Muralist Michelle Angela Ortiz’s art often begins before she applies her brush to a wall, through conversations with people in the community where she plans her work. That dialogue can take months, or even years, with Ortiz bringing together different members of a community to share their vision for what public art should look like and what role it should play.
Ortiz explains all this as she sat in her spacious art studio on Carpenter Street on a recent winter day, a space heater at her feet. “This process itself is art — using a creative lens to ask questions about hope and light and dreaming that doesn’t happen in our everyday lives,” she says.
For more than 25 years, that community-first focus has led Ortiz to collaborate with undocumented immigrant families, an indigenous community in Mexico City, and members of the Gayborhood. But it is her latest project, Our Market, that may be her most personal and expansive, because it involves the neighborhood where she grew up — the community centered around the historic South 9th Street Market (aka the Italian Market), which for decades has attracted immigrants and newcomers seeking better futures for their families.
Rather than being centered around one work, Our Market comprises many. So far, it includes 85 oral histories, five murals, tours, five light boxes, and four renovated market stands. Ortiz is not the lead artist for all of the works; instead, she has brought in collaborators with varying approaches.
The range of styles — from photorealistic to pop art — makes it difficult to define the Our Market aesthetic. Instead, it’s as if Ortiz has transformed the market into an outdoor gallery. One mural, An Ode to 9th Street, by Martha Rich, features cartoonish images and words. Another, Be a Friend to Me, by Carlos “Calo” Rosa, centers on a family photo and an image of the market. The light boxes, reminiscent of church stained glass and mounted on the inside of awnings, have decorative flourishes.
Strengthening community during fraught times
Ortiz’s own contributions, including a mural, are evocative of social realism. But aesthetics is only part of the goal — Our Market is an act of public art that aims to preserve and strengthen the community. Even as the project flourishes, the market is being tested by both gentrification and anti-immigration politics sweeping the country.
“This current climate, despite the fear, intimidation and uncertainty, is a space where the community rises,” Ortiz says. “When communicating these issues, we need to balance what’s going on politically with how people are coming together and identifying their collective power.”
“It is a market of immigrants. It is a market of working people. It’s our market.” — Michelle Angela Ortiz
In a city that has a unique commitment to public art — there are 4,400 murals and counting across the urban landscape, supported through Mural Arts Philadelphia — Ortiz’s work stands apart. Launched in 2019, with lead funding from the William Penn Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Mural Arts and other nonprofit partners, Our Market has been evolving with the community. In 2025 alone, Ortiz plans to replace iconic weather-beaten awnings with new ones; collect more oral histories; and expand current tours into Spanish and Vietnamese languages. She expects Our Market to continue into 2026, though she says some things — like the tours — may continue beyond that year.
“I don’t want to say there’s an end. There may be some beautiful threads that will continue,” she says.
Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts, says Ortiz’s ability to convene community reveals her strength as an artist. “Through her work, she’s been able to bring people together in a neighborhood that has gone through waves of change and where people haven’t always agreed,” she says. “Her work becomes a gathering space for people to meet and talk and try to hear each other. She’s providing a sense of love and care.”
The art of diversity
Ortiz grew up in a rowhome on a street that intersects the market. Her mother, Epifania Ortiz, from Colombia, cooked and cleaned for market businesses. In an interview with WHYY’s Art Outside podcast, Ortiz recounted how her creative pursuits were sparked at a young age, saying, “I would just escape and I would climb out from my brother’s bedroom and sit on top of my kitchen roof and just draw for hours and hours and hours.”
As an adult, she traveled as a U.S. cultural envoy producing public art and produced interventions in Philadelphia. All the while, she explored ways to work in the market. In 2011, she had the opportunity to restore eight awnings for produce stands, but they didn’t last long in the harsh outdoor elements. By 2019, with a new fellowship, she decided to return to the market with the goal of revitalizing it through public art. To spark community conversations, she convened three dinners at chef Cristina Martinez’s South Philly Barbacoa — now Casa Mexico — with members of the Bella Vista Neighborhood Association, Italian families, recent immigrants, business owners and workers. At the first dinner, her mom cooked a meal of Colombian empanadas, arroz con gandules, pollo guisado and coffee.
At each gathering, Ortiz would ask the same three questions: What were the treasures of the market? What were the obstacles? What is the future?
Main themes that emerged from those conversations focused on the importance of family and the market as a haven for newly-arrived immigrants. As with her own family, the market has been a place for newcomers to improve their stock in life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in their own countries. “It is a market of immigrants,” she says. “It is a market of working people. It’s our market.”
This tradition goes back to the origins of the market in the 19th century, when Irish, German and Jewish immigrants first built a community around it. Italian immigrants began arriving in the late 1800s, which propelled the growth of the market and the creation of business associations. Although its original name is the South 9th Street Curb Market, because of its outdoor stands lining its sidewalks, it became known as the Italian Market for many decades. But by the 2000s, immigrants from Vietnam and other Asian countries, as well as Latin America, began to change the face of the market. Today, it is a multiethnic business district — that still celebrates its Italian roots with a weekend-long festival each May (this year, May 17 and 18).
Another idea that emerged from those conversations was that any public art in the market had to serve a function and be sustainable. The focus was initially on revitalizing the produce stands, Ortiz says. Many in the community in the southern end of the market also spoke about the lack of lighting — which is what led to the creation of light boxes.
One thing led to another, and soon she was collecting materials for a digital archive about the market and gathering oral histories. She designed a pushcart in the style of the kind that Italian immigrants used to navigate through the market to sell fish and other goods. Instead of her products, she used the cart, which had recording equipment and a screen, to collect stories in the market.
By 2024, she was leading an evolving team of researchers, fellow artists, a project manager, and tour guides working with her to make Our Market a reality. A map of Our Market demonstrates the ambition of the project.
Centering community
But even with this larger team and many other collaborators, Ortiz keeps community at the center of her work. “When working with communities, I need to understand who I’m collaborating with and what’s important to them,” Ortiz says.
One of the light boxes was installed in front of Arepas Grub Spot. In it, a man holding a Venezuelan flag walks across a map of Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell is also pictured. Julio César Rivas, the owner of the arepas restaurant, is originally from Venezuela and says the artwork represents what his family left behind, their history in their birth country, and what they are trying to bring to Philadelphia.
“The art does reflect a bit that we have left many things behind, but that we try to inherit and transmit part of our culture and what we want to contribute through our food,” he says in Spanish. “[It] helps us to demonstrate what we want to contribute to the country, which is to feel proud of what we are, of our heritage, and in our case, we do it through food.”
A few blocks north, the latest mural represents Elizabeth “Betty Ann” Mongelluzzo, who owned a flower shop in the market for over 30 years. Mongelluzzo’s niece, Patricia “Cookie” Ciliverti, 59, remembers working in the shop with her aunt and also growing up in the market, sometimes making an extra buck by selling shopping bags. She said Our Market helps to preserve the heritage of the community. “It spotlights and brings people together to understand the diversity of the market that a lot of people didn’t know about,” says Ciliverti.
Threats to Our Market
It is not lost on anyone that even as Our Market serves to revitalize the community and the business district, forces beyond anyone’s control threaten it. One is the seemingly unstoppable march of gentrification, represented most visibly by a planned development at the corner of South 9th Street and Washington Avenue, the market’s old ice house, demolished a couple of decades ago with unfulfilled plans to build senior residences there. Today, it’s a vacant lot encircled by weather-worn wooden barriers. In the future, it’s expected to be a modern retail center.
“Their concept seems like a watered-down New York version of what they think the market should be, clearly not catering to current market community members,” Ortiz says. “Instead of focusing on new development, we should discuss investing in existing local businesses.”
Mural Arts’ Golden says that gentrification may seem unstoppable, “but you don’t give up. You have to think about how you do work that helps build resilience and knowledge and tries to be a stake in the ground and a force that says we are here. You have to do everything you can to protect what we have.”
But perhaps the most immediate threat to the future of the market and the livelihoods of the business owners is the looming threat of immigration raids. The possibility of roundups has already depressed foot traffic in the market and slowed economic activity as undocumented immigrants fear going to work or shopping where they might be picked up by law enforcement.
Ortiz said the market has survived through anti-immigrant movements before — Italian immigrants who came to the market in the late 19th century also faced discrimination from the Irish and Jewish immigrants who had already settled there. She said Our Market members have been distributing “Know Your Rights” information in the community and serving to help business owners communicate with one another. “Our project helps create bridges between different parts of the market — north and south of Washington Avenue, newer and established businesses,” she says.
Ultimately, Ortiz hopes Our Market helps to tell the story of the market in all its complexity.
“The market isn’t just a number of stores or a movie prop,” she says. “We’re not just a good site for commercials or quick tourist photos. We are a community. Beyond how others might perceive us or how the market is usually represented, we as people make the market. Those connections matter.”
