Fairmount Park Art Association

Association for Public Art (formerly Fairmount Park Art Association)

Abbreviation	aPA
Formation	1872
Purpose	Commission, preserve, promote, and interpret public art in Philadelphia
Headquarters	1528 Walnut Street, Suite 1000 Philadelphia, PA 19102
Region served	City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Executive Director and Chief Curator	Penny Balkin Bach
Website	http://www.associationforpublicart.org/

Established in 1872 in Philadelphia, the Association for Public Art (formerly Fairmount Park Art Association) is the United States' first private, nonprofit public art organization dedicated to integrating public art and urban planning. The Association for Public Art (aPA) commissions, preserves, promotes and interprets public art in Philadelphia, and it is largely due to the work of the aPA that Philadelphia has one of the largest public art collections in the country. The aPA has acquired and commissioned works by many famous sculptors (including Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Alexander Stirling Calder, Daniel Chester French, Frederic Remington, Paul Manship, and Albert Laessle); supported city planning projects; established an outdoor sculpture conservation program; and sponsored numerous publications, exhibitions, and educational programs. The aPA interprets and preserves more than 200 works of art throughout Philadelphia – working closely with the city's Public Art Office, Fairmount Park, and other organizations and agencies responsible for placing and caring for outdoor sculpture in Philadelphia – and maintains an inventory of all of the city's public art.

Chartered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1872, the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) was founded by a group of concerned citizens in the late nineteenth century who wanted to beautify Philadelphia's urban landscape with public art to counter the city's encroaching industrialism. The Association initially focused on enhancing Fairmount Park with outdoor sculpture, but the organization's mission expanded in 1906 to include the rest of the city as a whole: to "promote and foster the beautiful in Philadelphia, in its architecture, improvements, and the city plan." Friends Charles H. Howell and Henry K. Fox conceived of the Fairmount Park Art Association, and the organization's first president was Anthony J. Drexel, founder of Drexel University. The Association's first official venture was purchasing Hudson Bay Wolves Quarreling Over the Carcass of a Deer (1872) by Edward Kemeys, and its first major undertaking was commissioning Alexander Milne Calder for an equestrian statue of Major General George Meade in 1873.