Manayunkers follow art trail to new Venice Island rec center

MURAL ARTIST Eurhi Jones has turned the north wall of Bodine High School into a gigantic ocean wave, created a spectacular jungle on the exterior of the Philadelphia Zoo parking garage and painted a wildlife-rich "Walk Through a Pennsylvania Forest" at the Please Touch Museum.

Now, she has turned her eye-popping palette and her passion for nature into a 10-block, 50-artworks trail that winds through her own neighborhood, Manayunk, and leads people to the new Venice Island Performing Arts & Recreation Center on the Schuylkill River.

Venice Island features indoor and outdoor theaters, basketball courts, a spray pool, a rain garden, kids' play areas, riverside recreation, parking for 200 cars and an underground tank that holds four million gallons of storm water to keep them from running into the river.

The Philadelphia Water Department, justifiably proud of engineering a subterranean water tank big enough to hold 180 SEPTA buses, learned through a survey that most Manayunkers had no idea that the new Venice Island family fun complex is open right in their own backyard.

So the PWD partnered with the city's Mural Arts Program, which hired Jones to create one of Philadelphia's biggest-ever street art projects.

"The idea," Jones said, "was to create a trail of bread crumbs to get people who are walking up and down Main Street and people up at Pretzel Park to notice what's going on at Venice Island."

The art trail is opening just in time to lead residents and visitors to next Saturday's "PLAY Manayunk" - a free 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Venice Island festival featuring nature hikes, yoga, kayaking, dragon boating, dance lessons, children's games, crafts, food, live music and the 1 p.m. Guiness World Record Challenge for Most People Doing Simultaneous Sit-Ups.

Jones said her artwork, which combines watershed animals and plants with Manayunk's riverside history, were transferred onto vinyl stickers by graphic designer Peter Shay, and then installed on walls and sidewalks to create the trail leading to Venice Island.

The trail is temporary, designed to last all summer and then vanish into Philadelphia street art history.

"This is not a way to mess with Manayunk permanently," Jones said. "We want to involve the whole neighborhood but not have anybody say, 'What is that thing that's going to be in front of my door forever?'"

Jones regards her vibrant images of animals and plants as an expression of her environmental activism.

"I'm all about the plants and the animals," she said. "If you gave me an acre of park somewhere and I could sit there and paint the animals and plants all day long, I would just be so happy."