The too-often mean streets of downtown Holyoke are a little brighter this week with the unveiling of a colorful mural depicting scenes from the city’s past, present and hoped-for future. Designed and executed by a team of five Holyoke twelfth-graders, the 8 x 36-foot panorama is the culmination of an eight-week Mural Arts Workshop led by Carla Wojczuk, a community arts facilitator and UMass grad student in the Social Justice Education program. The workshop employed “counter-storytelling” to counteract majoritarian images of race and class and replace them with “stories of personal and collective importance, and encourage social action and reflection through community-based art-making.”
The mural adorns a streetside wall of the Victory Theater, an abandoned Holyoke landmark recently acquired by MIFA, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, which intends to restore the building to its former glory as an anchor in the developing downtown renaissance. The unveiling and dedication ceremony this Thursday includes refreshments and a showcase of work by other students in the Connections after-school enrichment program.
Dec. 17, 3:30 p.m., 134 Chestnut St., Holyoke. Free. For more information call (303) 908-5392.