Lydia’s Magic Garden (Park Avenue, east side, between 117/118th Streets has a new crocheted mural:

Project as described by one of the children (Sulaf):

“Our crochet class started in the middle of the nation’s grieving for George Floyd and other innocent victims of racially charged police murders. So when we were deciding what project we should do, the clear choice was to do an homage to the Black Lives Matter movement.

This crochet project consisted of us all crocheting several pieces on our own, with our teacher Carmen Paulino’s expert virtual help. Then we sent our pieces to Carmen, who combined them into a beautiful quilt spelling out “BLM.” The quilt was unveiled at Lydia’s Magic Garden, a local community garden Pono has partnered with for years. Our piece of art will now reside in a beautiful place, spreading awareness about this extremely important issue for years to come.”

Names and ages of children who created the project:

Sulaf Hatab (age 12)

Willa Sullivan (age 11)

Sophie Hurtado (age 12)

Hannah Rivner (age 12)

Info on artist: 

Carmen Paulino is a visual artist, who works on providing community art programming in hospitals, community centers, and senior centers in and around New York City. Carmen was raised in El Barrio neighborhood of New York City, where she developed her love for the arts with inspirational murals from around her neighborhood. Carmen has crafted and created many crochet pieces, artwork, and murals, which are displayed in New York City and are inspired by her upbringing in Spanish Harlem. 

Info on class:

This class is designed for students to learn, interact, and participate with each other to make fiber art. Children will learn simple knitting and crochet techniques and patterns to make a fiber art piece.  They will also have the opportunity to participate in a group project with members of the Pono community to make a crochet mural that will be publicly displayed at Lydia’s Magic Community Garden, Pono’s community garden partner, in Harlem, New York City.