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Towering at 307 feet, Dominican artist Angurria completed the piece in just 22 days, spending up to nine hours a day on a scaffold lift. “I grew up in Los Alcarrizos painting the people of my neighborhood,” he told City Limits. “In the South Bronx I found the same pride, the same strength, the same families.”
When Nestor Omar García, a Dominican artist widely known as “Angurria,” began painting a gargantuan mural—covering all 29 stories of a public housing development in the South Bronx—one of the first faces to come to life on the empty canvas was a young child, wearing headphones and perched atop a woman’s shoulders.
Tanya Pedler, president of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) development’s resident association, who has a 7-year-old son who is autistic, told City Limits it’s her favorite part of the piece.
“We have a lot of children in this neighborhood that suffer from sensory processing disorders,” she said, “and I wanted to make sure our special needs community was represented.”
Towering at 307 feet tall, the mural, titled “Un MAR de Gente / From Every Shore,” is the largest in the country, according to organizers—and Angurria completed it in just 22 days.
He used a scaffold elevator—often spending eight to nine hours on the lift each day—and help from two assistants to paint the southwest facing side of Morrisania Air Rights, a public housing development built in 1980 using air rights over Metro-North rail tracks in the South Bronx.
The complex is home to some 1,950 residents, who played a role in deciding what the record-breaking mural should include. “I hope that it reflects everyone who not only lives in the Bronx, but all these children who are here today,” Angurria said at the .
One of the only challenges, Angurria said, was the wind. “When it’s windy, the lift moves maybe two or three meters,” he said. “That was very difficult, but only for us. Everyone was so kind here.”
“This was an incredible experience for me,” Angurria told City Limits. “I grew up in Los Alcarrizos painting the people of my neighborhood, and in the South Bronx I found the same pride, the same strength, the same families.”
ArtBridge, a New York City-based nonprofit that transforms urban infrastructure like construction scaffolding into canvases for public art, commissioned Angurria to complete the mural.
They worked with another nonprofit group called Public Housing Community Fund (PHCF), created by the NYCHA in 2016 to facilitate design, construction and resident input for public projects that are funded by private donors. The M·A·C VIVA GLAM Fund awarded ArtBridge a $165,000 grant to support the mural.
Pedler said she reached out to the PHCF about a year ago, saying, “we needed to have a mural here, because the walls were a little hideous.”
“They connected us to ArtBridge, and this whole process was quite quick,” Pedler told City Limits. “We started talking about this last winter, and it’s completed before the year is out.”
A Jamaican immigrant who was raised in Queens after her family immigrated in 1989, Pedler also spent time in the city’s foster care system. She described how her past experiences with instability now inspire her to seek improvements for her neighbors, or help others who are struggling—with being a teenage mom, for instance, or transitioning to their first home in public housing, like she once did.
She’d previously collaborated with PHCF on other improvements at Morrisania Air Rights, like when she called on the city in 2022 to renovate the development’s playground, which several residents said was too dangerous for children to use because of unmanageable drug and criminal activity.
Former Mayor Eric Adams visited the playground in 2022, and it’s since received about $1 million in investments, largely through federal funding secured by Congressman Ritchie Torres in 2024. About $750,000 of that is being used to install a sensory playground and garden at the public housing development.
“This is a welcome sign that no matter who you are, or where you’re from, or what language you speak, or what God you worship, you are welcome right here in the Boogie Down Bronx,” Torres said at a ribbon cutting for the mural on Oct. 27.
After ArtBridge commissioned the mural, Pedler said she went to events in the borough, hung up flyers and shared information on social media about ways residents could influence details in the design, including identities that were important to them. The nonprofits, along with Angurria, then held workshops with residents to gather insight on themes and imagery they’d like to see in the art.
“The residents came out, young and old,” Pedler said. “They wanted to make sure that their voices were heard, and I’m grateful for them because we wouldn’t have this beautiful masterpiece if it wasn’t for them.”
Pedler also noted a particular request from 13-year-old resident Hawa Batchilly, who asked for more representation of Black and brown Muslim girls in their community. Of the finished mural, Batchilly said “it shows me that Muslim girls are all allowed to be here.”
“Children deserve beauty, representation, and a chance to believe that something extraordinary can happen where they live,” Pedler said.
Pedler’s message for other public housing residents, and especially other tenant association leaders, is “to dream and dream big.”
“Our residents look up and see stories that reflect our mothers, grandmothers, and children,” Pedler said. “Whether your roots are American, Jamaican, Honduran, Mexican, Dominican, Panamanian, African or whatsoever else, you belong in this story.”
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