Artists network through Muse de Philly

Penn artists need look no further than online to find their muse.

Muse de Philly, a new website created by College and Wharton junior Jun-youb Lee and College juniors Jierui Song, and Stefanos Metaxas, is an online community for Philadelphia artists, writers, musicians and performers to share their work.

“It’s kind of like a Facebook to organize your arts life,” College and Wharton junior Lee said. Artists of any visual medium can create a profile and post their videos, paintings, photographs, writing or music and view the work posted by other members. Users can also join specific groups to interact with people who attend their school or live nearby. Performing and visual arts groups can create a profile to feature their work.

There is also a forum for arts-related events where people can look for artists of a certain medium to help with a project.

“MdP is a great way for individuals ­— at any stage in their artistic life — to meet others with similar interests and find inspiration. Since it’s a local network, it’s potentially collaborative, wrote Song in an email.

Song explained that the site offers a sense of community for student artists to interact. “There are people of all different levels, some aspiring professionals, others who do art just for the love of it. You don’t post your work on there to be judged or critiqued, and it’s not like visiting artists’ personal websites that can sometimes be intimidating,” she wrote.

Lee came up with idea because he felt there wasn’t enough art sharing within the Penn community. “Penn is a very pre-professional environment and not always a suitable place to organize art life,” Lee said.

Song, who is part of the performing arts groups Penn Chamber and Up On Stage and takes art classes, “felt like outside of these organizations, there was not a whole lot of interaction among student artists and performers.” When the website originally launched in March, it was only open to the Penn community. Since then they decided to expand it to include all of Philadelphia. Currently the site has about 150 different members.

“More art is always better,” Lee said.

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