Chelsea is not getting a statue of Chick Corea, at least not yet. It is getting a mural. The City Manager told the council in February that the city will commission a mural called “Keys to Chelsea” on the underpass beside the site of the jazz pianist’s boyhood home, funded by a New England Foundation for the Arts grant, and that a statue remains “under exploration.”
The request and the answer
Councillor Taylor’s Order 2610 asked the City Manager to explore a statue for Corea, who was born in Chelsea in 1941, grew up on the hill, and became one of the most recorded and awarded jazz musicians of the century, with 27 Grammy awards before his death in 2021. The answer, 26CM23, read on March 2, announced the mural instead. The location is the underpass adjacent to where Corea’s family home stood, which the letter calls “both a tribute and a homecoming.” The money comes from the foundation’s 2025 Making It Public program, which funds municipal public art and trains cities to run artist selection properly. The call to artists asks them to interpret Corea’s legacy “through themes of innovation, excellence, cultural pride, and creativity, while reflecting Chelsea’s diverse, immigrant, and working-class identity.”
Statue versus mural
The city’s Community Preservation Committee did fund a statue this year, $200,000 in bronze for John Ruiz, the Chelsea-raised boxer, on an application from the City Manager’s own office, a grant we reported here. Corea, whose claim on the city is at least as strong, gets a grant-funded mural on a highway underpass. The difference is not a judgment on the two men. Ruiz’s statue had a sponsor inside City Hall and a pot of CPA money that can pay for public art; the Corea project had a council order and a foundation grant. The mural will be finished sooner and seen by more people, since the underpass is on the way in from the Tobin.
Corea left Chelsea young and did not come back often, but he never disowned it, and the city has a habit of discovering its famous sons late. The mural call closes this fall; the city has not said when the wall will be painted.