Sometime next month, the brick-clad Peabody/Englewood senior housing building at the crossroads of Peabody Square will be dressed up with a 1,500-square-foot mural created by a 30-year-old artist who grew up in Dorchester and Brighton.

Mattaya Fitts, who moved to Brooklyn in December 2019 and works there for a professional mural company, will return in mid-May to paint a little peacefulness in her former neighborhood.

“It’s definitely going to be one of the larger murals I’ve created,” Fitts said in an interview last week. “Overall, I’d say the encompassing themes are personal transformation, self-care, healing, and the relationship between us and nature…I just really wanted to tap into themes of growth and how we can look at nature and find commonalities between the natural world and ourselves.”

Fitts said the mural, which will be titled “Joy of Growing,” will be about acknowledging one’s personal journey, knowing one is going through that journey and may not be at the end. The central figure will be a large person in the ‘tree pose,’ borrowing a stance from yoga – though she said the theme is not about yoga.

The existing trees in front of the large wall on the Dorchester Avenue side of the building will play into the mural as well, giving it a three-dimensional quality. Finally, a theme of butterflies and caterpillars and their journey of change will be reflected in the mural.

However, she said it won’t be something that will overpower the urbanscape.

“Since it’s about self-care and healing, I wanted it to be really soothing to look at – some blues and purple and tones you would say are pastel,” said Fitts. “I don’t want it to overwhelm that space. The intersection there is really busy and loud, and I hope people will look at it in this context and feel at peace.”

The mural on the BHA property is part of a larger program by the agency to add some extra life to many of their buildings citywide. Last year, a mural was added to the Patricia White development in Brighton and another project is just about to start at Franklin Field on Stratton Street.

The Peabody/Englewood mural will be the largest and most visible within the program to date, according to BHA Administrator Kate Bennett.

“We are thrilled to have so many local artists bring new color and beauty to our public housing communities,” Bennett said. “These murals will be an awesome reminder that our residents and communities are central to the urban fabric of this city.”

Fitts spent most of her life living in Dorchester and Brighton before moving to Brooklyn. She attended the Haley School on American Legion Highway in Mattapan, and then Boston Latin Academy. During her school years, she said, she was very involved in the Artists for Humanity program, now located in South Boston, and that really shaped her desire to be an artist.

“We are all artists in some capacity as children and we draw and paint and create things,” she said. “Many of us leave that behind as we get older. It started the same way for me, but I never left it behind…Drawing, painting, and communicating a vision have always been part of my life since elementary school.”

Fitts enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art (Mass Art) in Mission Hill, and originally chose to pursue photography. Eventually, though, she landed in painting and worked at canvas paintings. However, unsure that this was a career path, she stepped away from painting after college. It wasn’t long, though, that she knew she needed to revisit things.

“I had to step away from it after college for a while to know that I needed to do it,” she said.

In 2017, she said she began looking into mural painting.

“The scale of the work and it being outdoors and in the community – making it so accessible to everyone – there’s something about that which really clicked for me,” she said.

Fitts has collaborated on other murals in Boston recently, particularly one done last year with Artists for Humanity on the side of the Sportsman’s Tennis Club along Blue Hill Avenue. She said she has been inspired by the many artists working in Boston on community murals and noted that there is a home-grown movement afoot here.

“There is so much talent in Boston,” she said. “The people that do murals in Boston are very open to other artists and it’s not snooty or like you can’t talk to them. People here are doing beautiful work. There’s always a commitment to community in them. You can see that and see that so much time and thought went into the work…The artists in Boston doing murals here have a connection to Boston or are from Boston…They have their hand on the pulse of the community.”

This year, upon hearing about the new Joy Agenda that started under former Acting Mayor Kim Janey, and continued under Mayor Michelle Wu, Fitts applied to see if she could be a part of it. Within the Joy Agenda was a budget for murals on city buildings. Fitts said she was contacted by the city and accepted into the program.

She was given a choice of two different walls, and eventually chose the Peabody/Englewood site. Her proposal was approved by the Boston Arts Commission earlier this month.

So far, she said, she has met with residents of the building a few times and gathered input from them. She has also been sharing ideas with building administrators. More times than not, though, she said, people wonder about how she’ll handle the overall size of the piece.

“It’s not completely new to me anymore, but when you’re in front of that big wall, it can still sometimes be a little overwhelming,” she said. “It doesn’t seem as big to me anymore, but my first mural was 8 x 8 and I was intimidated by it. Now, I see 30 feet, or 50 feet, and I can handle that.”

Fitts said she plans to start in mid-May and work every day for about three weeks to complete the artwork.