Strike Mural artist Andrea Kantrowitz at Public Art & Popular Movements Event in Jay — Sept. 27

The Scontras Center for Labor and Community Education is hosting a presentation with Jay Strike Mural artist Andrea Kantrowitz, former Jay paper mill strikers and activists at the Local 14 Solidarity Center on September 27 from 9am to 3pm. The event will be a lively exploration of the role of art in building movements for workers' rights and social justice.

In 1988, Kantrowitz was in a residency program for emerging artists at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture when she learned about the Local 14 International Paper Strike in Jay. As she recalled in 2008, she was inspired by the “sense of unity, purpose and shared sacrifice” of the strikers and accepted an invitation to paint a mural for the outside of the Local 14 union hall with images from the strike. Upon a visit to the union hall in 2008, she reflected on her work and reconnected with strikers who continued to use the hall.

“When I returned to the Union hall this summer, it was remarkable to see how much and how little had changed,” she wrote. “The participants in this heroic effort had returned to their normal lives and now, 20 years later, and 20 years older, were playing pool, smoking cigarettes and telling stories in a union hall full of beat up couches and worn out decks of cards. I wondered how many people had driven by the mural (it faces the main road in Jay) and what they thought of it. I wondered if my mural had become, like the strike, a part of the community that had once happened, that was sometimes forgotten, but was there to be seen and thought about by anyone who wanted to.”

WHAT: Public Art & Popular Movements: The Jay Strike Mural

WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 27, 9am-3pm,

WHERE: Local 14 Solidarity Center, 6 Intervale Rd. Jay, ME

For more information: scontrascenter@maine.edu