Olde Mistick Village
Olde Mistick Village's Colonial Revival commercial complex — built in the 1970s to evoke New England's 18th-century streetscape — might seem an unlikely mural destination, but its shingled buildings and wide pedestrian ways have attracted artists who find the simulation of history a provocative surface for work that confronts the real history of the place. The results are among Mystic's most conceptually ambitious commissions.
Featured Artists
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"Whaling Days" depicts a 19th-century harpooner whose target whale has become translucent and enormous, its body filled with the ghost shapes of all the ships that once worked this coastline — a surrealist reckoning with the maritime economy that made New England prosperous.
Swoon
"Pequot Homeland" uses Swoon's intricate cut-paper process to honor the Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot peoples whose territory encompasses the Mystic River valley — a work that confronts the Colonial Revival architecture it inhabits with a visual reminder of what preceded that particular construction of history.
Phlegm
"New England Winter" populates a bare-winter landscape in Phlegm's Victorian-grotesque narrative style — animals and humans sharing the cold in configurations that owe more to Breughel and Bosch than to the Colonial Revival context they inhabit.