Perhaps the most remarkable thing about murals is that they are among the most ancient of art forms. Prehistoric man first took brush in hand to paint pictographs that told the story of how they lived and, in doing so, created a new visual language that had the power to redefine how we think about ourselves and our surroundings. Murals trace their lineage to the earliest cave paintings and they have forever since represented the march of time as iconic anthropological, sociological, and psychological explorations of man’s history on Earth.

More than just narratives depicted in new and lasting ways, ancient murals almost always held a spiritual quality, one that transcended earthbound matters in search of the great beyond. Just as we do today, ancient man was asking himself questions and challenging his intellect in a quest for a better understanding of who we are and how we fit, not only into our community, but also into the larger scheme of things.

Over the centuries, murals maintained their prominent place in society because of the very fact that they were “in society.” Murals are perhaps the most egalitarian of art forms in that most exist solely in the public sphere.

Meg Saligman’s Fertile Ground follows the grandest traditions of the earliest murals and all those that followed in that she too asks big questions about our place in the world. From the incorporation of historical images of people and places to the stories of the many figures depicted in the mural, Fertile Ground is an oversized object lesson in who we are, how we got here and where we are going.

While many may be overtly political or religious, all murals share in common the characteristics of eminent accessibility and that special aura of somehow being forever “real” and “in the now.” And, while one could make the argument that all art is fundamentally a spiritual endeavor, we may all at least agree that the transcendent quality of murals is undeniable.