Artwork Details
- Title
- Bar None
- Artist
- Nicolo Gentile (b. 1991)
- Year
- Temporary installation: July – October, 2025
- Location
- Not on view
- Medium
- Galvanized steel barricades, etched acrylic panels, color gel light filters
Artwork Description
Bar None honors the Benjamin Franklin Parkway’s legacy as a site of collective assembly and action. It offers a testament to the overlapping movements and voices that have surged through this civic spine in pursuit of justice, celebration, and change. The installation is interspersed with colored acrylic panels etched with images sourced from historic archives. The manipulated images reflect moments of protest, pride, and public gathering.
The horizontal installation is a winding procession of transformed steel barricades that rise and sink into the earth like a wave. It creates a path-like structure that invites viewers to walk alongside it, not solely to observe, but to move through history itself. Rather than a fixed monument, the artist considers Bar None a dynamic site of reflection, where the lines between protest and celebration blur and where the act of gathering itself is honored. It reaffirms the Parkway as a vital stage for collective care, memory, and civic imagination.
Bar None is a dynamic site of reflection, where the lines between protest and celebration blur and where the act of gathering itself is honored. It reaffirms the Parkway as a vital stage for collective care, memory, and civic imagination. This sculpture was selected for Art on the Parkway, a juried commission organized by the Association for Public Art in partnership with the Parkway Council and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation. Art on the Parkway invites artists, designers, and other creatives to propose a temporary public art installation for Maja Park on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway as part of the annual Parkway to Park Festival. Support for the project was provided, in part, by AIR Communities/Park Towne Place and Prudent Management Associates.
About the Artist
Nicolo Gentile is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia, PA. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and a BFA in General Fine Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Gentile’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Athenaeum, Commonweal Gallery, Temple Contemporary, and Automat (Philadelphia); Fragment Gallery and Trestle Gallery (New York); The Vault (Denver); LVL3 (Chicago); Portland Contemporary and Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR); SOIL and The Vestibule (Seattle); TSA LA, Cannery Village Gallery, and Last Projects (Los Angeles); as well as exhibitions in Paris and Melbourne.
He is a recent recipient of the Velocity Fund, supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and is currently an Artist in Residence at the Fitler Club in Philadelphia. Gentile teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and has served as a guest lecturer at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State University, and Nazareth College.
Artwork Credits
Commissioned by the Association for Public Art for “Art on the Parkway,” in partnership with the Parkway Council and Philadelphia Parks and Recreation