Look Back at Daniel Gordon’s Dewey Square Mural on the Greenway 2021

*“Summer Still Life with Lobsters and Fern” , designed by Daniel Gordon*, painted by Overall Murals at Dewey Square

Though I visited and photographed Daniel Gordon’s art on the Greenway in 2021, I didn’t get to post about it then. I kept meaning to go back for better photos until his art was gone. But there are better photos and valuable perspectives in the Key Resources from Greg Cook’s Wonderland, WBUR, and Daniel Gordon’s own website, all quoted and listed here. Also I have decided to document the transformations created by all nine Dewey Square murals in the past ten years. Those are now sequenced on an ART OUTDOORS page: TRACK HOW TEMPORARY MURALS CHANGE THE AIR-INTAKE BUILDING WALL IN DEWEY SQUARE PARK.

“This week the Brooklyn-based commercial painting firm Overall Murals put the finishing touches on “Summer Still Life with Lobster and Fern,” a mural depicting an arrangement of fruit and flowers plus the title’s fern and lobster, designed by New York artist Daniel Gordon, at Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway on the tunnel ventilation building facing Dewey Square, along Purchase Street between Congress Street and Summer Street. In addition to the mural, “Daniel Gordon on The Greenway,” which is scheduled to be on view through May 2022, offers a selection of Gordon’s photography installed on the Greenway in the North End and Wharf District.” (quote from Greg Cook’s Wonderland, May 2021)

“Like generations of photographers before him, Daniel Gordon has been fascinated by the manipulation of imagery and the distortion of reality through his medium. Through the process of slicing, cutting, gluing, staging, arranging, and recycling, Gordon executes a shift from digital to analog—almost as though he were engaged in a physical form of Photoshop— and challenges the stability of the fixed image, opening up the possibility for new meanings to emerge.” (quote from Artist Statement, Daniel Gordon on the Greenway,2021: Rose Kennedy Greenway)

“Currently, park-goers can rest beneath Gordon’s mural “Summer Still Life with Lobsters and Fern” at Dewey Square in the Greenway’s bright lawn chairs. In the painting, blue-fleshed watermelon, apples, bananas, a pair of lobsters and flowers rest atop patterned tablecloths — the leaves of the giant fern fan out in front of its cherry red and black background. The scene — which took eight days or 88 hours of painting — evokes the quintessential New England summer, a much-needed nod to normalcy after more than a year indoors.” (quote from WBUR coverage by Jacquinn Sinclair, June 2021)