quotations, segments, and word collages that originated from the workshops and originally lived in participant and artist sketchbooks. Those phrases were later incorporated into the final design. All of the sketches became the support material that gives this large project its rigor, and creates substance that is far greater than the two simple words RISE and SHINE. This breathes new life into the phrase, and begs us all to stop and think about these words in a new way and in a new context.