Jessica Maffia, Old to the Wild, 2025, birch, resin, aluminum and glass with fabric collages, The Travis Community Campus, Staten Island ​

Ode to the Wild is a site-specific artwork created by Jessica Maffia for the lobby of the new Travis Community Campus, Staten Island. This expansive, mixed-media mural celebrates the history and ecology of Main Creek, a vital natural habitat that lies to the east of the school. The artist depicted Main Creek from a bird’s eye view using upcycled materials. Aluminum scraps set in blue resin sparkle like sunlight on the surface of rushing water. The creek stretches across panels made of birch wood. Dotting the composition are round portholes of varying sizes, which contain colorful collages composed of repurposed, patterned fabrics. Students can peer into each jewel box-like porthole to discover a plant or animal native to Staten Island.  

To create the artwork, Maffia researched Days Afield on Staten Island (1892), a memoir by naturalist and entomologist William T. Davis, the namesake of the nearby wildlife refuge that is home to Main Creek. Davis’s scientific observations of wildlife in Staten Island inspired Maffia’s selection of species; from left to right we see a scarlet tanager, a monarch butterfly, cattails, blackberries, a cottontail rabbit, a prickly pear cactus, a green heron, pussy willows, goldenrod, bluet flowers, a bluebird, a dragonfly with huckleberries, a bluefish, a bloodroot flower and a tree swallow. Maffia explained her hope for the artwork: “Noticing can lead to wonder, wonder can lead to care, care can lead to protection. We are all part of the same ecosystem. May we work together to care for and protect our more-than-human kin.”