ENCHANTED GARDEN MURAL

1986
KRISTIN REED, ROBIN MICHALS

East 4th Street between Avenues C & D, Loisaida, Manhattan, NY
25’ x 38’, alkyd on concrete

Photos © Kristin Reed

For “The Last Judgement” – Kristin and Robin’s La Lucha mural – the artists split the wall horizontally, its upper and lower sections a successful fusion of their personal painting styles. 

In Enchanted Garden Mural, the artists merged their individual styles, creating a beautiful coherent mural whose arched niches were, according to Robin, “sort of Italianate filtered through Latin America.”  

Their evocation of an East Village park and the portraits of the youth who used it capture, as Betti- Sue Hertz wrote in Stroll (June 1988), “the experience of a specifically Puerto Rican neighborhood, [and] the ambivalence felt in the community between the economic necessity of being in New York and the memory of a beautiful island.”