South Philly Review

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Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz is as much a product of her Bella Vista community as she is the element of change that shapes it. As a self-described visual artist, muralist and community arts educator, she has completed multiple murals throughout the area and is working to bring expanded arts education to her community.

“I’m working on a couple things right now, applying for some grants to support a project I’d like to do at [South Philadelphia area high schools] that’s still in the works,” the Ninth-and-League-Street resident, said. “I’m trying to raise funds for an arts project [to highlight] immigrants or children of immigrants in these high schools.”

The new project is a community-focused initiative in line with the body of Ortiz’s other work. Working as an arts educator, mural artist and minority advocate for more than a decade, Ortiz has amassed a vast portfolio of community-supported pieces in Philadelphia and abroad.

“In 2008, I was chosen as a cultural envoy for the United States embassy to go and travel to other countries and represent the United States,” Ortiz, 32, said. “I train [communities] in public art and its ability to change and transform communities.”

Her most recent trip to Vitoria, Spain, that ended in August culminated in a 60-by-45-foot mural that represented the themes of gender equality and women’s roles as peacemakers.

“I had about 15 volunteers. Some had no arts training and some were grandmothers who had never picked up a brush in their life,” she said. “I don’t come into a situation and say here’s the sketch and what we are going to do. It’s based on the stories and what they want to capture in the work.”

Back where she was born and raised, she is shortly going back out on assignment.

“I have another United States embassy-sponsored residency in Argentina in November. The work I’m doing there is still public art created, working specifically with a deaf community,” Ortiz said. “I did a mural in Philadelphia with Pennsylvania School for the Deaf … It’s really great to get this opportunity in another country, but working with a similar community and representing their stories through the art.

“I know for sure we’re going to have a translator there to help everything, but the great thing is that the work I am doing is visual and crosses all languages.”

Ortiz’s mother, Epifania Ortiz immigrated to the Italian Market area from Colombia.

“[My parents] lived in the neighborhood for over 35 years,” Ortiz, whose father, Miguel Angel Ortiz, is from Puerto Rico, said. “At the time, there weren’t that many Latino families in the neighborhood.”

Soon, though, the immigrant community became home for the family and her mother began working for Joanna Giordano, the eldest living relative of the Giordano family, in the kitchen.

“My connection to the market is really close and real and with the neighborhood it goes much deeper than doing the project,” Ortiz said of the Mural Arts Program’s Journeys South project she completed with photographer/video artist, Tony Rocco, last spring.

The connection has been 32 years in the making, including elementary school at St Paul’s, formerly at 916 Christian St., and then at St. Maria Goretti High School (now Neumann-Goretti), 1736 S. 10th St., where she created her first mural.

“There was a specific racial incident that happened with one of the nuns there and I tell this story to the high school students I teach now,” Ortiz said of the mural she painted in Goretti as her senior project in 1996. “I felt it was very unfair the treatment I received … I didn’t get an apology and I felt powerless so my thought process was, ‘What can I do?’

“It was my way of reacting to the negative situation, it was the inspiration. The title was, ‘Sharing the Light of Unity.’”

As a graduating senior, Ortiz felt her artistic training had been, “what I saw on the streets,” but with the help of her artistic mentor, Teresa Kramer, she received scholarships to summer programs at Moore College of Art and Design, University of the Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

“That’s when I realized I could move forward in my career as an artist,” she said.