A Bird's Eye View

If you live in Regent Square, you have seen the mural: You are looking down on the neighborhood, from a height of maybe 1,000 feet. You see the gridded streets laid out below, plus the green sprawl of Frick Park. Closer up, you see birds flying – as if you are flying with the flock, gazing down, free as a sparrow.

But where did this artwork come from? How did this one mural, painted on a plain brick wall on Hutchinson Avenue, come to represent the neighborhood? (Indeed, if you type “Regent Square” into a Google image search, the mural is the eighth image to pop up). So how did this landscape come to pass?

“It’s one of the most fun things I’ve ever done,” said Kristin Williams, 49, who painted the mural in 2003.

Officially, the mural is called "Bird's Eye View," and it was commissioned by the Sprout Fund's Public Art Project. As it happens, the project arrived at a peculiar juncture, for both the artist and the city, and its creation is a deeply personal story for both.

Raised in Greentree, Williams studied biology at Oberlin College and graduated in 1983. For most of the '80s, she struggled to find work and to support herself, and then a peculiar thing happened. She found a job illustrating birds for books. For most of the '90s, she worked alone, corresponding with editors.

When work started to evaporate around 2004, Williams started to panic. How would she support herself, having spent years as a “scientific illustrator”? Then, she discovered the Public Art Project, a program coordinated by the Sprout Fund and inspired by similar public murals in Philadelphia. The program was brand new and accepting applications.

“I thought, ‘What the heck?’” Williams recalls.

Although she felt the Sprout Fund was paying “shockingly little,” it was both a resume-builder and a chance to try something new. Williams did not pick Regent Square for the mural space.

“I didn’t even know where Regent Square was,” she admits.

But when Williams was selected for the project and assigned, she was grateful.

“It was just wonderful that they grouped me with that community, because I think we were a really good fit. It just seemed especially perfect," she said.

After a round of questionnaires, Williams received a deluge of input from the community – people wanted the mural to incorporate the park, their lawns, their homes, bright colors – and slowly Williams started to distill this into something palatable.

“That is one of the scariest things,” she said. “Deciding what to do. You have to get all the demons out of your head."

One night, after organizing all the input into tight categories, Williams went to bed, woke up and the idea came to her “in a blinding flash.”

Williams toiled over her work. Not only are the streets and roofs accurate to Regent Square’s actual layout – there are even cars and people and lawn ornaments that are true to the Regent Square of 2003. Virtually nothing is fudged or made-up. The mural was meticulously researched and as she painted, Williams received suggestions and feedback from passersby. Williams points out that there is a school teacher, one of the 20 to 30 volunteers to help her paint, who is depicted wearing a backpack and is preparing to board a bus.

Her own personal touch: the birds she had so carefully illustrated for more than a decade. “I tried to be open-minded,” she says with a laugh. “I thought, You should not necessarily put birds in this mural. But I couldn’t help it.”

Williams painted other murals as well, but she decided that the Public Art Project couldn’t support her modest lifestyle, and when her mother fell ill, Williams moved back to her childhood home in Greentree. True to her to wending lifestyle, Williams has discovered ceramics, and she now sells avian-themed pottery on Etsy.com, under the pseudonym “Birdartist.”

She doesn’t have much reason to come to Regent Square these days, but Williams still relishes the memory of Bird’s Eye View. She remembers the joy of watching Regent Square natives spot familiar landmarks.

“That was part of the euphoria,” Williams said. “People pointing and saying, ‘That’s my house! That’s my house!’”