Art Changes Everything

By Griffin Brandstetter

What is your hope or dream for the future you will inherit?

In what way could you make that dream come true?

These questions can have a lot of different answers for different people. During our stay here in Limon, we, two groups of Nicaraguan and American youth have come together to answer these questions in the form of murals. We have been working on these murals the entire time we have been here in Nicaraguan youth from Fenix and Patricia an experienced artist from the US. As a group we refined our basic ideas for these questions and the future into four statements:

• United we can achieve a better planet for a new future.
• Living in equilibrium with nature is sustainable.
• Within us is the power to change the world.
• The earth is our body and we should take care of it.

We based our murals off of these four statements and worked as a group to design renderings and paint the murals. We all had a group of people with youth from Fenix and SES so the collaboration process was in two languages and was sometimes difficult. All of the students from SES worked on their Spanish while the Fenix youth worked on their English. As a group it was sometimes difficult to figure out what the group wanted because of the language barriers but we ended up working hard to communicate so that we could all contribute. Sometimes our group was not very open to getting help which made it difficult to continue working but through asking others about their opinions we managed to collaborate and create ideas that we all agreed on and could paint a beautiful mural that we were all proud of. These murals show our shared vision for the future and will be traveling to Portland with members of Fenix in October.