Nature’s elements and an apartment building’s disintegrating bricks had hastened the demise of a 23-year-old mural, the last in New York City created by Eva Cockcroft, a global political activist and artist who died in 1999.

The three-story Harlem scene of lush green trees, river waves and clear blue skies, have turned grey and lack luster, said Jane Weissman of Heritage Preservation’s Rescue Public Murals project. But Janet Braun-Reinitz of Artmakers plans to save it.

Braun-Reinitz has assembled a team of artists who erected a scaffold on the side of the Washington apartment building on 142nd Street at Amsterdam Avenue to restore the fading “Homage to Seurat: La Grand Jatte In Harlem” in memory of Cockcroft; their mentor and friend.

With a $70,000 grant from the Friends of Heritage Preservation, the renovation became a moment for Cockcroft to deliver a final lesson, said Braun-Reinitz, who has painted more than 50 murals.

“I hear her voice sometimes when I’m up here,” she said pointing at the scaffold while holding a cigarette and wearing paint-stained green overalls and red high heel shoes. “It says don’t worry. Just paint.”

The mural, inspired by George Seurat’s famed “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” depicts African-Americans enjoying a day along the Hudson. It’s surrounded by a garden, secured by an iron gate and protected by local residents.

“I saw it go up and now I see them changing it,” said Robert Harris, a former urban developer who worked in the garden in 1970. “People have come and gone but, that was always here.”

Harris, 65, said the mural, unveiled last week, was an integral part of the Sugar Hill neighborhood. He never met Cockcroft, but said many remember her dedication and talent.

Community garden members commissioned Cockcroft in 1986, after they won a Parks Department contest to have an artist paint a mural in their honor, Reinitz said.

Cockcroft had just visited political murals in Chile and had created, in New York’s East Village, “La Lucha,” the city’s first multimural park; her work there called for better police and community relations, supported women’s rights and protested the U.S. intervention in Central America, apartheid in South Africa and racism.

Cockcroft, who died of breast cancer, became an international figure, Braun-Reinitz said, as artists convened at her home in SoHo.

Timothy Drescher, public mural historian and former co-editor of Community Murals Magazine, said Cockcroft was “important to the mural movement as a contributor and as an inspiration.” She changed the art form in three ways, he said.

“Her works such as ‘Towards A People’s Art’ are still the best discussion of the first decade of the mural movement,” he said. She also started organizations in New York, including Artmakers, that supported aspiring artists.

“I’m sure she would never say she was my mentor because we were the same age and all that, but I felt she was someone from whom I constantly learned,” Braun-Reinitz said as embers from her cigarette, nearly a butt, fell to the garden’s brick stone.

Cockcroft’s legacy lives, Braun-Reinitz said, speaking of the team of artists she assembled including Cockcroft’s former students. Apprentices also worked alongside members of Artmakers, which Brain-Reinitz now serves as president.

*Artist Maria Dominguez, who also credited Cockcroft as an inspiration, was among the team of artists.

“Even in her death she’s teaching me,” Dominguez said. “Look. She choose this wall out of all others.” Dominguez brushed the gritty wall and pointed out grooved mounds that protruded. Instead of sanding the thousands of “bumps” down, Dominguez said, Cockcroft integrated the texture into the mural, giving it a three-dimensional property.

“I never would have choosen this wall,” she said, noting the work is for the public, not the artist. “Selfish me.”

To begin the restoration, the artists coated the mural in a clear primer they repainted according to Cockcroft’s documents and pictures. But building repairs had damaged 20 percent of the mural, Braun-Reinitz said, and damage from weather left the crew with additional creative challenges.

“Eva was the one who looked at these walls and said, ‘What do you do with these textures?’” she said. “These boring, miserable, uneven walls.”

The finished mural will receive a protective gloss and varnish that Braun-Reinitz said will shield the mural from the sun’s rays but will aid in future restorations.

“This goes beyond a typical mural where someone puts up an image on a blank wall,” said Laurie Sheridan, another artist working on the restoration. “This helps maintain the flavor of the community when everything is changing so fast.”

She dipped her brush into more paint and stroked the now vibrant red, blue and green walls of the Washington.

“It’s not going away now.”

*Maria Dominguez and the three apprentices Janet Braun-Reinitz mentioned were paid. Dominguez was not a volunteer.