Rooted
April 22 – 28, 2024 

Boston-based artist Cicely Carew’s magic garden, Rooted, was installed on Northeastern’s Boston campus in the week leading up to its 122nd Commencement. Carew’s artistic practice spans media and scale, including large suspended installations, collage, painting, video, and sound. Color is a central component and of her work, and she has been commissioned by organizations including Google, in Cambridge, Pelaton, in New York City, and the Prudential Center, in Boston. 

The 15-foot sculptures rising from Northeastern’s Krentzman Quad along Huntington Avenue (Boston’s Avenue of the Arts) are composed of steel, aluminum mesh, and translucent plexiglass, with color and materials both contrasting and complementing the surrounding urban environment. 

The towering flowers are meant to inspire joy and enchantment, Carew explained to NGN in an interview from her studio during the weeks leading up to the installation and her process in this video. She went on to describe that they evoke a hyper-real form of nature—bright, playful, something out of the world of Willy Wonka.

Carew completed her MFA at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts and her BFA at Massachusetts College of Art + Design in Boston. She served as Artist in Residence at Shady Hill School and taught mixed media and printmaking for the New Art Center in Newton, Massachusetts, and Maud Morgan Arts in Cambridge and screenprinting at Lesley University.  

Among her many exhibitions and achievements, she was awarded the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art’s James and Audrey Foster Prize, which included an August 2023 exhibition of her work.