By Chris Harding
Special to the Reporter

Dorchester artist Cynthia Marie Bogues is a little unsure about the gender of her "baby."

In encouraging fellow members of the Dorchester Arts Collaborative to visit City Hall Plaza to check out her "Celestial Cow" contribution to the world's largest and most popular public art project ever, she says, "Here is a link [to a photo] so that you can identify him/her when you see him…er, her." The source of the confusion: her daddy from North Carolina taught her that "cows have udders. Bulls have horns." (But it turns out a few rare breeds of cows can have both.)

One of two Dorchester artists selected to participate in Cow Parade Boston, Bogues painted perhaps the most astronomically motifed of the 117 life-sized bovine statues that are displayed in scattered herds on the plazas and in the arcades of the city for the summer. In September they'll be rounded up to be auctioned off to raise millions for the Jimmy Fund.

Cow Parade Boston, the latest in a worldwide series of let's-decorate-a-bunch-of-fiberglass-critters-for-charity events, was inspired by an original exhibition in Zurich in 1998. The Hub is roughly the 35th city globally to join the stampede this summer along with Lisbon, Edinburgh and Buenos Aires.

Bogues, who by day is an artist for Trader Joe's in Framingham, submitted a design based on an illustration she had used on a couple of painted jackets. "I'm working on a series of images inspired by celebrity faces," she says.

Among her commissioned clothing work, she created a hand-painted denim ensemble for R&B rocker, Teena Marie, Rick James' sidekick. "The central image is Teena Marie's face as the sun with her hair radiating out as the rays of the sun. Superimposed over half of the sunface is a Teena Marie crescent moonface. When the viewer steps back the two images coalesce into one portrait image. The stars over the rest of the cow's body have come from the union of the sun and the moon."

Bogues used her $1000 honorarium to hire a truck to bring her blank statue to her Fields Corner living room where it took her a month and a half to put the sun/moon conjunction and starry and cloudy skies on her cow.

Samm, as she's known to her friends, is adept at working on many other surfaces besides pseudo-cowhide. Visitors to her website ladycapricorndesigns.com can view the scope of her talent. Locally she has done murals for two Bowdoin Street businesses. She developed the "Unconditional Loveline," a series of illustrations addressing issues of child abuse, domestic violence, racism, and sexual abuse for the Dorchester Community News. Represented by Dot's AfricanWinter Gallery, she has captured the likenesses of many other celebrities on clothing and canvas.

Bogues hopes many Dorchester art-lovers can mosey on over to City Hall Plaza some time this summer to give her creation "positive love vibes" whatever its sex may be. Those who can't hoof it down there can view the "Celestial Cow" and the works of Dorchester's other Parade artist Howie Green, who will be profiled in next week's Reporter, at boston.cowparade.com.