Re: Nicaragua
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:57 pm
NicaNotes: When Art Bloomed in the Secret Gardens of Managua
June 2, 2022
By Becca Renk
(Becca Renk is part of the Jubilee House Community, which works in sustainable development in Ciudad Sandino. The JHC also works to educate visitors to Nicaragua, including through their hospitality and solidarity cultural center at Casa Benjamin Linder. The first installment of this series on Managua’s murals was published in NicaNotes here: https://afgj.org/nicanotes-managuas-missing-murals.)
When I look back on the neoliberal period in Nicaragua from 1990 to 2006, my memories appear in shades of gray, covered in a layer of dust. There is a pervasive sense of helplessness and a numbing depression. Those were monochrome years of societal and cultural drought, when hope was suffocated.
In those years, Managua was gray – figuratively and literally. After a decade of the Contra war, thanks to U.S. meddling and funding, U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro had won the 1990 presidential elections, ushering in the 16-year neoliberal period.
Chamorro’s government erased the social gains of the Revolution. She welcomed the World Bank and IMF and followed their structural adjustment programs, which meant charging fees for public education and health care, refusing to raise wages for teachers, police, or any public worker. In the neoliberal era, the poor got poorer and the rich got richer until Nicaragua became one of the most unequal societies in the world.
The entirety of the country’s railroad tracks were torn up and sold for scrap, stoplights where people washed windows to survive became traffic circles where begging was impossible; crime and gang violence – nearly non-existent during the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s – rose at an alarming rate…and the colorful murals of the Revolution were erased with gray paint under the cover of night.
In the “capital of mural painting,” Managua, fervently anti-Sandinista mayor Arnoldo Alemán ordered revolutionary murals to be systematically painted over in an act of cultural imperialism that aimed to erase the Revolution itself and destroy the spiritof the Nicaraguan people.
With the neoliberal government’s antipathy toward cultural projects, artists, artisans and musicians found themselves struggling. Nicaraguan muralists, unable to find work in their own country, often travelled to Europe to seek commissions. Yet, in Managua there were pockets of hope – some murals were being guarded day and night, while a few new murals were being painted, blooming in secret gardens around the city.
One of these gardens was at Casa Benjamín Linder. In 1992, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Integral Community Development (FUNDECI), founded in the 1970s by former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister and Maryknoll priest Father Miguel d’Escoto, had its offices in Casa Ben Linder. Casa Ben Linder had been founded in 1988 by a group of U.S. citizens opposed to the U.S.-funded Contra war, and the Casa space was offered to solidarity organizations. Father Miguel, who died in 2017, in addition to being a liberation theologian, revolutionary, and statesman, was also a great lover of Nicaraguan art. Between 1993 and 1995, Father Miguel commissioned 12 murals at Casa Ben Linder that now are of historic and cultural significance. Although one mural was painted on the outside wall of the house; as murals around the city were erased, all the other murals were painted safely inside the walls of the Casa where they could be protected.
At the Santa Maria de Los Angeles Church in Managua’s Barrio Riguero, the murals are now covered because of their “disturbing images.”
Although there are other revolutionary murals in Managua that – through much effort – were saved, many of them are not accessible to the public. The unique murals that lift up the preferential option for the poor through images of Nicaraguan history in the Santa María de los Ángeles Church in Barrio Riguero, for example, were under constant threat for years despite being the only murals to be declared Cultural Patrimony of the Country twice. The priest of the parish, liberation theologian Father Uriel Molina, and a group of artists sent cease and desist letters to the church to stave off their destruction. In the early 2000s, after Father Molina was moved from the parish, a Franciscan priest from Guatemala oversaw the destruction of the altar, the baptismal font and other integral parts of the mural until the group sued the church and the priest for the destruction. Although the murals are still there, when the recent Light & Legacy Brigade went to the Santa María de los Ángeles Church recently, we weren’t allowed inside the sanctuary, which was completely sealed with tinted and curtained windows so as to not even allow a glimpse inside. We were informed we could come back for mass, but during mass the murals are hidden behind sheets and lace curtains so as to not offend the delicate sensibilities of churchgoers with “disturbing images.”
Let me take you on a tour of some of the murals that you can see today in Managua, ones that either survived Alemán’s gray brush, or were painted during that time of destruction.
At Casa Ben Linder there are four murals depicting the life of Ben Linder. Ben was an electrical engineer from the U.S. who came to Nicaragua in 1983 to support the Revolution, working on micro-hydro systems to bring electricity to villages in the war zones. We’ll dedicate a future article to the murals about Ben’s life.
“Empowerment” by Julie Aguirre at Casa Ben Linder, Managua. Painted in 1995, restored in 2005.
Father Miguel D’Escoto also commissioned two murals by Julie Aguirre, an important Nicaraguan artist from the PRAXIS movement. “Empowerment” is a typical Nicaraguan street scene done in the primitivist style. Although originally painted in 1995, an oven on the other side of the wall damaged the mural and in 2005 and 2006 the artist restored and also modernized it by adding details in the wall graffiti in the street scene. These changes are now like a snapshot of the neoliberal time period. For example,”6%” is written on the walls along the street, which refers to annual student protests demanding funding for universities. Another example is, “No más alzas al agua, luz etc.” which refers to the constant rate hikes in charges for basic services including water, electricity and transportation at the time. The “No al TLC, Sí a la Vida” refers to protests against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, which favored big business and was being debated at the time before it passed into law in April 2006.
“Güegüense Petroglyph” by Orlando Sobalvarro at Casa Ben Linder, Managua.
Casa Ben Linder also has a group of works called “Petroglyphs” by Orlando Sobalvarro, some are mosaics made of glazed clay tiles – “Petroglyphs of Matagalpa” – and some are incised concrete “Extraterrestrial Petroglyph” and “Güegüense Petroglyph.” Sobalvarro’s abstract art was a contrast to the mainly realist and primitivist work done during the Revolution. Sobalvarro, who died in 2009, believed that not only were abstract art and revolution compatible, but that capitalism impedes us from understanding abstract art, something that should be remedied as any form of illiteracy would be. He said, “It is important that the concepts of abstraction be understood by the general public, since the same pictorial qualities apply to painting as to political propaganda.”
Part of “Characters in History” showing Jesus and Dorothy Day by Diederik Grootjans at Casa Ben Linder, Managua
One of the most unusual murals at Casa Ben Linder is “Characters in History” by Dutch artist Diederik Grootjans in 1993. The artist was a volunteer with a Nicaraguan sister city project when he was invited to paint a mural at Casa Ben Linder by Father Miguel. Grootjans says that when he arrived at the house, Father Miguel already had the clay tiles laid out on the patio. Father Miguel pointed at the tiles and told Grootjans who was to be depicted in the mural – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a Nicaraguan worker woman, Dorothy Day, Jesus Christ, an Indigenous Nicaraguan woman, Leon Tolstoy, a Mayangna girl, and Mahatma Gandhi. The mural style is acrylic on clay tile, using the terracotta color of the tile as shading on the faces.
At the same time the murals at Casa Ben Linder were being painted, a few blocks to the west, community members in the Batahola Norte neighborhood were taking shifts to safeguard their fledgling Cultural Center where solidarity workers and children had painted murals in 1988. The community saw murals around the city being destroyed, and refused to accept that fate for their own murals, which were vulnerable in their open-air center. The people stood watch over their murals for months, eventually building a fence around their Center to protect them.
“New Dawn,” Batahola Cultural Center, Managua. Painted by the Boanerges Cerrato Artists Collective in 1988.
Although many murals have been painted at the Batahola Norte Cultural Center since the 1990s, the most well-known were painted with the Boanerges Cerrato Artists Collective in 1988. In the space the Center uses for mass is “New Dawn,” a manger scene with all people of color. In the center is baby Jesus, reaching for three angels above him. In the foreground, people modeled after real community members approach with offerings of fruits and vegetables. Guiding them are Che Guevara, FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca, anti-imperialist hero Sandino and Saint Oscar Romero of El Salvador.
In 1988 the Artists Collective also helped a group of children to develop their own ideas and paint their own mural, which today gives us a sweet glimpse into the minds of children living through a popular Revolution under constant threat of U.S aggression. The children decided to paint the history of the world, starting with the Big Bang, evolution of animals, and people. With the arrival of the atomic bomb, the dove of peace is killed and “black birds” circle. During the Contra war, U.S. planes would regularly fly over Nicaraguan air space and break the sound barrier as a terror tactic – these were called “Black Birds.” When they would hear the planes, the children of Managua would run for the bomb shelters that citizens had built in their tiny back yards, sometimes spending hours cowering in the damp spaces.
“Sandino’s hat protects us from the black birds,” by the children of the Batahola Norte Cultural Center, Managua.
The Batahola children’s mural continues with the return of peace with the Revolution, the martyrdom of FSLN guerillas and agrarian reform. In the next panel is painted, “Sandino’s hat protects us from the Black Birds,” and shows a black bird falling to the earth after being hit with lava spewing from Sandino’s hat. The next panel shows gains of the Revolution: houses built, the literacy campaign, and the “eradication of polio and Somocismo.”
Visitation under the Volcano” Grupo Artístico Contraste, Casa Ave María, Managua
A few blocks to the east of Casa Ben Linder, Episcopal priest Father Grant Mauricio Gallup commissioned Grupo Artístico Contraste to paint “The Visitation under the Volcano” in the early 1990s. The mural depicts Mary and Elizabeth pregnant with two liberators to be born, a rosary of women – including Dorothy Granada – who sacrificed for the social cause in Nicaragua, and Christ on the cross. Mary squats below the cross, hands uplifted over Jesus’ wounds. On the ground a photo of dictator Anastasio Somoza burns, in the background Managua’s Old Cathedral is covered with triumphant revolutionaries. According to Father Grant, who died in 2009, the mural illustrates Luke 1:52, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-06-02-2022
June 2, 2022
By Becca Renk
(Becca Renk is part of the Jubilee House Community, which works in sustainable development in Ciudad Sandino. The JHC also works to educate visitors to Nicaragua, including through their hospitality and solidarity cultural center at Casa Benjamin Linder. The first installment of this series on Managua’s murals was published in NicaNotes here: https://afgj.org/nicanotes-managuas-missing-murals.)
When I look back on the neoliberal period in Nicaragua from 1990 to 2006, my memories appear in shades of gray, covered in a layer of dust. There is a pervasive sense of helplessness and a numbing depression. Those were monochrome years of societal and cultural drought, when hope was suffocated.
In those years, Managua was gray – figuratively and literally. After a decade of the Contra war, thanks to U.S. meddling and funding, U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro had won the 1990 presidential elections, ushering in the 16-year neoliberal period.
Chamorro’s government erased the social gains of the Revolution. She welcomed the World Bank and IMF and followed their structural adjustment programs, which meant charging fees for public education and health care, refusing to raise wages for teachers, police, or any public worker. In the neoliberal era, the poor got poorer and the rich got richer until Nicaragua became one of the most unequal societies in the world.
The entirety of the country’s railroad tracks were torn up and sold for scrap, stoplights where people washed windows to survive became traffic circles where begging was impossible; crime and gang violence – nearly non-existent during the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s – rose at an alarming rate…and the colorful murals of the Revolution were erased with gray paint under the cover of night.
In the “capital of mural painting,” Managua, fervently anti-Sandinista mayor Arnoldo Alemán ordered revolutionary murals to be systematically painted over in an act of cultural imperialism that aimed to erase the Revolution itself and destroy the spiritof the Nicaraguan people.
With the neoliberal government’s antipathy toward cultural projects, artists, artisans and musicians found themselves struggling. Nicaraguan muralists, unable to find work in their own country, often travelled to Europe to seek commissions. Yet, in Managua there were pockets of hope – some murals were being guarded day and night, while a few new murals were being painted, blooming in secret gardens around the city.
One of these gardens was at Casa Benjamín Linder. In 1992, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Integral Community Development (FUNDECI), founded in the 1970s by former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister and Maryknoll priest Father Miguel d’Escoto, had its offices in Casa Ben Linder. Casa Ben Linder had been founded in 1988 by a group of U.S. citizens opposed to the U.S.-funded Contra war, and the Casa space was offered to solidarity organizations. Father Miguel, who died in 2017, in addition to being a liberation theologian, revolutionary, and statesman, was also a great lover of Nicaraguan art. Between 1993 and 1995, Father Miguel commissioned 12 murals at Casa Ben Linder that now are of historic and cultural significance. Although one mural was painted on the outside wall of the house; as murals around the city were erased, all the other murals were painted safely inside the walls of the Casa where they could be protected.
At the Santa Maria de Los Angeles Church in Managua’s Barrio Riguero, the murals are now covered because of their “disturbing images.”
Although there are other revolutionary murals in Managua that – through much effort – were saved, many of them are not accessible to the public. The unique murals that lift up the preferential option for the poor through images of Nicaraguan history in the Santa María de los Ángeles Church in Barrio Riguero, for example, were under constant threat for years despite being the only murals to be declared Cultural Patrimony of the Country twice. The priest of the parish, liberation theologian Father Uriel Molina, and a group of artists sent cease and desist letters to the church to stave off their destruction. In the early 2000s, after Father Molina was moved from the parish, a Franciscan priest from Guatemala oversaw the destruction of the altar, the baptismal font and other integral parts of the mural until the group sued the church and the priest for the destruction. Although the murals are still there, when the recent Light & Legacy Brigade went to the Santa María de los Ángeles Church recently, we weren’t allowed inside the sanctuary, which was completely sealed with tinted and curtained windows so as to not even allow a glimpse inside. We were informed we could come back for mass, but during mass the murals are hidden behind sheets and lace curtains so as to not offend the delicate sensibilities of churchgoers with “disturbing images.”
Let me take you on a tour of some of the murals that you can see today in Managua, ones that either survived Alemán’s gray brush, or were painted during that time of destruction.
At Casa Ben Linder there are four murals depicting the life of Ben Linder. Ben was an electrical engineer from the U.S. who came to Nicaragua in 1983 to support the Revolution, working on micro-hydro systems to bring electricity to villages in the war zones. We’ll dedicate a future article to the murals about Ben’s life.
“Empowerment” by Julie Aguirre at Casa Ben Linder, Managua. Painted in 1995, restored in 2005.
Father Miguel D’Escoto also commissioned two murals by Julie Aguirre, an important Nicaraguan artist from the PRAXIS movement. “Empowerment” is a typical Nicaraguan street scene done in the primitivist style. Although originally painted in 1995, an oven on the other side of the wall damaged the mural and in 2005 and 2006 the artist restored and also modernized it by adding details in the wall graffiti in the street scene. These changes are now like a snapshot of the neoliberal time period. For example,”6%” is written on the walls along the street, which refers to annual student protests demanding funding for universities. Another example is, “No más alzas al agua, luz etc.” which refers to the constant rate hikes in charges for basic services including water, electricity and transportation at the time. The “No al TLC, Sí a la Vida” refers to protests against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, which favored big business and was being debated at the time before it passed into law in April 2006.
“Güegüense Petroglyph” by Orlando Sobalvarro at Casa Ben Linder, Managua.
Casa Ben Linder also has a group of works called “Petroglyphs” by Orlando Sobalvarro, some are mosaics made of glazed clay tiles – “Petroglyphs of Matagalpa” – and some are incised concrete “Extraterrestrial Petroglyph” and “Güegüense Petroglyph.” Sobalvarro’s abstract art was a contrast to the mainly realist and primitivist work done during the Revolution. Sobalvarro, who died in 2009, believed that not only were abstract art and revolution compatible, but that capitalism impedes us from understanding abstract art, something that should be remedied as any form of illiteracy would be. He said, “It is important that the concepts of abstraction be understood by the general public, since the same pictorial qualities apply to painting as to political propaganda.”
Part of “Characters in History” showing Jesus and Dorothy Day by Diederik Grootjans at Casa Ben Linder, Managua
One of the most unusual murals at Casa Ben Linder is “Characters in History” by Dutch artist Diederik Grootjans in 1993. The artist was a volunteer with a Nicaraguan sister city project when he was invited to paint a mural at Casa Ben Linder by Father Miguel. Grootjans says that when he arrived at the house, Father Miguel already had the clay tiles laid out on the patio. Father Miguel pointed at the tiles and told Grootjans who was to be depicted in the mural – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a Nicaraguan worker woman, Dorothy Day, Jesus Christ, an Indigenous Nicaraguan woman, Leon Tolstoy, a Mayangna girl, and Mahatma Gandhi. The mural style is acrylic on clay tile, using the terracotta color of the tile as shading on the faces.
At the same time the murals at Casa Ben Linder were being painted, a few blocks to the west, community members in the Batahola Norte neighborhood were taking shifts to safeguard their fledgling Cultural Center where solidarity workers and children had painted murals in 1988. The community saw murals around the city being destroyed, and refused to accept that fate for their own murals, which were vulnerable in their open-air center. The people stood watch over their murals for months, eventually building a fence around their Center to protect them.
“New Dawn,” Batahola Cultural Center, Managua. Painted by the Boanerges Cerrato Artists Collective in 1988.
Although many murals have been painted at the Batahola Norte Cultural Center since the 1990s, the most well-known were painted with the Boanerges Cerrato Artists Collective in 1988. In the space the Center uses for mass is “New Dawn,” a manger scene with all people of color. In the center is baby Jesus, reaching for three angels above him. In the foreground, people modeled after real community members approach with offerings of fruits and vegetables. Guiding them are Che Guevara, FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca, anti-imperialist hero Sandino and Saint Oscar Romero of El Salvador.
In 1988 the Artists Collective also helped a group of children to develop their own ideas and paint their own mural, which today gives us a sweet glimpse into the minds of children living through a popular Revolution under constant threat of U.S aggression. The children decided to paint the history of the world, starting with the Big Bang, evolution of animals, and people. With the arrival of the atomic bomb, the dove of peace is killed and “black birds” circle. During the Contra war, U.S. planes would regularly fly over Nicaraguan air space and break the sound barrier as a terror tactic – these were called “Black Birds.” When they would hear the planes, the children of Managua would run for the bomb shelters that citizens had built in their tiny back yards, sometimes spending hours cowering in the damp spaces.
“Sandino’s hat protects us from the black birds,” by the children of the Batahola Norte Cultural Center, Managua.
The Batahola children’s mural continues with the return of peace with the Revolution, the martyrdom of FSLN guerillas and agrarian reform. In the next panel is painted, “Sandino’s hat protects us from the Black Birds,” and shows a black bird falling to the earth after being hit with lava spewing from Sandino’s hat. The next panel shows gains of the Revolution: houses built, the literacy campaign, and the “eradication of polio and Somocismo.”
Visitation under the Volcano” Grupo Artístico Contraste, Casa Ave María, Managua
A few blocks to the east of Casa Ben Linder, Episcopal priest Father Grant Mauricio Gallup commissioned Grupo Artístico Contraste to paint “The Visitation under the Volcano” in the early 1990s. The mural depicts Mary and Elizabeth pregnant with two liberators to be born, a rosary of women – including Dorothy Granada – who sacrificed for the social cause in Nicaragua, and Christ on the cross. Mary squats below the cross, hands uplifted over Jesus’ wounds. On the ground a photo of dictator Anastasio Somoza burns, in the background Managua’s Old Cathedral is covered with triumphant revolutionaries. According to Father Grant, who died in 2009, the mural illustrates Luke 1:52, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-06-02-2022