The This is East arts project is behind the Cross St. mural project underway in East Somerville.

By Josie Grove

Cross Street is a half-mile length of road between Interstate 93 and the McGrath Highway. The East Somerville street’s single-story buildings, small bodegas, and Brazilian restaurants feel worlds away from the trendy eateries and artisan coffee of Davis Square. The neighborhood is hard to reach and easy to overlook, but Teresa Vazquez-Dodero hopes new art projects will change the neighborhood’s image.

“East Somerville has been somewhat ostracized from the Somerville community, says Vazquez-Dodero, the director of East Somerville Main Streets. “Part of the mission of Main Streets is to make East Somerville a destination, make it a place where people know that it’s safe. And by creating events and festivals, that changes the perception of people.”

East Somerville Main Streets is a nonprofit organization working to promote business development in the area, and to enhance East Somerville’s sense of itself both as a distinct neighborhood, and as a part of Somerville. Along with streetscape design and local festivals, the group is using public art to achieve these goals. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts is funding a series of public art projects, known together as This Is East.

“This Is East is a big, community-wide project that’s happening at a time of change in East Somerville,” said Vazquez-Dodero. “This is part of a much larger initiative that has to do with the identity of East Somerville, exploring the identity of East Somerville in a time of change.”

“Along with two other murals, This Is East also encapsulates a storytelling component,” said Laura Smith, the project’s artistic director. “People are taking videos, and capturing videos with longtime community members, and people who are important in the community in East Somerville.” “And the business community,” added Vazquez-Dodero, who sees business development as the most important part of neighborhood development. “The Main Streets mission has been to make sure businesses thrive,” said Vazquez-Dodero. “With businesses thriving, neighborhoods thrive. Crime is lower, it’s just a chain reaction. So that’s part of the mission.”

Art is already helping businesses by marking the business district. Colorful “This Is East” banners hang on light poles along Broadway, defining the boundaries of the district, and making it easier for outsiders to find. “The banners contain some of the people who are also painted, who are also telling their stories,” said Smith. “Not every single person, but there are intersections between all of the projects.”

The mural’s design is a result of cooperation between artists and East Somerville residents over the past. “We’ve done a community design process. We invited the whole community,” says Smith. Vazquez-Dodero clarifies, “We obtained ideas from the community, we had an event where we invited members of the community. Laura and three other artists came and did drawings. And then Laura and Nate Swain [another artist] created the actual concept of how the mural is going to look, and the techniques that will be used to create that.”

The mural started taking shape last week. “We took photographs of people and projected them on the wall. We started tracing the silhouettes on the wall last week, and then also took people’s silhouettes in the moment, and also traced them up on the wall.” The mural will feature silhouettes of residents and their stories in writing. “All of the murals contain images of people in the community, and they’re very literally about the identity of people in the community.”

The orange-and-red mural taking shape on Cross Street has already brought people together. Neighbors came out on Thursday and Friday as they walked by, or after seeing it on Facebook. “We’ve had a lot of different groups working on it,” said Smith as she poured water for a six-year-old volunteer. “Next week, people from the Council on Aging are going to come out and paint, there are also some people from Teen Empowerment on this, and there were all different generations of people that came to our mural design event.”

Despite the boarded-up church building on the corner, and the interstate visible just blocks away, the mural makes the street feel bright and cheerful. The tucked-away place feels like a neighborhood secret, one locals will be proud to show off.

The last  Community painting day for the Cross St. East mural will occur on 13 from 4:00-8:00pm.