‘Big Bird’
This trompe l’oeil-infused portrayal of Tubman captivated national attention soon after it went up in Cambridge’s quaint downtown this spring. And it’s easy to understand why: it shows Tubman the liberator, reaching through a brick wall to lead the enslaved to freedom, with the compassion and heroism that few depictions of her bravery ever have.
“[Her niece and nephew] were just being auctioned off at our courthouse here,” Rosato said. “People that were going to purchase them decided to go to lunch. Then she came and took them down to Long Wharf, which is right down the street, then put them on a rowboat, rode it across the Choptank River, [and] off to freedom.” The artist incorporated a rowboat and the North Star, Tubman’s navigational tool, to emphasize these dimensions.
Rosato learned this story during a community meeting at the Harriet Tubman Museum & Educational Center, on which “Take My Hand” sits. Tubman’s descendants founded the institution roughly three decades ago. Located down the street from Rosato’s studio and RAR Brewing, the center still offers an intimate path to understanding Tubman’s newly-big-screen story.
Location: Harriet Tubman Museum & Educational Center, 424 Race St., Cambridge ‘Native American Life’:
Few foods scream “Maryland” as loudly as the blue crab. So it’s only natural that Rosato put this mural, featuring a great blue heron enjoying a crab, on the side of J.M. Clayton Company, the world’s oldest continually operating crab house. “Big Bird” faces outward towards the crabbing boats docked behind the building, which means that visitors get the fullest views from a boat or the nearby drawbridge.
Rosato noted that he based “Big Bird” on a passage from “Chesapeake,” in which the Indigenous character Pentaquod witnesses a bird crack a crab in half with its beak.
“It tells a story about how the soft crab was given by their god as a gift for their stewardship of the land,” he said.
Rosato also incorporated oysters and
The mural trail ends near the county line, in the town of Vienna, and depicts what Rosato described as “a sweeping epic of a mural.” Loosely reflecting both “Chesapeake” and Vienna’s nonfictional history, the mural starts with Pentaquod riding down to the region. Viewers then experience other pivotal periods, including John Smith’s early interactions with Indigenous tribes, governor Holliday Hicks during the Civil War, the tobacco trade, crabbing and the introduction of trains. Its comprehensiveness makes for a fitting end to the mural trail’s extensive and specific cataloging of the region’s cultural and ecological heritage.
Location: 104 Race St., Vienna
Visitors can follow the Chesapeake Country Mural Trail with Rosato’s narration by using the Visit Dorchester mobile audio app at visitdorchester.org.