Caryn Kunkle remembers growing up in North Philly with pride and affection. “You would ride your bike with your friends, you would play jacks. This was the 80s. You would play football on the concrete! You would just scrap together a bunch of people and you would make it happen,” she says. That spirit of making things happen has guided her on a journey to become a beloved go-to Philadelphian, someone artists, patrons, and those in their orbit seek out for help finding resources and support.
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These days, Kunkle is running what she calls iMOCA, or, the interactive museum of contemporary art. It’s a “micro museum” inside a Victorian mansion on South Broad, which aims to inspire positive changes beyond its walls, Kunkle says, “cause it makes the community interactive.” There are artists in residence who live upstairs, along with galleries and spaces for salons downstairs. It’s all funded by generous donors, like Terry Jue.
On a recent day, I met up with Kunkle in the gorgeous yard of the mansion. We sat outside eating homemade oatmeal cookies and sipping tea while talking about her work and her love for Philly. Connecting the dots for people; it’s just what she does. As she says: “We do it the old-school Philly way.”
It all started back when Kunkle was bartending while in grad school at PAFA. She’d hear from people who wanted art, people who were making art, people who were hitting roadblocks to their art and needed guidance. She started Air-BNB-ing out her place on North Broad Street during key Philly weekends – The Roots Picnic, the Papal visit – then using the money she earned to host salons around town to bring together artists and art-lovers. There were small get-togethers and big ones, like one I remember at 3rd and Arch at a huge old bank. Her goal was to nurture Philly’s local art scene, to see local places become the go-tos over major big box national chains.
“I like to make people aware of their neighbors so that they know the local network,” she says. “Where they can get things printed, where they can get things made on vinyl, where they can get good support with the sculpture that they’re doing, whether it’s borrowing tools or learning a new technique from somebody. There’s little pockets all over the city with these amazing resources.” She created a list of them all so that, “from the beginning of a creative idea to the end of a creative idea, all the resources that they need” are in one place.
Even before the internet became a free-for-all, she organized a website listing all these resources plus essential info about the art institutions in our city. She called the whole movement Art Jawn – a name bestowed upon her idea by none other than The Roots themselves. She tells this great story:
“So I’m on North Broad, it’s a rainy day, Osteria had just opened, and the guy who was the real estate mogul there, I believe it was Eric Blumenfeld for that project, had The Roots come and play on the street there. So of course I was all over that — it was like one block from my house. So I went up and we were jamming out. I had gone bowling a few times with The Roots, but I didn’t expect them to remember me. But it started raining and they were like ‘Aw, man, our stuff is gonna get wet.’ This is before Uber. iPhones were in their infant stage.
So they all came back to my house and were sitting in my living room. I was telling them my plans. I had envisioned a museum at the Divine Lorraine. I was like, listen, there needs to be a website that brings us all together. If you have a recording studio but you need a vocalist, you need Kharisma McIlwane, or you need a producer to put it all together like Carmen Tomassetti, you can find those resources all online. And they were like ‘What are you gonna call it?’ And I said I don’t know, I’m struggling with the name. And the one bull was like ‘Why don’t you call it Art Jawn?’ And I was like that’s it, that’s the move. So we called it that.”
(Side note: Most people don’t know the etymology of jawn. They think it’s just a Philly thing. But it actually goes back to when drug dealers were trying to work around the FBI’s wire taps! A “jawn” was a brick of cocaine.)
Anyway, Kunkle started doing all this back in 2006, 2007 — and since then, she has made connections and opened doors for so many artists around this city who are now grateful to her. She brings together people from all walks of life, including at iMOCA nowadays.
“We’ve been showing all sorts of art forever,” she says. “Street art, and things that you only see in the graffiti world and encouraging those artists to keep making their installations, keep making their art, find professional avenues to make money off those things. And now we see some of those kids from 20 years ago who are making a great living for themselves making murals professionally and it’s awesome! Sometimes it’s just down to what connections you have.”
West Philly born and raised with a slosh of Brooklyn, Big Rube partnered with Mitchell & Ness in 2000 to help make it a global brand marketing and selling high-end throwback jerseys. He has been photographing Philly since 2009, including in a Daily News Column from 2011 to 2017. He’s also a chef, preparing to open his own space in 2026.
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