六天在5月底开始,艺术家Jess X. Snow blasted love songs from 30 feet in the air for all of Stanford University to hear.

Snow and assistant Tessa Zeng blasted the music of Lauryn Hill and the cast recording of “In the Heights” as they painted stars and roots, bright blooms of California poppies, and a greater-than-life-sized silhouette of a Stanford student on the back of Harmony House, the center for Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

The end result is a design that melds humanity with nature — a woman embedded with silhouettes of other people touching the hand ofa Mother Earth figure made of branches and flowers; where the fingers meet, awhite sage, a plant indigenous to the Bay Area,shoots from the earth.

Snow’s goal was to create a mural about intergenerational healing for students at Stanford — specifically, “what care looks like for women and trans and queer people of color, organizers, artists, healers, activists.”

“It’s a huge way of showing the communities of color and women and queer folks that we see them and they are deserving of monumental walls,” Snow says.

The work was commissioned by the Institute’s interim director A-lan Holt and student program coordinator Evelyn María Anderson, and done in partnership with Stanford’s Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse Education & Response.

To design the mural, Snow looked at a course held by the Institute called “Long Live Our 4 Billion Year Old Mother: Black Feminist Praxis, Indigenous Resistance and Cultures of Queer Possibility,” which focuses on the concept of care.

But what “care” really is can be complicated. The mural derives its title — “Are You Sure Sweetheart, That You Want To Be Well?” — from author Toni Cade Bambara’s book “The Salt Eaters,” which Holt says speaks to the “complexity of healing.”

“We find ourselves as both the organ and the blade — the person that inflicts harm, and the person that has received that harm,” Holt says. “Healing has to happen on both sides. We know that from our work in restorative justice. So how can we respond to harm knowing that care has to be given holistically? And to think beyond just punishment as the only way to redress harm?”

One answer is to look to the Earth.

“The most resilient ecosystems are the most biodiverse,” Snow says. “We can look at the Earth for inspiration about how to start revolutions and how to survive after trauma, because that’s what plants do, and that’s what animals do all the time.”

Another answer is to acknowledge the problematic histories that powerful institutions often have.

“I feel like anytime we talk about Mother Earth and honoring Mother Earth we also need to honor the legacies of indigenous folks who have been practicing care to the Earth thousands of years before settler colonialism happened,” Snow says.

“Stanford is on Muwekma Ohlone land, and we have to do the work of redressing that very violent history while also uplifting and supporting the current indigenous students of the Bay Area and beyond,” Holt says. “The mural is a living testament of that work.”

But looking to the past also necessitates looking to the future. Part of this is represented in the constellations present in the mural, “an entire galaxy of people working towards liberation,” Snow says.

And that “galaxy” for this mural includes those at Harmony House and beyond. Even during the making of the mural, students and a Stanford cook would drop by to help finish the massive project, which Snow only had six days to complete.

“The work, the community building, and all the magic that happens in this house in particular — the Harmony House — is finally reflected in the face of the house itself,” Anderson says.

At the core of the mural’s multiple themes, its magnetic energy has a message.

“Come to Harmony House,” Snow says. “People here will look after you.”