Stephen Dean, Crosswords, 2017, acrylic paint and pigments, PS 889 / IS 889, Brooklyn

Crosswords is a painted mural that spans the curved wall of the two-story lobby of PS 889 and IS 890, Brooklyn. Bright dots of orange, red, pink, and yellow populate a dark blue crossword puzzle-style grid. The mural floats in between and around the lobby’s second-story windows, echoing the dark blue color and grid-like structure of the window frames.    
 
For this artwork, artist Stephen Dean takes the familiar structure of the crossword puzzle and turns it into a playful color composition. Where we once could have imagined letters and words filling in the boxes, we now have over 250 colored dots. These lightly painted wobbly blobs swish around in their boxed homes, sometimes bumping up against the edge of their boxes, other times exceeding their constraints. They occupy some but not all of the available squares, leading the viewer to imagine the dots as perhaps coming and going. Do the colors represent letters in some way? Are they arranged in a pattern? These questions are purposefully left open by the artist, free to interpretation by the students, faculty, and staff that pass through the lobby each day.