This sea rates an A!

Joining artist Antonio Garcia (front right) — better known as Chico — and his cousin Joelle Salas (back, far right) at the mural they helped create are (from left) 5th-grade teacher Crystal Soto, school secretary Joyce Borden, kindergarten teacher Beverly Rosario, 5th-grade teacher Jessica Gipson and Principal Maria Velez-Clarke of PS 361/the Children’s Workshop School. The group worked over the Rosh Hashanah holiday, with the educators preparing the walls, helping out on the background and sealing the completed artwork. School secretary Joyce Borden had a vision for the Children’s Workshop School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she has worked for 15 years: Why couldn’t some of the colorful murals that give the neighborhood its character and essence enliven her school building, too?

With her principal in agreement, Borden asked the legendary Antonio Garcia — better known as Chico, a community artist who has beautified buildings and stores throughout the neighborhood for decades — if he would sign on.

Soon it was all arranged: He would paint a mural extending throughout the entire third floor of the school.

“I’m so thrilled and happy to do it!” Chico said. “When I was young, I was always painting and coloring on the walls. My mom was very angry, but I loved the colors.”

Comparing it to school, where he said he had trouble following the rules and listening, he said, “For me, it was easy, creative and there were no rules.”

As he got older, Chico began painting murals on the abandoned buildings of the Lower East Side to help beautify the struggling neighborhood and to serve as a beacon of encouragement to children there.

“I wanted kids to feel safer, walking down blocks seeing crack addicts and prostitutes,” Chico said. “I had to make sure the neighborhood felt safer for me, my family and everyone.”

His work can now be found on storefronts and walls throughout the community, giving it the vibe the neighborhood has become famous for. He collaborated with Keith Haring in the 1980s and achieved his own level of fame, traveling to Tokyo, Paris, London and Germany to paint.

“Today, a lot of the Lower East Side is called the East Village,” Chico said. “It’s clean and beautiful, much safer than when I was growing up.”

The aquatic mural he painted for the school has meaning for him: “When kids go to school and see beauty, see fish and a world underneath the sea, it’s a world you don’t see — and kids also have a life that people don’t see — and they want to be seen! All the different fish in this painting, all different colors, they all get along, so to me, it’s an image of life for us humans, too.”

For UFT District 1 Representative Donna Manganello — who, like Borden, also lives in the neighborhood — the project has been incredible.

“I love the Lower East Side,” Manganello said. “We’re a hard-working community, we make change. This is very inspiring.”

And when students returned to the school following the weekend that the mural was painted, Borden said, “They were in awe of the mural. They love it!”

(left) Soto adds her own touches to the water, (middle) Gipson tackles the trim, (right) Borden is hard at work on the blue border of the mural.