Photos of mural courtesy of Lawrence Sumulong. Renderings of Damrosch Park courtesy of Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
A colorful mural opened at Lincoln Center on Monday, part of an ongoing effort to transform its western edge into a more welcoming public space. Designed by artist Vanesa Álvarez and assistant artist Derval Fairweather in collaboration with ArtBridge, “The Future We Create” draws on themes and imagery shaped by community input. The mural is installed on construction fencing along the perimeter of Damrosch Park, where Lincoln Center plans to remove longstanding barriers separating its campus from Amsterdam Avenue and improve access to surrounding neighborhoods.
According to W42ST, the 4,000-square-foot mural translates drawings, memories, and ideas gathered from locals through community workshops into vibrant graphic figures. The artwork features present-day residents alongside references to San Juan Hill, the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood razed in the 1950s to make way for Lincoln Center.
It replaces a stretch of fencing that once displayed the Ex Vandals’ San Juan Hill mural, which will be converted into a digital format and displayed inside David Geffen Hall.
“I’m so thrilled to unveil ‘The Future We Create,’” Álvarez said.
“This is more than a piece of art—it’s a story. Behind this mural is a history of community: of joy, of color, of people spending time together, creating together, believing in the arts, and being part of making it.”
The mural’s unveiling marks an important step in the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Lincoln Center West Initiative, first announced in 2023. Led by Hood Design Studio, Weiss/Manfredi, and Moody Nolan, the project focuses on the campus’s Amsterdam Avenue-facing side, where a five-foot wall at 62nd Street rises to 20 feet at 65th Street, acting as a barrier between the campus and neighborhoods to the west.
For decades, residents of NYCHA’s Amsterdam Houses and Addition, along with students at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and the five schools within the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex, have been physically separated from the Lincoln Center campus, lacking the same access found on the east side.
The project also includes changes to Damrosch Park, which is city-owned and operated by Lincoln Center. After a participatory planning process that included feedback from more than 3,400 New Yorkers, the design team was selected to transform the space into a public park with a modern performance venue, as 6sqft previously reported.
New gardens at the park’s entrance will provide public seating, while new art and light installations will enhance the concourse connecting Amsterdam Avenue to the 1 train entrance on Broadway. Much of the park’s new geometry echoes the historic forms of Lincoln Center’s iconic modernist design.
Anchoring the new park will be a performance venue featuring a permanent theater and an open plaza with seating for about 2,000 guests, designed for both artistic and community use.
“The new design for Damrosch Park will repair what for so long has been one of the great failures of Lincoln Center, the cold shoulder it turns toward its neighbors to the west, replacing an uninviting open space with a vibrant new park gracefully connected to its surroundings,” Paul Goldberger, architectural scholar and historian, said, according to Lincoln Center.
The project is supported by a $335 million capital campaign, with 65 percent of the funds raised as of last May. Support has come from the LCPA Board of Directors, who championed the project from the start, as well as a $10 million commitment from the State of New York.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is a founding partner in the project, awarding a $75 million grant. The gift includes early support when the initiative first launched and builds on the foundation’s backing of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City free programming.
The mural will remain in place for about two years while construction on the project continues, which is slated for completion in 2028.
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