CREATE Resilience Murals
How do we create a better future?
How do we CREATE Resilience?
One way is through fostering resilient communities with members that are knowledgeable about their local environment and connected to each other. To this end, Nurture Nature Center worked with youth, adults, and municipal leaders in three communities – Easton, Wilson, and Bangor, PA – to co-create a vision of community resilience, shown here in these murals that were created by participating artists.
The CREATE Resilience project is a 4-year multi-disciplinary collaboration to engage youth and community to increase knowledge of weather and climate science, the risks from local hazards, and strategies for hazard mitigation. Through community meetings, surveys, interviews, story-gathering and photovoice exhibits, forums, and community mapping exercises, NNC engaged the community in thinking about what resilience means.
Bangor area artist Jim Gloria, Easton area artist Jackie Lima, and Wilson area artist Don Wilson gave voice to these visions of resilience in 2021 through the creation of these murals.
These murals are a lasting reminder of the importance of community connections, preparedness, and education. The mural will stay in the community but move to different locations in order to reach more residents.
Responses to community poll question: “Imagine your community in its ideal state of resilience as you envision it. What words describe that community?”
PRESS RELEASE — AUGUST 28, 2020
Nurture Nature Center is pleased to announce that as part of a four-year project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Nurture Nature Center (NNC) will be commissioning three artists living in the Easton, Wilson and Bangor areas to produce community-specific murals that envision a more resilient future.
NNC’s project, called “CREATE Resilience: Community Resilience through Education, Art, Technology and Engagement”, was one of nine projects awarded nationally (2018) in a highly competitive grant process through NOAA’s Office of Education. The project is a multi-discipline effort to help regional communities understand the science of hazards and strategies for resilience.
Artists were selected on the following criteria: residency and engagement in the community they represent, skillset in the arts and ability to visually communicate concepts, and an interest in learning about environmental hazards. The three artists that have been contracted are: Jackie Lima (Easton, PA) painter of large scale works and professor of art at Fairleigh Dickinson University; Don Wilson (Williams Township, PA – Wilson) muralist, educator and Master Watershed Steward; and James Gloria (Bangor, PA) muralist, arts educator, director of the Totts Gap Arts Institute and founder of the Heritage Mural Education Program, Bangor, PA.
Both Jackie Lima and Don Wilson have been participating as partnering artists with the center for several years and Jackie currently has a solo show of her works at the center. This exhibit, “Infamous Oculus,” will be featured in a virtual gallery tour coming soon.
The artists have been attending community events and meeting with NNC staff to begin the process of understanding the topics that affect their community. Additionally, the artists will be working with project advisor and NNC Resident Artist Tom Maxfield who illustrated NNC’s “Living Local” mural which features over 80 locally relevant environmental topics. The mural was recently replicated and installed at Moravian College’s Collier Hall of Science.
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This web page was prepared by the to Nurture Nature Center, Inc. under award NA18SEC0080005 from the Environmental Literacy Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA or the U.S. Department of Commerce.