BOSTON, MASS.- Boston-based artist Ethan Murrow has created Seastead, a new installation of the sprawling Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

In this monumental piece Seastead, Ethan Murrow responds to the ICA’s waterfront location and the surrounding changing landscape. Murrow enlivened the Fineberg Art Wall by drawing directly on the wall with permanent Sharpie markers. The installation features a round oculus piercing through a dark wall focusing attention on a dramatic scene of a large boat hauling a massive cathedral into an empty sea. The boat is based on American aircraft carriers, the impressive warships that have been central to U.S. military prowess. Perched on its deck is the British St. Paul’s Cathedral, the towering church that was built after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and survived the Blitz of World War II.

Murrow joins together these two structures in an imaginative and enigmatic scene indicative of the artist’s interests in storytelling and history. Photo-realistic and done entirely by hand, the wall drawing took the artist and two assistants approximately two weeks to complete. Project curator Ruth Erickson was drawn to Murrow’s virtuosic drawing ability and his “longstanding interest in landscapes as subjects of immense beauty and power.”

The Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned annually. Located along the eastern interior wall of the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the most public space in the museum, the Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art work on entering the building. Murrow’s work is on view until November 27, 2016.

Ethan Murrow received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.F.A from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Recent and upcoming solo shows of drawings, video and sculpture include La Galerie Particulière in Paris and Brussels, Slete Gallery in Los Angeles, Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York City and Seattle and the Nevada Museum of Art. Ethan recently participated as Artist in residence at Facebook, was included in the DeCorodva Museum’s 2013 Biennial with a three story wall drawing and had a solo museum show at the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences. In the summer of 2015 he will be a fellow at the Ballinglen Foundation in Ireland. His work is in many public, private and corporate collections and has been reviewed and published widely around the world. A monograph on his work is due out in the fall of 2015 with the German publisher Hatje Cantz. His film project “Dust” with Harvest Films and wife Vita Weinstein Murrow was an official selection of the 2008 New York Film Festival. The Murrow’s will also be publishing their first children’s book, “The Whale” due out this fall in Europe with Big Picture Press and in the the USA shortly after that with Candlewick Press. Murrow serves on the Graduate and Painting Faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.