The Work
Every Participaint mural starts with marker lines and an open invitation. These are the walls so far — and the people who painted them.
Forty feet of coral reef in the lobby where families check in. A sea turtle the size of a car, a tiger shark that grins instead of bites, jellyfish drifting up toward the ceiling tiles.
It is the last thing you look at before your name is called, and the first thing you see when you come back.
The full story →
Two walls in one day. In the lobby, Jamaal airbrushed a bear in a Shriners fez holding the earth. Down the hall in the seventh-floor playroom, everyone else got the wall.
Patients, siblings, parents and staff filled it with sailboats, cupcakes, cat faces, small handprints, a Bruins “B”, and in teal letters across the top: I ♥ SHRINERS. Someone wrote BE YOU.
A bald eagle over the Merrimack River, four storeys of it, on Merrimack Street. Two weeks of painting with the nonprofit Beyond Walls — and one open day where residents of every age were invited to add a brushstroke before Jamaal finished the piece.
He called that day a Partici-paint. It worked so well that Cindi and Jamaal built an organization around it.