“My largest painting to date – Green Tara 2 – celebrates all those people undergoing an immigration journey as I did. Focusing on the joy of concluding such a journey, Green Tara 2 offers a message of hope to the Cambridge Crossing neighborhood. Thank you to CX for making this artwork possible, and for sharing with the community.” – Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a IMAGINE

Boston-area artist Sneha Shrestha has completed a large-scale painting that greets visitors to the lobby of DivcoWest’s new life science building at 441 Morgan Avenue, designed by Ennead Architects.

Sneha Shrestha, known as IMAGINE in the art world, is a Nepal artist whose practice lies at the intersection of art and innovative social impact. She is the artist behind For Cambridge, With Love from Nepal (2018), the 60-foot orange and blue Central Square mural at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street. Her artwork can also be found in the collections of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MFA Boston, Facebook, Fidelity, and more. 

In her practice, IMAGINE enmeshes the Nepali alphabet and Boston’s graffiti scene. Her works are gestural and sweeping, yet connect to a deeper interrogation of language, diaspora, and cultural identity. The commissioned artwork draws upon the Celebration series, which centers around the visa and immigration process, and thereby embeds the artist’s cultural lineages and ongoing sense of community orientation. 

The Celebration series encapsulates the artist’s immigration journey that lasted over a decade. In this painting, she uses layered and poetically resonant letters to spell out an identification name that heads one of the many immigration forms that were filled out throughout this lengthy process. Composed of a randomized mix of letters and numbers, such as 1040-A or I-120A, these codes are often cryptic, intimidating and impersonal. In a mode of re-personalization, the colors in this painting are inspired by an outfit worn by her mother during a celebration that the artist missed in her hometown of Kathmandu. The lettering and colors together form a jubilant celebration that marks the end of a grueling immigration process, complete with the systemic barriers and emotional sacrifices of missing valuable time with loved ones back home.