Video: Artist Jonathan Monk.The City of Philadelphia’s MuralArts Program is bringing 14 renowned artists to the city this summer for public art projects, with Knight support. Here, MuralArts’ Nicole Steinberg provides an update on one of the installations.   Starting this week, we’re dropping behind-the-scenes videos about our Open Source artists and how they’re exploring the diverse communities and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, thanks to their work with MuralArts.

For our first video in this series, we turn the spotlight on Jonathan Monk.

Monk is a British artist, now living in Berlin, who visited Philadelphia and took inspiration from the city’s active skater community. He created two temporary skateable sculptures based on concrete works by the minimalist master Sol LeWitt, which have been installed in Franklin Paine’s Skatepark and will remain there through November 2015. We dedicated them in early June and celebrated at a major kickoff event—see the photos here.

These large sculptures are unusual, interactive additions to the park, which invite people of all ages to touch, step, and skate upon their surfaces. Like many of Monk’s other creations, he is reinterpreting works of conceptual art through humor, and challenging the typically precious nature of art objects. He doesn’t consider the sculptures complete until skaters and cyclists shred on them—and we’re excited to see this play out, all summer long.

Learn more about Monk at his artist profile page.