56TH STREET GATEWAY: Life Underground and Wild Medicine Eco Mural 21

Life Underground by artist Laura Lyn Stern and Wild Medicine Eco Mural 21 by Hagopian Arts are part of the first stage of a multi-year reimagining of the 56th Street Corridor (56th Street at Lindbergh Boulevard and Elmwood Avenues) in Southwest Philadelphia. This project was created in collaboration with the Philadelphia Housing Authority, Empowered CDC and Bartram’s Garden. This iteration of the project includes a series of freestanding panels painted by Hagopian Arts entitled Wild Medicine Eco Mural 21 as well as the first three in a series of bas relief mosaic planters by Laura Lyn Stern called Life Underground.
Wild Medicine Eco Mural 21 by Hagopian Arts depicts medicinal flora and pollinators local to Bartram’s Garden and used historically by the Lenape people. Plants include echinacea, passionflower, southern magnolia, comfrey, black cohosh, mugwort, red clover, burdock, narrowleaf mountain mint, bloodroot, cleavers, blue vervain, witch hazel, and tall goldenrod. Also depicted are the honeybee, the monarch butterfly, the spicebush swallowtail butterfly, and the yellow swallowtail butterfly, crucial pollinators for this region.
Life Underground is a series of ceramic bas-relief mosaic planters by Laura Lyn Stern. The planters explore the mysteries of the life of animals and plants that reside beneath us and consider the ways in which individuals, ecosystems and communities are nourished by the unseen.