This feature originally appeared in Issue 16, published May 16, 2026. You can read this piece and more by purchasing a copy of or subscription to the magazine here.
Self-taught muralist Rixy thinks with her entire body. She carries the physical knowledge of a former jazz cellist and Muay Thai practitioner into the work and moves through it as a casual salsa dancer, each rhythm imprinting her vision on the wall. That embodied thinking is the conceptual spine of everything she makes, a practice the mononymous artist calls experimental world-building, and it is now arriving on one of Boston’s most visible public stages: the Rose Kennedy Greenway.
In January 2026, Rixy learned that her proposal had been selected for the Greenway’s Dewey Square mural wall situated directly across from South Station. Since 2012, the wall has hosted internationally acclaimed artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Os Gemeos, and Lawrence Weiner. The commission came through a competitive open call, a first for the Greenway, hosted in partnership with Embrace Boston’s Everyone250 initiative. Artists were invited to engage with the city’s revolutionary legacy and reckon with what that spirit demands now, on the occasion of the country’s 250th anniversary. In 2022, Rob “Problak” Gibbs became the first Boston-based artist commissioned for it. Rixy will be the second.
With this monumental mural, we enter Rixy’s invented world—she calls it Cúcala. Audiences most readily encounter it through similarly large-scale murals and public art—portals, as Rixy frames them. The world also surfaces through paintings and sculptures that function as artifacts and unearthed texts from an imagined distant land, as well as through the installations she builds for live events.
The artist turned toward world-building as a response to growing up in the working class neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester in the 1990s. Cúcala began as a child’s answer to feelings of inadequacy and finding that the adults around her had no language to address the difficulty of life. This mythical realm is an imaginative construction with its own whimsical narrative formations, traditions, and social patterns developed from an environmentally and spiritually grounded visual grammar. In this world, all genders and peoples are harmonious contributors to the ecosystem, in symbiosis with animal and plant life, unencumbered by the hierarchies and diminishments of the present one. The child’s dream is one of bright colors and uninhibited expression, from song and dance to free speech and progressive education. For Rixy, it became a place where the present could be held at comparative distance and examined. Not as an isolated dream of escape but, as she put it, “a mirror that you use to compare and contrast and concoct.”
The name itself is an act of force. Cuca is a Honduran term from her mother’s culture, both colloquial and femme, a word for female anatomy that carries centuries of shame by design. Rixy was thinking about the terms applied to women’s bodies, how that language does its work through softening and omission, and she wanted to make street art that came out of the erotic rather than in reaction to its censorship. Then she found Celia Cruz’s song “Cúcala,” in which Cruz deploys the word like a shout of enlightenment, collective and joyful. The world had its name and its temperament at the onset.
(right) Rixy, Gargola 2, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist. (left) Rixy, Ain’t No Sin to Take Off Your Skin, and Dance, 2025. Acrylic on woodcut, 30 x 60 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Rixy has spent years building a body of large-scale street art rooted in this world, its characters appearing on walls across Boston and beyond. They arrive eclectic and unapologetic: brown-skinned women in warrior stances with gold chain leashes and tribal tattoos climbing their legs; biker girls with layered lavender hairstyles riding hot pink motorcycles through tropical nightfalls; mirrored figures with star-marked breasts raising their arms above a skull; and young men with braids and bandaged eyes holding cigars with the quiet authority of people who have survived something. The figures straddle tenderness and danger, between the sacred and the street, drawing on anime, video game aesthetics, and animated culture.
Cúcala is also her studio, STÚCA, an institutional antithesis of art school that she is building as a conceptual space for open experimentation, failure, and inquiry without the gatekeeping she has experienced and resisted. She has been teaching Cúcala as a public practice and system for three years as an artist-educator, and the imagined ecosystem has begun to organize itself across realms. Her work dwells in the liminal, from earthly forms to the otherworldly and the transcendent. The artist is less concerned with fixed subject matter than with the quality of presence each figure carries. The next chapter of work shifts from the singular figure to what unfolds between beings and the invisible threads of relation that bind human and animal, self, and society. For the Greenway, her largest commission to date, Rixy is using the assignment to begin this next phase.
She grappled with the weight of the assignment while she developed her proposal in November 2025. “When I first thought of revolution as a concept, I didn’t [only] think of the American Revolution,” she said. “American history,” she insisted, “was never only a European or white colonialist story.” Working from a diasporic frame of reference, her inspirations are diverse and global, rooted in her Afro-Caribbean ancestry. Revolution, for her, carries that inheritance.
“I thought about the revolutions of other Afro-Latinx and Caribbean revolutions. I thought of the people who transformed the world. I didn’t care about any dusty statues [of white men].”
She decided to confront those histories—to find a visual and symbolic language capacious enough to hold the breadth of what revolution has meant to people who were never the subjects of its official telling.
Rixy in her studio at Elevated Thought in Lawrence. Photo by Mav Fernandez for Boston Art Review.
That meant asking herself what parts of America actually comfort her. Character design became political intervention; what does an American figure look like when the design process is underscored by decolonial inspiration? The Statue of Liberty had been on her mind since she first knew she wanted to make public art—not as a symbol of American self-congratulation but as a figure that has always meant something different to the people who arrived here with nothing, looking at her from across the water. “She is the most fantastic character we have,” Rixy shared with me. “The fantasy of American history. She should be more fun.”
The result is a grand image rendered entirely in spray paint: a femme figure in iridescent gold armor, blindfolded, adorned in cream-white billowing fabric and layered costuming that draws from colonial-era dress and Caribbean Carnival aesthetics in equal measure, flying alongside a midnight-blue horse who rears up in strength and partnership. The characters are unnamed. “Not showing her eyes makes it less about who she is and more about what she represents,” Rixy said. She is modeled from Jo Nanajian, a Lebanese artist based in Boston, and Rixy’s close friend, who was photographed with a black horse in 2025, a year when Lebanon was being bombed. The figure visibly carries the weight of that context in the dignity of her posture and the fortitude of her partially covered face, her eyes disappearing beneath the fall of her headdress.
The mural’s conceptual scaffolding includes the lesser known participants of the American Revolution: Sybil Ludington and the grassroots activism of early American youth, Caribbean Indigenous people, and the historic power of the African enslaved. In 1777, a sixteen-year-old Ludington reportedly rode more than twice the distance as Paul Revere (approximately forty miles to his sixteen miles) on horseback to muster militia troops and never received equivalent recognition. “I’m tired of only hearing about Paul Revere,” Rixy said. “Who else was there?” Her research turned toward the voices that conventional histories of the Revolution tend to pass over—Black and brown women, young people, and the many communities whose presence shaped New England even as they were often written out of its official record. She looked into the Caribbean and Latino histories she is personally connected to, tracing what was happening in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the eighteenth century and how those stories intersect with the broader revolutionary moment. The unnamed figure in the mural accumulates this shared history rather than representing any one of them alone.
The image of the American flag surfaced early and was set aside; Rixy was unwilling to let it anchor the mural as a whole. Instead she broke it into its parts and let each element find a new home in the work on its own terms. The red of the stripes became red strings threaded through the composition, referencing the red string theory of invisible connection between loved ones that traveled from Asian cultural traditions into global popular culture. The deep blue became the midnight blue of the horse. The gold of the armor she derived from her advocacy work, from an understanding that defense can be divine, that the impulse to protect is not the same as aggression. “Armor and adornment is beautiful and strong,” she said. “It shows strength and durability. The materiality of it.”
The stars required their own revision and underwent a design process shaped by ongoing dialogue with the community and selection jury,* whose conversations guided the imagery toward where it is today. What do stars mean outside of conquest? She found her answer in navigation, in the way Indigenous cultures use stars as scientific tools, in how the North Star guided African American people during flight from enslavement. She angled them in the composition to point north, turning them from decoration into direction, from symbol of dominion into instrument of survival.
The mask and headdress reinterpret the Statue of Liberty’s crown, its spikes stripped of civic authority and recast as ceremonial regalia, belonging to a sense of ritual. The headdress falling delicately across her eyes evokes blind faith and trust, a chosen “not-seeing” that shifts the figure’s power from recognition to presence. She flies alongside the horse rather than astride it with wings elaborately decorated and noble. They are the wings of the American eagle remade through the aesthetics of Caribbean festivity, where resilience has always announced itself through adornment and collective display. The horse meets her there. Its neck draped in a heavy gold chain, its posture unhurried and unbroken, it carries none of the submission that colonial monuments have long demanded of animals and people alike. This is what partnership looks like when both figures are adorned rather than harnessed and neither is elevated above the other.
Rixy, The Midnight Ride, installation view, 2026. Photo by Emily Williams. Courtesy of Rose Kennedy Greenway.
“What happens after 6:00 p.m.?” Rixy asked. “That’s when the artists are at work.” Rixy is a self-proclaimed night owl, most alive and productive after the sun goes down, and she understands nighttime as a site of labor and culture that goes unacknowledged in the diurnal clock of institutions. She was thinking about underground and alternative scenes, the party and DJ communities that hold her favorite artists in Boston, and the goth and punk kids who find belonging in the shadows. The othered and the angsty are central to her vision: The Midnight Ride is designed to transform in the evening hours. For special evening events, projections and light displays created in collaboration with partners such as Studio HHH will activate the work in an entirely different register. She wanted the mural to be just as radiant for the person passing through Dewey Square at 4:00 a.m. as for the tourist arriving at noon.
Her relationship to night is also shaped by loss. When her dear friend, Beba, passed at the end of 2019, someone she describes as “like the sun,” Rixy found herself turning toward ancient Egyptian and Southeast Asian wisdom in the Books of the Dead. What she found there was not a reckoning with death, but a framework for the passage between worlds and for how the living might tend to that threshold with care. It is the work of what some call a death doula: holding space in the in-between, offering comfort where darkness and light meet. This twilight sensibility that oscillates between grief and courage cannot be separated from the work itself. The mural’s nocturnal activation extends this feeling, becoming what she calls “a lighthouse in the Financial District,” and a source of comfort and orientation for a community navigating its own transitions.
Throughout the duration of the installation, Rixy considers programming integral to the work: community panels, mask-making workshops, movement meditations, and Carnival-style convenings. Production began the first week of May, with painting continuing throughout the month. The mural will be revealed and celebrated in late June and will remain on view through May 2027. For The Midnight Ride, Rixy, who typically paints alone, will have an all-women paint team, including local artists Ayana Mack and Sagie Vangelina. “It’s an opportunity,” she said, “to divide the work, learn from each other, and lead the community through their presence on the wall.” The Midnight Ride is that practice at its largest scale yet, with the North Star positioned to guide viewers along their way.
* Jameson Johnson, executive director at Boston Art Review, was a juror for the Rose Kennedy Greenway mural commission.
