I have only recently become acquainted with Inglese’s vivid and engaging work and instantly noted how strongly it conforms to the spirit of the WPA Mural Project, which I studied in-depth while writing my doctoral dissertation on 1930s and ‘40s WPA wall paintings in New York City.  I am thrilled by her art—and by her continuation of the WPA tradition.

Inglese has, without being aware of it, carried out the ideals of WPA muralists such as the ones at Harlem Hospital and in schools, libraries, and even prisons. She was not aware of the murals of Lucienne Bloch, but the spirit is similar. I have included two Bloch murals in this article that could be cousins to Inglese’s coping and healing murals.

On November 3, 2025, I spoke with the very gifted and giving Inglese about her life and work.

Greta Berman: Judith, I’m fascinated by the many murals you have created. I wrote my dissertation on WPA murals, and I can’t help but wonder if you’ve seen and been influenced by them.

Judith Inglese: I may have seen a few in person; I just don’t even remember. But I’ve seen books about them, and I certainly know the Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera. I’ve actually been influenced by them, the scale of their work and the way they intertwine images to tell a story.

But I think that what got me into doing public art rather than art in galleries, was, first of all, using clay. That probably goes back to my elementary school days—you know, loving the texture, the feel of the clay itself. I loved what I’ll call its forgivingness, which I discovered as I went on and started to do other things like wood carving and welding. You know with clay that you can make a mistake—or it isn’t a mistake. You might do something you didn’t intend, and you could so easily change it with clay, whereas in other materials you were stuck with whatever you did at the moment. I think I was also tremendously influenced by studying anthropology in college and realizing that human beings need more than the basic necessities of life. Yes, we need clothing, shelter, and food. But we also need inspiration, and we require a creative outlet to go beyond ourselves. Look at the way hunter-gatherers would paint or tattoo their bodies.

GB: And people who painted caves. Everybody seems to have a need to decorate. We tend to use that word in the pejorative sense, But, in those contexts, decoration shouldn’t be pejorative.

JI:  No! No! That’s exactly right. I was very moved by [early art]. I also had such a feeling for artisan work, for people that worked with their hands and then used tools.

GB: That’s clear in your work, Judith; it’s very moving. Some of it is so extensive—and probably expensive. The frieze that you did in Florida is gigantic.

Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA) Headquarters,
Immokalee, FL. Freeform ceramic tile frieze, 232” L 2007.
Section of the mural.

Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA) Headquarters,
Immokalee, FL. Freeform ceramic tile frieze, 232” L 2007.
Section of the mural.

Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA) Headquarters,
Immokalee, FL. Freeform ceramic tile frieze, 232” L 2007.
Onlookers admiring the mural.

Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA) Headquarters,
Immokalee, FL. Freeform ceramic tile frieze, 232” L 2007.
Section of the mural.

JI: Yes, that was huge. My husband, Tullio, and I spent two weeks installing it. That was a pretty incredible experience. Immokalee (Florida) is right in the orange groves and the strawberry fields, and there were all these migrants from Guatemala, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

GB: All the people that are now being hunted down by ICE.

JI: Absolutely!

GB: And the mural still exists there?

JI: Yes. It was incredible being part of that little town. It had a McDonald’s, and a casino. Men would come up and live in trailers together, quite a few in each trailer. On weekends a lot of them were drinking because they didn’t have their families with them and there was nothing to do. They came to the U.S. to make money and send it back to their families. It was a hard way of life, getting up early to be bussed to the fields and working long days carrying bags of oranges on their backs or bending over in the fields. Redlands Christian Migrant Association helped them. RCMA has charter schools, daycare centers, and literacy programs for adults. It’s committed to the migrants and the rural poor whom it serves.

GB: How did you get this commission—and others?

JI: I got the Immokalee job through a mutual friend of the architect, Ted Hoffman, who wanted an artwork on the building that he had designed. The director of RCMA at the time, Barbara Mainster, was supportive. In fact, Tullio and I stayed at Ted Hoffman’s house and also with Barbara Mainster during the RCMA installation.

I’ve also done things where there has been an open call to artists. You put in your credentials and so forth, and then they whittle it down to three. They’d give you a modest stipend. You’d have to do a proposal for them, and then they would choose one; and that’s how I usually would get a job.

GB: That’s very much the way the WPA worked; people would submit proposals. When I wrote my dissertation, I looked at the archives in City Hall and read people’s proposals. How did you go about doing the research for these murals?  I know you have a background in anthropology, but did you go to archives? Did you use living people as models?

JI: It’s basically all of the above. In many cases—for example, Rockville, Maryland—they supplied a book and pamphlets about how they developed from a rural community. I went to the local library and asked for information. And I also took pictures. I went into the reference material and found faces that I loved, or places that I thought were interesting or common.

The Current of Life Is Ever Onward, three ceramic tile murals,
Rockville Town Square, Rockville, MD, each 10’H x 16’L 2009.
The artist at work on one of the Rockville murals.

The Current of Life Is Ever Onward, three ceramic tile murals,
Rockville Town Square, Rockville, MD, each 10’H x 16’L 2009.
One of the three Current of Life… murals.

The Current of Life Is Ever Onward, three ceramic tile murals,
Rockville Town Square, Rockville, MD, each 10’H x 16’L 2009.
View of all three murals.

So, it was a combination of things. It’s all the things that you don’t get paid for, that whole process of putting an idea together.

GB: Did you enjoy doing that?

JI: I did, because it was not only visually interesting to me, it became intellectually interesting as well. How does one get these ideas? You want to convey an idea. It’s not just a visual thing. Perhaps you’re trying to express what an organization wants to do, how it wants to show its diversity, and all the things that it works with. In the case of Immokalee, they have charter schools and daycare centers. They take care of families; they take care of migrants. So, all those things came together in [my work there]. Also, they wanted the work not to be square or rectangular. They wanted it to run the length of the building, so it had to have a lot of different kinds of imagery.

GB: When you say “they,” do you mean the architect or the people commissioning it, or both?

JI: Both, because I actually got the job through the architect, who was a friend of a friend. It’s wonderful when the architect supports what you’re doing. It makes such a difference, because often the art takes away from the architect’s budget to some extent. And some architects aren’t as open as this one was.

Another wonderful commission was the Memorial School in Connecticut: the architect supported the artwork, and the artwork supported the architecture. This commission was another very big one. There were three corridors in this elementary school, and so instead of just doing a big mural, as you enter, we did a number of little ones.

Freeform ceramic tile frieze spanning three corridors depicting earth, water, and air.
Memorial Elementary School, East Hampton, CT, 880’L 1992.
View of the frieze in one corridor.

Freeform ceramic tile frieze spanning three corridors depicting earth, water, and air.
Memorial Elementary School, East Hampton, CT, 880’L 1992.
Frieze detail, earth.

Freeform ceramic tile frieze spanning three corridors depicting earth, water, and air.
Memorial Elementary School, East Hampton, CT, 880’L 1992.
Frieze detail, water.

There was a wainscot of tiling that went through the whole building, and I made a frieze that would go through the whole building and each corridor. One corridor was air; One was land or earth; and one was water.  And they had to go around the doors or into the wainscot, which means I had to work with the people who did the tile installation of the commercial tile wainscot, because they had to leave little places for my artwork. It was really interesting.

GB: From what I gather, you make the tiles first. Do you make them in your studio and then place them in situ?

JI: Yes, the bigger ones were done that way. I made them in my workshop, numbered each tile, then reassembled them like a jigsaw puzzle on plywood pallets for shipping with a special art carrier to the site.

At the site, there were often local people to help. In some cases, like at the [Washington, D.C., National] zoo, there were two amazing workers who knew much more than I did about tile installation. In many ways they were more than my helpers. They were my teachers because that was my first big project.

GB: Tell me something about your most recent work.

JI: Several years ago I realized I no longer have the energy to put up a really large mural or frieze and work for two weeks, so I thought about what I could do, and how I could keep working. And I thought about all the rural communities in New England, and probably all over the country, that don’t even think about putting artwork in their town because they’re dealing with a lack of financial resources. So, I came up with the idea of proposing a mural for a town’s library or public building in order to create a sense of identity, pride, and community. I would do an artwork, and they could approve of what I would want to do, and then I would try to raise the funds by going to the local banks and so forth. That worked for quite a few towns. I did one in Leverett, Massachusetts, just north of Amherst. It’s on the outside of the library, and it’s really the history of Leverett.

Past is Present is Future,
exterior framed ceramic tile mural, Leverett Town Library,
Leverett, MA, 7’4″ x 4’4″ 2022.

GB: Tell me about a work I just love, La Famiglia Sacra. When I first looked at it, I saw that the woman was holding a cell phone. As I looked more carefully, I saw that everybody except the dog has a cell phone.

Famiglia Sacra.
framed ceramic tile mural in A.P.E. Gallery show,
Northampton, MA, 2018.

JI: After a while I realized there were things I wanted to say in my murals. I did two gallery shows in Northampton, where Smith College is, each with another woman artist. I did a show of framed murals with some clay sculptures, and a show of only clay sculptures. La Famiglia Sacra is a commentary on contemporary life. I was influenced by [Fernando] Botero, the Colombian painter and sculptor who made charming, chubby figures and family portraits. He was also critical of the religious and political situations in his country. I did a whole series of framed murals that allowed me to express my ideas. At the time—I think it was the beginning of 2018—there was just the sense of the cell phone taking over our lives. You’d go into a restaurant and you’d see people sitting at the table, each of them with their cell phone.

GB: I thought it was just wonderful; it’s obviously a spoof on the Holy Family where you have the doves and the angels, and one of the angels playing an electric guitar.

JI: It’s a little bit of a take-off on Spanish painters who depict the traditional Holy Family (perhaps Murillo), But it’s also a take-off on Botero’s sculptures. I thought he was charming, but his work was also critical of situations in his country; so that’s what I did with La Famiglia Sacra.

GB: Your Birds don’t Know Borders has the same sort of idea: that we human beings make borders, but birds can just fly free. You have all of these people that are cut off from each other, but the birds go freely. There’s a beautiful irony in it. Was that a separate small mural?

Birds Don’t Know Borders,
framed ceramic tile mural in A.P.E.
Gallery show, Northampton, MA, 48”x 24” 2018.

JI: It was. Both of these small murals were in a show and were sold. But Birds Don’t Know Borders was about the devastation happening in Afghanistan when the Americans were there and how the war was affecting the lives of children.

GB: Have you also done children’s books?

JI: Yes, I have. I worked with two others, an independent publisher, Julie Murkette, and my friend, Dedie King, who was an acupuncturist. We worked together. pooled our money, and divided the profits. The books would be bilingual. Each one would be in both English and the language of the country we wrote about. In particular, we chose languages that had different scripts so children could see the amazing diversity of written alphabets. I really don’t feel that comfortable drawing; so, for the illustrations I ended up doing collage, combining photos, scrap paper, and drawing. The illustrations were real and not real, and the collage created defined images, very much like my tile technique, with grout joints being the line work. And they had restrictions similar to commissioned murals: I had to interpret the author’s ideas and show characters in real environments and experiences. The books included I See the Sun in Afghanistan and I See the Sun in Myanmar.     

Illustration from I See The Sun In Myanmar.
The sixth book in the See the Sun children’s book series. 2013.
Frieze detail, water.

Each book illustrates a day in the life of a child in the subject country. We made ten of them, including books about Nepal and the United States. The one set in Afghanistan was banned in Florida. The one in the United States was not too well received because it showed a gay family with two mothers and a child, and an interracial couple.

The interesting thing is that I feel very comfortable working three-dimensionally, but I really don’t feel that comfortable drawing; and yet I had to make presentations for what I was going to do. So, we ended up doing a lot of collage because in some ways it was like making tile with sharp edges.

GB: The books are examples of how all the ways you’ve worked interrelate with your desire to reach people first, and relay something that we learned from childhood. And they’re ways of giving back to our world, which you have mentioned several times. I have, of course, also had to confront these issues as an art historian teaching art history. How do we reach people? How do we change the world? And we’ve each done our part: you in a different way than I. I felt I did it by reaching individual students and helping them to understand.

JI: Absolutely! You did do that! Our colleagues have too.  My way of doing it is so visual. And it’s not really recognized: once you put this thing up there, no one knows who did it.

GB: I know so well, Judith. When I was writing my dissertation and looking for murals, I would call somebody and ask, “Is there a mural where you’re sitting?” And they would say “I don’t know.” And I would say “could you look up?”  They would look up and say, “Oh, that?”  It had become part of the ambience. It’s ironic, because you want it to be; and on the other hand you’re an artist. You’d like to be known for your work,

JI: I feel [our work] does affect people; they’re just not aware of it. They see it, and at the same time, they don’t see it after a while. People in my little community of Leverett [MA] still say to me, “Oh I still see some things in that mural when I go to the library that I didn’t see the other day.” They say that it connects with their experience.

GB: Some of the images that you sent me of people looking at your work reminded me of Lucienne Bloch’s mural for the women’s prison in New York. It showed children playing in a playground, and the artist said that the inmates named the children and would respond to it. So, murals are a kind of dialogue in a wonderful way when people can experience something like that.

JI Oh, exactly!

Lucienne Bloch. “The Cycle of a Woman’s Life.” True Fresco.
Made for the House of Detention for Women, NYC, 1936. (Destroyed).

GB: Getting back to what you’re working on now, and putting that in context: can you tell me about your earliest works and the creations that you’re working on now, so I have a kind of arc?

JI: The earliest thing I think I started a long time ago was just doing rather flat tile, not cut, but free form. This was probably in my twenties. I put that work in a local gallery, and from there I took some of these framed tiles and went down to Baltimore when they had their first craft exposition.  The assistant head of the Washington [National] zoo was walking through with his wife and looked at the murals. They had been wanting to put up a mural outside of the education building. I knew nothing about putting up a mural at that scale, and actually I didn’t even know about the right mastic to use or about the right shrinkage or any of that. But he asked me about it, and I gave him a drawing, and they accepted it. That was 1973, I believe, a really long time ago.

GB: And what’s the most recent work you’ve done?

JI: I just made a very small mural for an Amherst performance venue called the Drake. (ill 17) It’s a mural that you don’t necessarily see because it’s on the second floor, on a balcony, and you can walk up there as you go into this performance space. The title of the mural is The Song of Earth Has Many Different Chords.

The Song of Earth Has Many Different Chords
(the title taken from “Listening,“ a poem by Amy Lowell).
Framed ceramic tile mural for The Drake, a performance venue,
Amherst, MA, 48” x 30,” 2025.

I was inspired from the poem “Listening” by Amy Lowell. It features imagery of music from around the world. People are playing different kinds of instruments, and children are singing. It involves a little bit of Amherst, too, and Emily Dickinson. The people in the minaret on the right are Bach at the top, and below him, Hildegard von Bingen and Duke Ellington. Emily Dickinson is peeking out from the top of her house between two historic Amherst buildings. I wanted to celebrate the diversity of music as well as Amherst as a culture center. I put in several birds because bird song is part of our rural surroundings.

I wanted to eliminate dealers and agents and all that, and make it rather basic for these towns. And it worked for a while. I’ve done about three libraries and a couple of public buildings, and so forth, in these small towns.

GB: Now we’re in our eighties and feeling young, vital, and pretty amazing!  I think it’s things like what you’re doing and what I’m doing that keep us vital. We have to have projects; we have to have goals.

JI: Obviously, as you get older your life does get more constrained. But it is gratifying just having these threads out to the community and to other people and connecting with other ideas.

GB: it’s so wonderful that you do that, Judith! It’s so unusual because for so many artists, it’s all about “me, me, me.” But your works are not about you.

JI No! No! I realized from doing these two gallery shows that I’m so shy, really, when it comes to that kind of thing. It’s not who I am at all, and I I’m not comfortable with it. I think people sort of tiptoe around artists because they’re thinking of them as that type of person, right?

GB: As divas. But you’re hardly a diva. What’s so touching about your art is that it’s all about other people, animals, the world, connections. It’s really very rich and loving.

JI : I  do admire artists who have that dedication, discipline, and skill; it’s remarkable. But I also feel—because of working in hospitals with children and families and making tile—that there’s so much latent talent out there. I just get floored sometimes by all these people who don’t think of themselves as artists but are so creative and absolutely amazing.

Lucienne Bloch. History of Music.
Made for former George Washington H.S. Music Room.
Bronx, NY. True Fresco. 1936-38.

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