Boston's most famous ride happened on a horse in the dark, and for 250 years the city has told it as a one-man story. The new mural at Dewey Square says that's incomplete.
A national open call, a hometown answer
In late February 2026, the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy announced Boston-based artist Rixy as the winner of its 2026 Dewey Square mural commission, chosen through the Conservancy's first-ever national open call, run in partnership with Embrace Boston and Everyone250, according to WBUR. A panel of local artists and cultural leaders picked her proposal, titled "The Midnight Ride," unanimously. Opening the process nationally, rather than handing the wall to a pre-selected name, was itself a departure for a commission that sits on some of the most visible public art real estate in the city.
The rider Boston forgot
Rixy's research turned up Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old who rode through the night on April 26, 1777, to rally militia against a British assault on Danbury, Connecticut, covering roughly twice the distance of Paul Revere's ride two years earlier, according to the American Battlefield Trust. Ludington's story carries an asterisk historians haven't resolved: no contemporary record of the ride survives, and questions about whether it happened at all go back decades, as her own historical record shows. Rixy painted her anyway, as a brown-skinned, warrior-like woman wearing a Lady Liberty-style crown and gown, a figure the artist has described as standing in for underrepresented activists, especially women, young people, and Black and brown Bostonians, according to the Boston Globe.
Painting 76 feet up
Rixy spent most of May on a boom lift in the middle of downtown Boston, building the mural up to its full 76 feet on the Dewey Square wall, the Greenway's signature street-art canvas above the underground stretch that used to be an elevated highway before the Big Dig buried it. The timing wasn't incidental. The piece is built around the 250th anniversary of the United States, tying Rixy's rewrite of Revere's ride to the same milestone driving Everyone250 programming across Massachusetts, according to the Bay State Banner.
What came off the wall
Dewey Square doesn't keep a mural for long. Rixy's piece replaces "your spirit whispering in my ear," a 2024 work by Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, which was the first mural on that wall by an Indigenous artist. The rotation is the point. The Greenway treats the wall as a running conversation rather than a monument, handing it to a new artist and a new argument about whose history gets 76 feet of downtown Boston for a season.
Two riders, one wall
Paul Revere isn't erased from the story, he's just no longer the only rider in it. His statue still stands about a mile away at Paul Revere Mall in the North End, cast in the same bronze certainty that's made his ride the default answer to "who rode to warn the colonies." Rixy's mural doesn't argue Revere didn't happen. It argues Boston stopped the story too early when it didn't have to.
A wall that keeps rewriting the city
Dewey Square sits on some of the most looked-at real estate in Boston, a park wall facing commuters pouring toward South Station every morning. Every artist who gets the commission is handed that sightline and a season to say something with it. Rixy used hers to put a forgotten teenager, on a wide-eyed horse, over the heads of people heading into the T, timed to land exactly when the country is looking back at its own 250 years and asking who got left out of the first telling.
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