Photo By Gail

Covering the western-facing side of City-As-School in Manhattan’s West Village, Eduardo Kobra’s enormous Ellis mural is a riot of color, featuring five giant faces surrounded by the Brazilian artist’s signature geometric patterns in pink, purple, blue, yellow and green.

Created in 2018, the mural is Kobra’s tribute to the immigrant experience in New York and the millions of people who left their homelands in search of a new life. The five faces represent people of different ethnic backgrounds, reflecting the diversity of those who have made New York their home. Kobra says the work was inspired by New York’s long history as a destination for immigrants.

The connection to Ellis Island is more than just the title. The imagery is based on historic photographs of immigrants taken at Ellis Island in the early 20th century. Kobra transformed those old photographic portraits into something thoroughly contemporary, breaking the faces apart with his colorful geometric style.

At more than 8,600 square feet, Ellis is the largest mural in Kobra’s New York “Colors for Freedom” series. The location is fitting in another way: City-As-School is a public high school with an interesting connection to New York’s art history: artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was once a student there.

The mural has become such a recognizable part of the neighborhood that the recently developed Hudson-Houston Plaza (the streets on which the mural is located) was designed with the Kobra mural as its backdrop.

I love the way Ellis combines something very old with something unmistakably modern. These faces belong to people who arrived in New York more than a century ago, but Kobra’s kaleidoscopic treatment makes them look as though they’ve stepped straight into the colorful, constantly changing New York City of today.