More Than Likes is a series about social media personalities trying to do positive things for their communities.
Conrad Benner’s phone camera is fixed on Nile Livingston, an artist standing in front of a blank wall. Mr. Livingston is about to paint a massive mural, and the “canvas” will be the side of an apartment building overlooking a parking lot in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood area. But Mx. Livingston had a hard time finding the right words for a promotional TikTok.
“We can do a thousand acquisitions,” said Mr. Benner, the warmth in his voice. He chose the location and the artist.
Mr. Benner, 38, is running Streets Dept, a photo blog and social media presence dedicated to spotlighting street artists. In addition to interviewing artists on video and photographing their work, Mr. Benner the artists for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which claims to be the largest public arts program in the country. In a city known for its wealth of both cultural institutions and its public art sceneMr. Benner wants to “serve artists in every way.”
“He is a bridge to the public art community,” Mx. Livingston said. “He stops and slows down and observes things around him, and he really cares about the city of Philadelphia.”
Before meeting Mx. Livingston, the camera of Mr. Benner is locked in with another artist, Alexei Mansour, which Mr. Brenner chose to paint a mural in real time as part of a street festival. It was almost 90 degrees, and the big speakers drowned out Mr. Mansour, a self-described “mumbler” who dislikes public speaking. There are people everywhere and Mr. Mansour, too, struggled, his face turning bright red. (“I blacked out,” Mr. Mansour said later.)
Mr. took Benner is in control: He orders Mr. Mansour waved his hands in front of his face to cool himself. He moved locations, first trying to record Mr. Mansour in an adjacent building (also very loud) before settling in a corner away from the chaos.
“One, two, three,” said Mr. patiently. Benner, and began to describe Mr. Mansour is his job.
Mr. Mansour, whose work focuses on queer identity, and his team worked on a mural of the Greek god Dionysus, which some consider an early not binary figure
Mr. Benner, who grew up in the Fishtown neighborhood and usually wears a flat-brimmed cap and mustache, shies away from attention when documenting art, drawing people’s eyes to the artists he supports.
“My interest has always been in pointing the camera outward,” Mr. Benner said. “I find great joy and interest in learning about the world around me through public art and the artists who create it.”
First published by Mr. Benner the Streets Dept in 2011. A newcomer to the world of street art — Mr. Benner was not a trained artist, and he had long planned to go into architecture — his first posts took what he called a “fanboy blog” tone.
The blog went mainstream in June 2011 when Time magazine reprinted it a post about an artist who “yarn bombed” a city train, wrapping the seats in multicolored knitted threads. The attention went to Mr. Benner a full-time job in marketing, which she left in 2015 after she surpassed 100,000 Instagram followers (she now has over 150,000 followers and another 34,600 on TikTok) and devoted all his attention to the Streets Dept. Eventually he started a subscription service through Patreon, a membership platform for content creators.
In 2020, Mr. Benner of artists and locations for Mural Arts, which he says now provides the bulk of the Street Dept’s funding, after nearly a decade of independent curatorial work, which he still does on the side.
At the center of all that work is a love for a city he believes is particularly suited to a thriving street art community.
“Most of the street artists working today are putting up in either abandoned buildings or construction materials,” Mr. Benner said. “Almost every neighborhood in Philly has an abandoned building that used to be a warehouse, or abandoned homes.”
“There’s this idea that, OK, industry and maybe some people have left this city, so now this is our playground,” he says of street artists (the city’s population has dropped from about two million in the 1960s to about 1.5 million in 2021). “If you leave a building abandoned, it will be filled with art.”
A few hours after filming with Mx. Livingston and Mr. Mansoor, Mr. Benner came across a free wall space for artists on a busy street corner, where a man painted a woman’s face. A few months ago Mr. Benner is the work of the artist but he has never been identified. He is Shaun Durbin, an up-and-coming local artist who tries to get the attention of Mr. Benner earlier in the live painting. He agreed to let Mr. Benner is his work.
Released by Mr. Benner is his camera. “It was very kismet,” he said. Her favorite part of her job is meeting new artists and sharing their work with the masses. “Why are we here on earth if not to look around and be excited about what’s around us?”
