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Frontier Justice
The mural Frontier Justice by Eric J. García is located on the north side of the E-Z Recycling building at 875 North Prior Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, within the Creative Enterprise Zone. This visually engaging public artwork integrates elements of the building’s structure directly into its design and communicates strong social and environmental messages. The focal points of the mural are two animal characters—a deer and a loon—positioned in the foreground and middle ground. The deer, depicted in yellow, stands on land facing left, while the blue loon paddles a canoe down a river in the same direction. Both characters carry baskets filled with glass bottles and aluminum cans, cleverly utilizing the building’s actual windows as the baskets. This integration of architectural features into the artwork is a testament to García’s thoughtful and innovative mural design. Color plays a central role in the visual impact of Frontier Justice. García restricts his palette to primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—with accents of white. The loon is dressed in a Minnesota Twins baseball cap, while the deer wears a white T-shirt referencing the controversial Line 3 pipeline. The deer stands in a powerful, dominant stance with its right hoof resting on painted blue pipes in the foreground. Holding an axe, the figure evokes the legendary Minnesotan icon, Paul Bunyan. At the bottom left corner of the mural, the axe is shown splitting the end of the pipeline, another reference to environmental activism and resistance to Line 3. García again demonstrates his creative abilities by incorporating the building’s actual pipes at the base of the building, into the composition of the mural, making them part of the pipeline imagery. The background features a shore lined with white and yellow pine trees, with red mountains rising behind them. Finally, in the upper left corner, a factory releases smoke, spreading across the top of the mural.