The murals of Nicaragua come with a sense of history as deep as that which pervades Gettysburg. Through artworks on the scale of walls, murals tell a story, one that can be linear but not always so. Project Gettysburg Leon (PGL) has over its many years as a sister city with Nicaragua supported these stories and has done so in both countries. Three years ago, PGL as part of its cross-cultural work in Nicaragua sponsored a mural in the center of Leon, the country’s second-largest city. This mural was created with the help of children and teenagers from the education programs that PGL was providing support to. The mural is located just around the corner from the city cathedral, which is a UN World Heritage site. The central figure is Ruben Dario, the greatest poet in Latino history and a son of the city of Leon.
Two years ago, PGL brought two Nicaraguan artists to Gettysburg to create a mural at The Painted Turtle Farm on the Gettysburg College campus. Local Latino families helped in the design and students from The College as well as community members assisted the artists in bringing this mural to life, a work that qualifies the tool shed at the farm as the most beautiful such shed in the state of Pennsylvania.
PGL is helping to support a mural project that includes three panels. The panels on each side will be painted by people in rural Nicaraguan communities with a center panel being painted by artists of Believe In Art, one of the programs supported by PGL.
PGL works in many other ways, both in Nicaragua and the U.S. The food gardens programs in rural Nicaraguan villages and at the school for children with disabilities in the Leon barrio of Sutiaba are examples. These programs also have a component of art, with murals adorning the walls of the school and with painting classes for rural families who have never before had the opportunity to hold a brush in their hands. Life is hard in a country as poor as Nicaragua, still classified as the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere, but that makes the creation of art even more important, as a way to say there is more to life than struggle and that struggle has meaning. The same is true in the U.S. This is what art can create, and what murals such as these have to say beyond just being decorations on a wall.
In Gettysburg, murals have many forms, such as the beautiful work on Coster Avenue depicting one aspect of The Battle, or the diorama at the Battlefield’s History Center. The Painted Turtle Farm mural has a different intent but is true to the same vision of showing the way people live through visuals, not only through words, whether the time they lived in is long past or whether that time is today. There might well be new murals that are part of Gettysburg’s future as well, just as there will be in Nicaragua. This is a language shared, across time and geography.
If you would like to see a small selection of the murals associated with PGL’s work, please go to this link…
Gregory Bowles
Greg Bowles is the current director for Project Gettysburg Leon, the sister city program between Gettysburg and the country of Nicaragua that was founded in 1986
