Newkirk Memorial Garden

Newkirk Memorial Garden by artist Eliseo Art Silva is located in the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mural is a restoration/redesign of a mural previously created at the site in 1985 by the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. The original mural functioned as part of a memorial garden. Many of the foundational elements in Silva’s current mural were derived from that initial image: a verdant landscape with a distant mountain under a plain blue sky, a narrow winding path flanked by lush vegetation, and potted plants throughout the garden.

As Silva explains: “In redesigning and restoring the mural, I sought to honor those core elements while deepening the visual narrative. I introduced symbolic features such as the mythical cloud formations and three youthful angels, each channeling breath through the cosmology of the heavens—a gesture toward spiritual continuity and ancestral presence. The original palette leaned heavily on primary colors, so I also infused the redesign with a more nuanced chromatic approach to distinguish it as a unique evolution of the original work.”