NEW YORK, NY.- Conrad Benners phone camera was fixed on Nile Livingston, an artist who stood in front of a blank wall. Livingston would soon paint a massive mural, and the canvas would be the side of an apartment building overlooking a parking lot in the Gayborhood area of Philadelphia. But Livingston was having a hard time finding the right words for a promotional TikTok.
We can do a thousand takes, Benner said, warmth in his voice. He had chosen both the location and the artist.
Benner, 38, runs Streets Dept, a photo blog and social media presence dedicated to spotlighting street artists. In addition to interviewing artists on video and photographing their work, Benner selects artists for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which says it is the nations largest public art program. In a city known for the richness of its cultural institutions and its public art scene, Benner wants to serve the artists in all ways.
Hes a bridge in the public art community, Livingston said. He stops and slows down and observes the things around him, and he really cares about the city of Philadelphia.
Before meeting up with Livingston, Benners camera was locked on another artist, Alexei Mansour, whom Brenner had selected to paint a mural in real time as part of a street festival. It was almost 90 degrees, and huge speakers drowned out Mansour, a self-described mumbler not keen on public speaking. There were people everywhere, and Mansour, too, struggled, his face turning bright red. (I blacked out, Mansour said later of the moment.)
Benner took control: He instructed Mansour to wave his hands in front of his face to cool himself down. He switched locations, first trying to record Mansour in an adjacent building (also too loud) before settling on a corner away from the commotion.
One, two, three, Benner said patiently, and Mansour began to describe his work.
Mansour, whose work focuses on queer identity, and his team worked on a mural of Greek god Dionysus, whom some consider an early nonbinary figure.
Benner, who grew up in the Fishtown neighborhood and typically wears a flat-brimmed cap and a mustache, eschews attention when documenting art, directing peoples eyes toward the artists he supports.
My interest was always at pointing the camera outwards, Benner said. I find deep joy and interest in learning about the world around me through public art and the artists who make it.
Benner first published Streets Dept in 2011. A novice to the street art world Benner is not a trained artist, and he had long planned to go into architecture he had early posts that took on what he called a fanboy blog tone.
The blog went mainstream in June 2011 when Time magazine reprinted a post about an artist who had yarn-bombed a city train, wrapping seats in multicolored knit fibers. The attention landed Benner a full-time marketing job, which he quit in 2015 after he surpassed 100,000 Instagram followers (he now has more than 150,000 followers and another 34,600 on TikTok) and devoted all of his focus to Streets Dept. He later started a subscription service through Patreon, a membership platform for content creators.
In 2020, Benner began selecting artists and locations for Mural Arts, which he said now provides the bulk of Street Depts funding, after nearly a decade of independent curatorial work, which he still does on the side.
At the heart of all that work is a love for a city that he believes is particularly suited to a thriving street arts community.
Most of the street artists who work right now are putting up on either abandoned buildings or construction materials, Benner said. Almost every neighborhood in Philly has an abandoned building thats a former warehouse, or abandoned homes.
There was this idea that, OK, industry and maybe some people left this city, so now its our playground, he said of street artists. (The citys population declined from about 2 million in the 1960s to about 1.5 million in 2021.) If you leave a building abandoned, its going to get filled with art.
Hours after filming with Livingston and Mansour, Benner popped by a free wall space for artists on a busy street corner, where a man was painting a womans face. Benner had seen the artists work for months but had never met him. He was Shaun Durbin, an up-and-coming local artist who had tried to get Benners attention earlier at the live painting. He agreed to let Benner feature his work.
Benner pulled out his camera. This is so kismet, he said. His favorite part of his work is meeting new artists and sharing their work with the masses. Why else are we in this world if not to just look around and be excited by whats around us?
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.