On a quiet side street 10 minutes from Cambridge’s bustling Central Square, a vivid blue humpback whale and its soon-to-be dinner of solemn-faced krill is painted against a backdrop of dizzying purple Fibonacci spirals. The mural, “Cetacean Spiral,” is the brainchild of East Medford-based muralist Sophy Tuttle, whose work primarily centers around themes of human-nature relationships.
Tuttle is one of many artists in the greater Boston area who has carved a niche for herself amidst the city’s recent thirst for public and street art, particularly murals. Although the street art scene in Boston was once characterized by tagging and unsanctioned murals influenced by the development of graffiti in other East Coast cities like New York and Philadelphia, it now follows a much more codified process supported by nonprofit organizations, private institutions and city governments.
In 2019, Boston launched the Transformative Public Art Program that commissioned over 50 murals and public art projects over three years. It also named the nonprofit Street Theory its official mural consultant in April 2023, and with Boston Public Art Triennial launching its first citywide public art display program in May 2025, Boston continues to leverage collaborations with nonprofits to bring art to public spaces.
Prof. Toni Shapiro-Phim (CAST), who studies how art can be used as a force of social transformation, suggests that street art doesn’t just beautify a city — it also takes advantage of its public nature to share deeper meanings with larger, and oftentimes unintended or unexpected, audiences. Yet how different pieces do so varies, and questions over how much credit they should pay to graffiti and their unsanctioned predecessors continue to loom large.
Some street art finds meaning through its intentions to educate the public about pressing issues: Tuttle sees her murals as going beyond just being a striking visual on a wall to operate as a form of activism, conveying messages about climate change and environmental degradation.
“I see my work as communicating the science that the scientists are trying to convey, but doing it through art, which is much more emotional, much more accessible to people in a universal language,” she said.
For instance, “Cetacean Spiral” depicts the cooperative ‘bubble-net’ feeding technique that groups of whales adopt to hunt krill. Tuttle intended for the piece to serve as a “celebration of geometry in nature and how natural systems create them just by existing,” and the subsequent threat climate change poses to these systems.
For other artists, their work finds meaning through the process — it’s not just about what a piece of art shows and its intended meaning, but also how it comes to be.
In Somerville, a driver rushing down Dimick Street at Waldo and Marion Avenues is compelled to slow down to admire the whimsical cartoon flowers painted in the center of the five-way intersection. This is the work of Somerville-based artist Liz LaManche with the nonprofit Neighborways, whose mission is to create traffic-calmed streets that support more walking and cycling.
LaManche’s process for “Garden Path” is representative of a more community-oriented, participatory approach to creating art. In response to the neighborhood’s desire to reduce traffic in the intersection, she worked with residents to develop several rounds of ideas, eventually settling on a garden motif to contrast against the man-made, geometric character of the area. The neighborhood then came together in a block-wide painting party in July 2017 to bring their vision to life.
Shapiro-Phim spoke to the idea of participatory processes as being especially powerful to facilitate community-building through art, and to ensure that a piece of art resonates with the community in which it’s placed.
“The more those particular communities are involved from the beginning, the more constructive it can be for that community,” she said. “Maybe they [the art] beautify something that everyone wanted beautified, but the likelihood that this will actually have deep meaning — that likelihood becomes greater the more the local folks are involved.”
“Garden Path” and other examples of LaManche’s art also fall into the category of what geospatial consultant Tova Perlman, who specializes in urban spatial analytics, deems ‘urban interventions’ — pieces of art that aim to reclaim or activate urban space, and call people’s attention to what’s actually in the space rather than just “seeing the city as one solid landscape.”
LaManche, who has painted everything from “weird old cars” on a set of unassuming park stairs in Somerville, to tropical birds and flowers on an electrical box in East Boston, also describes her work as “interventions in the urban landscape that make cities more sustaining of life and fun for people to live in.” Like Tuttle, she sees her art operating as a form of activism in a “quieter” way — her hope is that her art “gives people a giggle” as they move through their day.
For other artists, their work encourages people to pay attention not just to what’s there, but also who’s there. From the heart of Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, a passerby’s attention is called to a vibrant purple mural of flowing orange script painted on the side of a high-rise building. This piece, “For Cambridge, With Love from Nepal,” is the work of Cambridge-based artist Sneha Shrestha, known in the local artist community as IMAGINE.
Much of Shrestha’s work utilizes Sanskrit and Devanagari scripts to convey themes of identity and belonging, reflecting upon her experiences immigrating from Nepal and the ignorance and stereotyping she faced from her peers in college and as a young adult. “For Love” intends to speak to the various communities that make up Cambridge — to acknowledge the presence of fellow Nepalis like herself and offer a reminder of home, or for others, to intentionally create a lack of understanding that mimics the feelings of alienation she once felt.
For Shrestha, grappling with themes of belonging and representation of marginalized communities in art are central drivers of her work. Inspired by the practice of graffiti and her mentorship under longtime Boston street artist Rob “Problak” Gibbs, her specific medium is word-based mural art. Shrestha spoke to how she found comfort in the expressive and oftentimes defiant nature of graffiti, particularly in how it grew out of disenfranchised communities’ desires to be seen, and quite literally, take up space in their own cities.
The differences between Shrestha, Tuttle and LaManche’s art, as well as where they find their artistic inspiration, resurfaces age-old questions about the differences between street art and graffiti, and the implications of cities’ investment in a form of art that was once — and in some places still is — heavily persecuted under the law.
To Perlman, this investment does not come as a surprise: she suggests that there is a fundamental difference between street art and graffiti, where their similarities only go so far as the artistic medium and method of walls and spray paint. Rather, street art also finds its roots in other forms of public art like statues and monuments, which are public goods that bring value to a space.
Shrestha disagrees, emphasizing that it is important for street art to pay homage to graffiti and recognize how graffiti first facilitated community-building through art.
“Street art came out of graffiti and street art couldn’t exist without graffiti,” she said. “Graffiti is such a unique art form where you used to only be able to learn from other people in your community, and so that relationship-building was how the culture was kind of passed on.”
As street art continues to diverge from graffiti, its commercialization and the simultaneous acceptance of graffiti influences into the artistic and cultural mainstream continues to be fraught with unanswered questions about identity, ownership and who gets to create art and where. LaManche and Shrestha’s focus on creating art that collaborates with and tells the stories of local communities may well represent one way to consider these questions, while Tuttle’s pieces that convey messages about important issues impacting the city may be another.
Yet, as Shrestha argues, ensuring that art resonates with the community in which it’s placed continues to be of paramount importance, and as Shapiro-Phim suggests, employing participatory art-making processes that involve the community increases the likelihood that this is the case.
“At the end of the day, murals belong to the city, not the artists,” Shrestha said. “If a mural is successful, it belongs to the city and the life of the mural will reflect that. If the city wants it, then the mural will be there for a long time.”
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