Thank You For Growing Here. 2025
celebrates the overlooked plants that thrive in disturbed soil and city sidewalks. By presenting these so-called weeds as a bouquet, the mural honors resilience, migration, and the ways nourishment can come from unexpected places. The work asks viewers to reflect on what we inherit, what we offer, and how communities grow.
This work was created with and supported by The Punto Urban Art Museum part of the North Shore Community Development Coalition in Salem, Massachusetts, as a part of their 2025 RAÍCES | ROOTS (Soy de aquí | I am from here) mural exhibition.
When you leave your house and look down at the ground, what plants do you see? Along the sidewalks and patches of grass in Salem, you may spot bright yellow dandelions or tall sprigs of pale purple chicory. There may be plants whose names you do not know, but still may find familiar: mugwort, with its purplish pointed clusters of leaves; plantain, with tall olive-green seed stalks and wide, sturdy leaves; burdock, whose burrs hitch rides on your clothing. The weeds that grow in sidewalk cracks, ditches, and construction sites are as diverse as they are quietly beautiful.
Thank You for Growing Here is a visual offering: a single hand emerging from a cloud, reminiscent of the Ace of Wands in the Rider-Waite tarot, extends a bouquet of foraged weeds. These plants, dandelion, chicory, mugwort, plantain, burdock, shepherd’s purse, are edible, medicinal, and naturalized “immigrants” to the region, often labeled invasive or undesirable. Bound together with sweetgrass, sacred in many Indigenous traditions (including those of the Naumkeag, the original caretakers of this land), the bouquet becomes a ceremonial gesture, honoring resilience, memory, and shared care. This mural is rooted in the themes of RAÍCES /ROOTS, celebrating the stories of migration, survival, and community-building embedded in both people and plants. Just as immigrant communities have taken root and flourished in Salem through struggle and stewardship, so too have these plants persisted; thriving in disturbed soil, offering nourishment where few others can grow.
This mural continues the conceptual lineage of my recent projects. In Find The Lot In Your Life, I layered archival redlining maps with paintings of medicinal weeds printed on sheer curtains to explore how both people and plants are marked as undesirable. In Slán Abhaile/Safe Home, I created a public bench in the shape of a triple-decker to anchor community storytelling around housing justice. These works turn overlooked materials, plants, stories, and landscapes into sites of reflection and resistance. In everything I create, I ask the viewer to question their connection to where they live. Do you know the history of your neighborhood? What stories—buried or dismissed—have shaped your city, your housing, your land? My practice invites participation, reflection, and often physical engagement: walking back and forth to uncover hidden text, taking a vial of soil, and listening to testimonies of economic injustice.
Thank You for Growing Here is both a continuation and a departure. By isolating the hand, emerging from a cloud, it evokes spiritual generosity and ancestral labor. It asks: What do we carry? What do we offer? What do we discard? In honoring the plants often pulled and poisoned, I honor the communities who have been marginalized, who persist, regenerate, and root down anyway.
