Lue Gim Gong is looking one way; a kid is looking the other. The Chinese immigrant came to California as a preteen later here in North Adams, Massachusetts, and worked as a laborer. Eventually, he developed horticultural techniques using cross-pollination to create a cold-resistant kind of orange that greatly impacted the agricultural industry.
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The USDA and the city itself have recognized the life and Lue Gim Gong (Chinese: 呂金功, 1860-1925) for his contributions to the economy and community, and now mural artist GAIA has done the same. In 2000, seventy-five years after his death, he was recognized by the Great Floridian program for significant contributions to that state’s history and culture
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Using realism and dynamic repositioning of geometries, the Baltimore-based artist transforms a North Adams Housing Authority along the so-called Ashland Street corridor. Figures and faces are within the lively composition, bringing history alive with a contemporary style of storytelling. “Valencia Oranges and Autumnal leaves surround the figures,” says the project description that GAIA sent us.
“In the intersecting shapes of the bodies emerges children from a neighboring Eclipse Mill shot by photographer Lewis Hine in 1911. Below the children, within the legs, are two scenes of women working on circuitry inside the old Sprague electric plant.”
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In a project nearly hamstrung by the Covid-19 epidemic, GAIA sometimes wondered if the project would come to fruition, but he stuck to it. “This mural happened in spite of covid after a year and a half of planning and surveying!” he says.
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