“Un MAR de Gente / From Every Shore,” the largest mural in the U.S., is about to be officially unveiled at a ceremony at Morrisania Air Rights in the Bronx. Photo courtesy ArtBridge
ArtBridge is a New York City non-profit that started out in 2008 with the goal of adding art to the city’s miles and miles of ugly construction sheds. Since then, its horizons have broadened considerably to include a series of record-breaking works of public art, including a new one in the Bronx that will soon assume the title of the tallest public mural in the United States.
Since its humble beginnings, ArtBridge has decorated 100,000 square feet of public space across the city and provided paychecks to countless emerging artists and graffiti writers. The city liked the ArtBridge model so much that in 2021 it codified it into law. Now, having already facilitated the painting of the biggest murals in Queens and Brooklyn, both on affordable housing projects, ArtBridge is about to dedicate a 300-foot-tall mural on the side of the Morrisania Air Rights (Houses), a New York City Housing Authority building in the South Bronx.
“About 75 percent of our programming—like the one around the corner here—is artwork on construction fencing. That was our founding mission: sheds, fencing, anything construction-related, any flat surface on a construction site,” Stephen Pierson, ArtBridge’s executive director, said the other day standing before a block-long work of art on a shed in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge on Water Street in Lower Manhattan.
Art Bridge Executive Director Stephen Pierson explains the ArtBridge model, flanked by a painted construction barrier on Water Street in Lower Manhattan. Photo: Jamie Lubetkin
After years spent beautifying street-side plywood barriers, the enterprise began thinking a little bigger with a focus on the walls of affordable housing buildings and New York City Housing Authority complexes. And that’s how ArtBridge wound up on the brink of public art history with the Morrisania project in the Bronx. The piece called Un MAR de Gente / From Every Shore by artist Nestor Garcia also known as Angurria will measure close to 290 feet, spanning the building’s 29 stories. That should be good enough to claim the mantle as America’s tallest mural, surpassing the 245-foot, Excel Miami tower in downtown Miami that was completed earlier this year.
The top of the mural features a central figure wearing a Morrisania Air Rights T-shirt carrying a child on her shoulders, while a group of dancers surrounds a DJ in tribute to the neighborhood’s deep hip-hop roots. The lower section features kids at play, including one gleefully opening a fire hydrant, and a scarfed woman wearing, what else, a Yankees jersey.
Like all of ArtBridge’s murals, Un MAR de Gente / From Every Shore was designed with deep input from the neighborhood.
“It’s going to look like the community. The design grew out of months of workshops with residents, led by the tenants association. We conducted more than a dozen workshops and went through five different mural designs. The community wants to see itself—old, young, everyone,” Pierson said.
Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez’s 2025 mural Brownsville King of Love, the tallest public art work in Brooklyn. Photo Courtesy ArtBridge
Last year marked a pair of record-setting achievements for ArtBridge. In Brooklyn, Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez completed his mural Brownsville King of Love, a portrait of a crowned Brooklyn youth holding up a "Spread Love" jean jacket with patches featuring hip-hop and Caribbean iconography. The boxing gloves hanging around his neck honor both Brooklyn’s champion prizefighters and its hardscrabble reputation. At 150 feet, it is the tallest mural in Brooklyn.
Not to be outdone, artist Danielle Mastrion completed Queens Rising in Jamaica, Queens, a 13-story, 5,000-square-foot tribute to the neighborhood’s landmarks, culture and, most prominently, its women. The biggest mural in that borough, Queens Rising features portraits of four women wearing golden “QUEENS” jewelry. There are roses, butterflies, pigeons, street signs and subway markers.
Recently, ArtBridge worked with Con Edison to bring a series of murals to the block-long wall of its station on Avenue A in the East Village. On a warm fall day, a dozen artists showed up to render spray-paint murals on a wall that had been tagged, buffed clean and tagged over and over by graffiti writers over the years. That the artists hired by ArtBridge came from the world of graffiti is kind of on-point for ArtBridge.
“Getting artists paid, getting wider recognition, is central to everything we do at ArtBridge,” said Pierson, who stopped by to watch as the Avenue A installation took shape. “We want to recognize that the mural component of street art that's flourished in the last decade, it's all built on the backs of the work that some of these old-school guys put in for three decades without payment, with risk of arrest. Everything we do is built on the framework that they provided. So giving them opportunities, trying our best to get them paid, that's hugely important,” he said.
Optimo, whose top-hat-wearing figure can be seen hundreds of feet up on building walls across New York, is one of the city’s most respected graffiti artists. During a break in painting Avenue A, he applauded ArtBridge for tapping into the graffiti world to find artists for its projects. “They seem to have a lot of respect for the artists, because they're making sure everybody who paints gets paid. Which is great,” he said.
Optimo stands in front of his black and white work on Avenue A. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin
“What they're doing here for the neighborhood and for the artists, I think it's long overdue,” said Dave "Chino" Villorente, a graffiti writer and author who was applying spray paint to his mural contribution to the ConEd wall. “I mean, this is an American art form, maybe the last to be embraced, unfortunately, but progress is a process that I understand, and I'm grateful that it's happening in my lifetime.”
But let’s get back to the construction sheds, those ugly plywood barriers that blight some 300 miles of streets across the city’s five boroughs at any given time. Construction sheds rank along with rats and e-bikes on the list of things New Yorkers love to hate, so ArtBridge found a receptive public audience for its plans to try to beautify them. It started out mounting exhibitions, pairing local, emerging artists with neighborhood sites.
How did ArtBridge get the city to embrace its model? “With considerable naïveté at first, and then a lot of effort,” Pierson said. “As you might imagine, anything placed on those surfaces is tightly regulated by the city through the Department of Buildings and the zoning code. What was needed to obtain permits was a zoning-code override, which, it turns out, the city doesn’t do easily,” he said.
Danielle Mastrion’s 2025 Queens Rising, the biggest mural in Queens. Photo Courtesy ArtBridge
In 2018, the city Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department of Buildings and the Mayor’s Office tapped ArtBridge to run a test program called City Canvas. That led to the passage of a 2021 law that requires builders to allow art on the sheds unless they opt out of the program. Unfortunately, Pierson said, the vast majority of builders choose to opt out.
In 2019, ArtBridge expanded its mission, launching a program called Bridging the Divide, which created two-month artist residencies at NYCHA developments during construction to encourage collaboration between artists and community residents. It has done projects as far north as Hudson, N.Y., and as far away as Italy, South Africa and Brazil.
But at the end of the day, ArtBridge is a New York City enterprise. An outfit that started out with a plan to decorate 300 miles of plywood, now reaches 300 feet into the Bronx sky.
The monumental Un MAR de Gente / From Every Shore is set to be dedicated October 27, 11 a.m., Morrisania Air Rights, 3125 Park Avenue in the Bronx.
