Pope Leo XIV is staring out from the wall of Bake Shop on Bogart Street, and he is not alone. To his right is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Behind them, a Terminator’s chrome skull. Bake Shop owner Massimo painted the mural over three weeks in December.
It has been on the wall ever since, but for most of New York it landed last week. Isla DeLuca posted a photo of it on X with the caption “coffee shop by my house inexplicably has a mural of Pope Leo XIV and the Terminator on their wall.” The post crossed 650,000 impressions and drew hundreds of quote tweets, including one from Bushwick filmmaker Anthony DiMieri, who helped produce Mayor Mamdani’s campaign videos, that read simply: “i love bushwick.”
The work has roots in Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical and a Vatican climate conference last October at which Schwarzenegger told a global audience the Catholic Church was a “power” that could help “terminate pollution.”
“It was inspired by what’s happening in the world,” Massimo said one recent afternoon, standing under the mural. “But in the course of painting it, one thing that struck me was how much people stopped to ask me why. It turned into me asking them what they thought I was painting.”
The literal answer goes back to Oct. 1, 2025, when more than a thousand religious leaders, scientists, climate organizers and international officials gathered at the Mariapolis Center in Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence about 15 miles outside Rome, for a conference called “Raising Hope for Climate Justice.” Massimo was there with an exhibition of his own paintings, mounted alongside the three-day gathering, which marked the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on the environment. The conference was organized by the Laudato Si’ Movement, which now counts hundreds of chapters around the world.
It was Pope Leo’s first major speech on the climate. And the crowd heard him introduced by an unexpected hype man.
“Schwarzenegger is a huge climate advocate, both in his advocacy life and when he was governor of California,” Massimo said. The action star gestured to Pope Leo, who had ordered solar panels installed at the Vatican as one of his first acts in office, and called him “an action hero.” Then, citing the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion members, 400,000 priests and 200,000 churches, Schwarzenegger described that reach as “a power” in “our environmental movement to terminate pollution.”
“That’s hilarious,” Massimo said. “That’s what stuck with me.”
The mural is the latest installment in Art for Laudato Si’, Massimo’s series of public works named for the encyclical, which framed climate change and economic inequality as a single moral question. He’s been at this for 20 years, and his bakeries have been part of the project from the start. The original Little Cupcake Bakeshop, which he co-founded in Bay Ridge in 2005 with his brothers Salvatore and Luigi, was one of the first small businesses in the city to put out a public green build-out: recycled denim insulation, FSC-certified timber, wind-power sourcing, the works. The SoHo location, at Prince and Mott, opened on 10/10/10, a date chosen to coincide with 350.org’s first international day of climate action. Massimo wrote about it that year in HuffPost under the title “The Little Green Bakeshop That Could.”
“All the science facts are on the table,” he said. “But obviously we’re more than just rational creatures. We act on emotions and other parts of our identities. That lens was super inspiring, and I wanted more people to learn about it.”
Longtime Bushwick Daily readers may remember an earlier piece in the series. In 2021, Massimo painted a mural on the side of Bake Shop depicting a vision of universal basic income: $1,000 a month redeemable only at independent restaurants serving organic food, a proposal he framed as solving the climate, hunger and small-restaurant crises at the same time. He painted the same mural on the corner wall of Little Cupcake Bakeshop in SoHo. Alice Waters, the Chez Panisse chef who effectively launched the American farm-to-table movement, saw the SoHo version on Instagram and reposted it. “This would be my dream!” Waters wrote. “It is certainly needs to happen to save our farm to table restaurants in this country.”
The SoHo wall has its own cultural history. In September 2012, Amanda Bynes, at what would later be recognized as the start of her public mental-health crisis, barricaded herself in the bakery’s bathroom for more than 30 minutes, prompting a fellow customer who happened to be an FDNY firefighter to call police about breaking down the door. (She emerged unbothered, telling staff she’d been doing her makeup.) Gawker’s Caity Weaver later folded the standoff into a long-form, tweet-heavy piece on Bynes’ decline that went viral in its own right. A short L ride away, the LoBuglio brothers’ Prospect Heights location has hosted a Shepard Fairey climate mural on its outer wall. Over 20 years, the family’s bakeries have collected an unlikely amount of cultural history.
The new mural arrives at a more personal moment. Massimo was in Rome through Pope Francis’ final months and met him in person on Feb. 14, 2025, weeks before his death.
“He gave an audience for about 15 minutes after I met him,” Massimo said. “Even when he was in the hospital, I was still in Rome, and people were in St. Peter’s Square every night, candles and prayers, 30-minute rosaries for him to get better, every day. They just kept doing it. I’d made so many paintings of him, so to see the person in person, it was a good thing.”
All of that history is in the wall on Bogart Street: the encyclical, the Schwarzenegger speech, the path from Francis to Leo, 20 years of murals from Bay Ridge to Bushwick. Massimo is in no rush to spell any of it out. Customers walking by have offered him every reading from “Saint Francis on the air” to a Star Wars reference. (A couple of younger passersby insisted the T-1000 was C-3PO.) One asked whether you needed to have seen “The Terminator” to get it.
“Not necessarily,” Massimo told her. “The real answer would shock you. You’d have had to be at a very specific climate conference a couple of years ago to fully understand it.”
The mural is on view at Bake Shop, on the corner of Bogart Street and Flushing Avenue.
