This week, our Art in the Public Space studio has NuVu collaborating with international artist Shilo Shiv Suleman. This is the second week of the studio and students are creating a mural around themes relevant to the Cambridge area. The project is part of Shilo's Fearless Campaign, a collective of hundreds of artists across South Asia, that do participative storytelling and art in public space. Below is a short brief on the mural.

Belonging

Across Boston and Cambridge, the ancient river Charles etches it’s way through the landscape creating intersecting islands of people.

Woven between the transient populations of university youth, migrant communities, cantabrigian locals and the ever imminent threat of gentrification, the river gently threads all of Boston’s diverse groups together. At the threshold of Area 4 (now being renamed the Port Neighborhood), old Cambridge and all the universities is our wall. In a place of so many intersections, we want to explore the question "What makes us feel like we Belong?".

The mural itself will depict a multi-racial person, with locally found flowers growing out of her chest. The river weaves and snakes through her body and emerges into a 'port' of sorts. A port where one comes and docks, and is simultaneously welcoming, but also a checkpoint or threshold of sorts. In each of the small plots on the map of the charles, we will have different members of the community "dock" and write one thing that makes them feel like they belong, to create a sense of ownership and community involvement.