Three stories tall, this memorial mural at a Brooklyn intersection is part of a community tribute to 28 pedestrians killed by cars between 1995 and 2007 in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. I abstracted the mural by showing only one third of it – the section at the corner that remembers four-year-old James Rice, who was hit by a car speeding around another corner a block from where this mural now stands. The driver who killed Rice received a ticket for failure to yield. The huge figure of Rice holds up a traffic symbol urging respect for pedestrians. I made this image as a flesh and blood pedestrian paused at the corner below the mural. He was wearing a blue shirt, which virtually matched the ghostly color of the child in the mural above him. I use scale incongruity here to tell my own story: the needless killing of a small boy should loom much larger in our memory than the parade of ordinary day-to-day happenings on the streets of Brooklyn. Drivers who see this memorial through their car windows will not only slow down – they may even think about the nature of mutual respect and the safe sharing of streets.

You can read more about this mural here: http://www.commarts.com/columns/vision-thing.html