MEET THE MAKERS
Love Letter to Cambridge BY SHAFAQ PATEL | PHOTO BY SASHA PEDRO
C
ambridge resident and muralist Caleb Neelon’s most recent work, “The Teachers’ Home,” located behind the H Mart in Central Square, is a “love letter to [his] hometown,” he says. Through this mural, Neelon says he wanted to thank the women in the city who raised him. This mural was a part of the Central Square Mural Project, through the Business Improvement District. The goal of the project is to celebrate the area while paying homage to the past, present, and future of Central Square. Neelon is also hoping to convey that the city that he loves should remain a home for all its people. “This place is expensive,” Neelon says. “It’s gotten obscenely so. I think it’s important for the people coming in who may be younger to know it wasn’t always that way here. There used to be a little more room in Cambridge. The transformation of wanting to be an industry town has been something that’s been weighing on everybody. I think it’s important to hold onto things we can hold onto.” The conglomeration of images depicts a teacher looking out of her window to see high rise buildings, new condos, and construction. Behind her is a bulletin board filled with teacher appreciation letters—inspired by Neelon’s 7-year-old daughter’s drawings—alongside rent payments and loan notes. “Cambridge was a place where people could be a school teacher and not get a laugh and an eye roll
18 Meet the Makers | scoutcambridge.com
when thinking about historicizing his “There used to living here,” he says. experiences, be a little more “And that goes for whether it be room in Cambridge. all civil servants, through art or too. This goes for writing. While ... I think it’s police officers and the graffiti and important to hold firefighters.” mural scenes onto things we can Neelon painted were visually “The Teachers’ Home” bursting at the hold onto.” in just a few weeks seams in the ‘90s, in October. He planned there was little being out the giant project using written about them. a smaller sketch, but he says the So, coming from a family overwhelming size of the mural of writers, Neelon began writing wasn’t an issue. articles and books about public art, too. “I don’t want to say this in a Neelon says he explored places bragging way, but nothing about the where there was more of a community size or scale was difficult,” he says. “The between artists and less regulation. site was easy, the parking lot was closed When he was in Brazil, he’d be painting off, I had a lift, I could go home to use on a wall and the owner of the business the bathroom. It doesn’t get any easier would come out and offer him a ladder. than that, honestly. The size thing just “Such an interaction would be comes with doing murals a lot.” beyond inconceivable here,” he says. Very few of Neelon’s earlier Inconceivable, yes, but not experiences in large-scale murals took impossible. Back in 2012, Neelon place in Cambridge, however. While recalls walking up to a wall on there is no shortage of public art in the Columbia Street he had been eyeing area now, this was not the case when for a while, and asking the owner if Neelon was growing up. he could create a piece of art. After Neelon says he grew up in a time looking at a photo of his ideas, she where the city was not receptive to agreed. So, he believes there’s hope contemporary public art, calling it “a for more art, yet. Only time will tell. very late-developing art town.” Since Cambridge was not the best place for Caleb Neelon has painted murals across muralists, Neelon began traveling and the greater Cambridge area, as well as immersed himself in the global graffiti in surrounding cities like Worcester, scene under the name SONIK in the Allston, and Chelsea. He also does mid-1990s. He painted in over two curatorial and studio work. To learn dozen countries, from Nepal to Brazil. more, visit www.calebneelon.com. It seems he had a knack for
