Art by the pound: Thousands of abandoned artworks are being salvaged from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts

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Anderson Hall on South Broad Street was once home to classrooms, art studios, libraries, a printmaking studio and a woodshop.

Now, it’s a ghost town 9 stories tall, filled with whatever students and faculty could not carry out in the last days of the University of the Arts last year. The building was sold earlier this year for $8.5 million to Dwight City Group, LLC, which plans to redevelop it as a mixed-use residential and commercial tower.

A construction crew has occupied the building to clean it out. George Mathes, owner of Thunderbird Salvage, has been allowed inside to pull out anything that can be reused. He and his 10-member crew are trying to stay one step ahead of the construction crew determined to throw everything away.

“There was so much stuff in here. Nobody got all of it. Nobody was willing to take all of it. It was too much,” Mathes said. “There is a lot of art left in here.”

Mathes and his crew are cutting padlocks off lockers, going through flat file drawers and opening locked closets to locate thousands of abandoned pieces of art.

There are monumental-sized paintings measuring 4 feet by 8 feet, small and exquisitely detailed portraits, artist proof prints, original graphic design posters, reams of life drawing sketches and a rack of clay busts that were never fired.

“There’s stuff from the 1980s and 90s that I found in some drawers. That was in the drawers since that time period. Nobody opened it to look,” Mathes said. “We’re scanning all the places that nobody’s got into, because it’s going to be trashed.”

The Thunderbird crew pulled out dozens of letterpress printing trays full of block letters in dozens of fonts, a room full of anatomical drawing models, and a literal ton of aluminum printing plates. In the woodshop, they hope to retrieve several drill presses and a woodworker’s jointer table, if they can figure out how to get them out.

Thunderbird Salvage has cleaned out countless homes in Philadelphia and a few high-profile buildings, such as the Bok Building in South Philadelphia and the personal mansion of Father Divine in North Philadelphia.

In the coming months, Thunderbird will also be clearing out Hamilton Hall, another UArts building across the street from Anderson Hall that was sold to the redevelopment group Scout. Mathes expects to find another trove of left-behind art there.

The goal is to find forever homes for everything. Much of their finds will be sold at Thunderbird’s store in Kensington. Some will be diverted to various auction houses in the area.

“We appreciate all this old stuff that was part of the history of this place and the city,” Mathes said. “There’s a lot of art and artifacts from the past that people spend a lot of time making. To be able to have the opportunity to save all this stuff, we’re going to put our time into it. It’s really cool to go through it.”

Mathes is giving former UArts students and faculty a chance to reunite with their abandoned artwork. If an artist can show a piece is theirs, they can have it.

When Lucca Voltoio posted videos of the inside of Anderson Hall to Thunderbird’s Instagram account, the response was immediate and intense. Within 30 minutes, it had 100 comments. Days later, his videos offering to reconnect artists with artwork have been seen over 350,000 times, generating over 7,000 likes and 700 comments.

“A lot of people here didn’t get a good farewell when it closed down and they were probably just reminiscing on that,” he said. “It blew up because they’re sending it to their friends who was a part of the community.”

People who can show they are the artists of particular works will be given those works free of charge. The rest – along with furniture, tools, books and art supplies pulled out of Anderson Hall – will be sold to the public at the Thunderbird Salvage store in Kensington on August 16.