Adam Cvijanovic, City Tree, 2020, hand-glazed ceramic tile, District 19 S.T.E.M. Academies, Brooklyn

City Tree is a hand-glazed ceramic mural created by Adam Cvijanovic for the alcove at the entrance to the new District 19 S.T.E.M. Academies, Brooklyn. Inspiration for the artwork came from Betty Smith’s 1943 book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about the hardships and hopes of a young girl and her family living in Brooklyn in the early 1900s.  

Measuring 21’ x 21’, the mural depicts a glorious and majestic tree. At the base are buildings and streetscapes from the surrounding neighborhood in blues and purple-grays. What begins as a familiar streetscape becomes something else, as images of buildings piled on each other and mashed together converge to form the trunk and then its branches. Rising above the sidewalks and streets, the branches begin to sprout. Leaves fill the mural with foliage, life and possibilities. As the eye moves up, the geometry and haphazard order of the city merges into the complex, fractal world of biology – a maze of darkness and light, pathways and secret worlds. As the leaves and branches climb to the top canopy, they dissolve into ray of light and color lifting upward to the sky, forming a new vision far beyond the city below.  

For Cvijanovic, “this tree grows out of Brooklyn, grows out of, and is, the city itself… It is a tree of the imagination. It is a map, a story that changes over time, a friend who gives its secrets slowly to those who look.”