dialogue
Contested Image: Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century Book Cover
behind the book
Visual Culture
by Tara Smith
Public art plays a role in defining place — and it’s also in some way defined by that place and its people.

While art connoisseurs might never group the Rocky Statue, Thomas Eakins’s 1875 painting The Gross Clinic, and the Barnes Foundation’s collection together, the stories of these iconic works intertwine to tell a larger story about Philadelphia’s reputation and self-perception. In Contested Image: Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century (Temple University Press, 2019), Laura Holzman ’06 examines “the messy process of public envisioning of place” and the ways that public dialogue shapes public meaning.

Around the year 2000, proposals to relocate these three “contested images” on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway became the focus of often-heated public conversations about visual culture and how to balance the city’s historic past with a more recently acquired negative image that leaders sought to shed in the new century.

Holzman’s engaging narrative captures Philadelphia’s quirky charm and complexities as she traces the city’s significant identity shift from one rooted in challenges to one rooted in cultural achievements. In doing so, she gives voice not only to leaders and experts but also to members of the public, whose opinions have often gone unheard in discussions about art.

Yongsoo Park, Rated R Boy Book Cover
Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens
by Tara Smith
For young Yongsoo Park ’94, moving from Korea to Queens in 1980 opened up a world of marvels, including pizza, roller skates, and public libraries. But he also encountered homelessness, graffiti, and bullying.

In Rated R Boy (Piggycorn Books, 2020), Park captures such baffling juxtapositions with a boy’s wide-eyed wonder tempered with the wisdom of retrospect. As the book opens, Park —who was top of his class in Korea — sits in a classroom struggling to discern meaning in a strange new language and culture.

Park’s vivid coming-of-age memoir is set in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, where kids, untethered by digital technology, are free to roam. There are moments of humor, as when Park mixes up the words “secret” and “cigarette.” There are also moments of tender reckoning, as when he stands in awe of parades featuring marching bands and floats instead of soldiers and military convoys.

Ultimately, Park learns to navigate school, the streets, and summer camp as he figures out his place in his family and in this new country he comes to call home.

Park is also the author of two novels, Boy Genius and Las Cucarachas, and an essay collection, The Art of Eating Bitter: A Hausfrau Dad’s Journey with Kids.