NORWICH — From the outside, Norwich might be a city best known for being near the casinos, having Dodd Stadium, and sporting plenty of local dining and history.

Norwich also has a great deal of public artwork, and has lately added a handful of murals to several existing art pieces. Some are forms of pure artistic expression, while others show important people and places in the history of Norwich.

The Bulletin has gathered a showcase of just some of the public art in Norwich. Whether you want to keep an eye out for the artwork while you’re out and about, or if you want to walk it like an art trail, here's where you can find it.

Drive into downtown Norwich welcomed by the “Rose of New England” mural on the side of Amazing Furniture. The mural was painted by Candice Flewharty and The Rose Arts Festival.

A small Bob Marley piece on an electrical box across the street was painted by Jill St. Claire.

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This mural, visible from the parking lots for the Otis Library and The Bulletin, shows gardening, meditation, swimming, and other activities, against a blue background. Part of the chipping mural is now covered in graffiti.  

This older building is now home to new artwork by Cristhian Saravia, known as Golden, created in August. The mural features a unicorn and reminds people to “Stay Golden.” It was painted at the same time as the mural on 59 Broadway as a project from the Norwich Street Art Collective. The organization hopes to have a larger street art festival next summer.

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Artist Faith Satterfield painted the side of the Chestnut Street Playhouse in 2013, according to her website. The piece was completed in 24 hours as a fundraiser for scholarships and building a youth center in Greeneville. It was inspired by Ezekiel 47:9 “Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live.”

The best spot in Norwich to see public art is Lower Broadway, with at least five significant pieces a stone's throw away from one another.

Visible from city hall is the mural on 59 Broadway, painted by Carlos Alexis Rivera Rivera, known as Carlitos Skills. He intended the mural, featuring butterflies, to symbolize Norwich’s artistic transformation. It was painted as a project from the Norwich Street Art Collective, along with the mural on 163 Franklin St.

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To the right is the mural on the former Otis Library building, now nightclub Latin Quarters, at 80 Broadway. Norwich Arts Center Co-President Faye Ringel said it was painted in the 1970s, only a few years after the Otis Library moved to its current location on Main Street. The faded mural depicts different kinds of learning and invention, and was painted by Gerry Wadsworth. The project was funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, 1970s legislation that in part put artists and writers to work.

Next to the 59 Broadway mural are jersey barricades outside Billy Wilson’s Ageing Still at 57 Broadway. The dining area was originally created in 2020, under Connecticut’s Phase 1 reopening. Since it was put up, it has featured artwork from the community, changing intermittently.

Across the street is the Fairhaven Building at 26-28 Broadway. While not currently inhabited, the boarded-up windows feature Warholian portraits of Ellis Ruley. Ruley was a rock mason who began painting in 1939, according to Connecticut History.org. Ruley bought 28 Hammond Ave., which is now a park in his name.

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Ruley had one exhibition at Norwich Free Academy in 1952, but did not gain greater renown until the 1990s, years after his mysterious death in 1959.

Next to the Fairhaven Building is Castle Church at 4 Broadway. Completed in June, this mural features two more important Black figures in local history. James Lindsey Smith is the man in the mural. He escaped slavery in 1838, and eventually settled in Norwich in 1842, where he became a businessman and a minister, according to Connecticut History.org.

Sarah Harris Fayerweather is the woman in the mural. In 1832, she was the first Black woman to attend Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury. Two years later the school was closed after prejudice toward the school and the Black students culminated in a group of white men attacking the school building, breaking the windows. After her schooling, she lived in New London and moved to Kingston, Rhode Island in 1855 with her husband. She was involved with the abolition movement, and was a personal friend of William Lloyd Garrison.

The Market Street garage, at about 70 Market St., features two separate mural projects. The first one, painted in fall 2015, is on the front, and features sections from Reliance Health and other local organizations. Artist Faith Satterfield helped on the project, with Artreach’s section, but said the mural is still incomplete, as local children’s handprints were meant to be added.

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The newest mural, around the backside, was dedicated in January, as a part a project with Public Art for Racial Justice Education, meant as sister art to murals planned in three other Connecticut communities. The mural includes a variety of civil rights figures, from Norwich-born David Ruggles, who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, to Hiram Harry Bingham, a rabbi from Salem who was an American diplomat during World War II and helped thousands of Jews evacuate France before the Nazi occupation, to Jaswant Singh Khalra, an activist who exposed the disappearance of thousands of Sikhs during the 1984 Sikh Genocide in India.

Below the Norwich Police Department, facing the water and railroad tracks, there is an inviting blue and gold mural.

You can see by looking across the water, from the Marina at American Wharf or the Howard Brown Park. Norwich resident David Bishop said it was originally a green wall until it was painted around 1998 by Nancy Bram-Mereen, commissioned by Ron Aliano.

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Bishop restored the mural in summer 2021. He had seen the mural in the background of a picture in the newspaper, and he thought it looked rundown. Bishop had repainted some historic signs in the past, but it took him a few years to get the approvals for this project, including from the railroad company. Bishop would be interested in painting a mural or two of his own in the future.

These next two are a bit out of the way for the downtown public art tour, but worth a visit. At 15 Town Street is another art piece by Candice Flewharty, a mural with birds and other wildlife.

Outside Payless Auto Glass, owner John Wisniewski commissioned artist Samantha Izenco to paint depictions of downtown Norwich on the side of the building four or five years ago. Wisniewski met Izenco while he was out getting tacos, and he saw her painting elsewhere. Wisniewski wanted to cover up the “super ugly wall” on his building, but said another Payless logo was a bad idea.

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Two of the city’s public arts projects are located on Central Avenue and North Main Street in Greeneville. The most prominent is a series of sidewalk bump-outs, painted in 2021 to look like different national flags. While this reflects the neighborhood’s diversity, the bump-outs also help with pedestrian safety through shortening the crosswalk distance, and marking an area where cars can’t park. Find them at the intersections of Central Avenue and Eighth Street and Central Avenue and Eleventh Street.

Less conspicuous in this area is the series of painted fire hydrants. These were part of a contest held by the Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Zone in 2015 and 2016, paired with a Spirit of Greeneville day, a family-friendly event intended to change the perception of Greeneville.

Find the penguin at North Main Street near Sixth Street and one covered in fish on Central Avenue near Third Street, and see if you can hunt down any others in the area.

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Outside of Querica’s Auto Repair is a mural depicting places of interest in Greeneville and a blue heron, painted in the summer and fall of 2016.

Artist Faith Satterfield said she painted it with 15 volunteers as a part of the Greeneville Revitalization Zone project. Satterfield said she wanted to celebrate the neighborhood’s history, and showcase what’s there, with depictions of the dam, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, the Greeneville Fire Station, and the now demolished Greeneville School. She added a blue heron to the mural, because the bird kept visiting the volunteers during the painting.