City Tree is a hand-glazed ceramic mural by New York-based artist Adam Cvijanovic for the alcove at the entrance to the District 19 S.T.E.M. Academies in Brooklyn. The commission draws inspiration from Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a narrative that chronicled the struggles and aspirations of a young girl and her family living in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century. 

Measuring 21 by 21 feet, the mural presented the image of a monumental tree. At its base, Cvijanovic depicted neighborhood buildings and streetscapes in muted blues and purple-grays. This recognizable urban fabric gradually shifts as piled and distorted architectural forms fuse to create the tree’s trunk and extending branches. From these emerges a canopy of leaves that animates the surface with foliage, vitality, and possibility. As the composition ascends, the rigid geometries and disorder of the city give way to the intricate, fractal structures of biological growth—an environment of shadow and illumination, passages and concealed spaces. At the mural’s upper edge, the leaves and branches dissolve into radiating bands of light and color, suggesting transcendence and a vision extending beyond the confines of the city below. 

Cvijanovic reflected on the work by noting that “this tree grew out of Brooklyn, grew out of, and was, the city itself… It was a tree of the imagination. It was a map, a story that changed over time, a friend who gave its secrets slowly to those who looked.”