Blind Fox is changing Boston’s vertical surfaces one surprising mural at a time.
By Danna Lorch
Blind Fox is the imaginative Boston-based pop artist behind the murals that are bringing color, joy, and edginess to the city’s trendiest restaurants and businesses.
“We live in such an Instagram-bubble world that every space needs to have a wow feeling,” says the artist as she lounges in a thrifted chair she’s spray-painted bling gold in the corner of her living room in Quincy. “Blind Fox “is a moniker, a mood, and the work itself.
Have you seen the monkey in an astronaut’s suit floating behind the pickleball court at PKL Boston? That’s Blind Fox’s design. So is the mural that curls across the cavernous interiors of Coquette restaurant, offering a poetic nod to Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. Instead of using her garage to store a vehicle, she’s turned it into a spray paint bay for prepping projects. Today, the garage explodes with paint splatter, and an unusual bovine guest waits inside. “I recently rolled a life-size, 150-pound cow into the garage,” she admits.
Neighbors, there’s no need to call Animal Welfare. The steer is actually a sculpture that Blind Fox is painting for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s 2023 CowParade, a benefit that installs painted cattle across New England to raise funds to defy cancer.
Since completing her first mural at age 12 as a gift to the local police station, Blind Fox has used her self-taught talent to do good in the community. “Early on, my mom used to take me with her to do charity stuff and I learned that it just fills your soul in a special way,” she says.
Her favorite charity project involved creating a mural for a children’s bedroom at Tommy’s Place in 2021, a dream home on Cape Cod that hosts children with cancer and their families for free vacations. Riffing off the nautical theme, Blind Fox sprayed a giant, playful octopus on the wall, its tentacles splaying across the floor.
“Every time the kids walked into the room their eyes got big as saucers because the idea that someone was allowed to paint on the floor was something they had never seen,” shares Blind Fox.
An art teacher first recognized Blind Fox’s innate talent early on, but the pressure on her to work at night to enter contests ruined the fun for the then-teenager. For a while she stopped creating, instead pouring her imagination into a first career in the nightclub industry.
Deeply influenced by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and other artists with a strong connection to club culture, she painted on the side for years until she’d finally reclaimed her inner playfulness. Eventually, following a move from the West Coast to Boston, Blind Fox went all in as a full-time artist.
Rather than using her real name, she opted to follow the lead of other graffiti artists and chose an attention-getting tag. Her name honors a beloved Shiba Inu dog with poor eyesight. “I like pop art and graffiti because they tell a short story,” she explains. It’s this blend of the two mediums that makes Blind Fox’s style so recognizable.
Her latest work, a candlelit bar installation of a skeleton blooming with roses sets the stage at the newly reopened Lolita restaurant in Back Bay, a chandelier-lit, gothic space that begs for a date night. Those hitting the new nightclub Underground at Mariel will recognize Blind Fox’s signature touch on the walls immediately. She says, “The idea is for it to feel like a mix between old Cuba and a subway—a forgotten, hidden place filled with graffiti and lost art. I sourced vintage Cuban posters to make this look happen.”
Next up, Blind Fox hopes to convince more Boston business owners to commission local artists to paint murals for the public. “I know that the City of Boston and the local arts councils are trying to put more art there, and there are so many buildings going up with it and so much opportunity,” she says.
Until then, you can find her spraying canvas portraits in her garage or shaking her paint cans at the wall of a soon-to-open downtown hotspot, turning walls into stories.
