His work has been discussed in books with titles such as Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions and Transgressions: The Offences of Art, which says something about its reception. Did Mural Arts really invite him to Philadelphia to create something other than a mural? Well, you wouldn’t know it from their website, but the piece is well-documented on Scott’s website, with documentation of the process and film interviews with the participants.
The project was part of Artworks!, a program of after-school workshops that Mural Arts runs in partnership with the Department of Human Services and involved Scott working with fourteen high school students during the summer of 2008. Scott said he learned from the students, and they learned from him. He had happy relations with Mural Arts despite the fact that he had to strike out a clause in the original contract that would have allowed the program to change the art if it provoked community outrage. He also negotiated the obvious difference in values, that the program’s priority was clearly pedagogy while his was to make art.
