The three posters are faded, aged, and wrapped in plastic, but the conviction in the messages — and the strength of the design — remain intact. Notes fixed to the wall, as aged as the posters themselves, offer context for non-Spanish speakers.
One translates the slogan on the left-hand side: “Mother: Wherever your name is spoken, victory is said.”
“For the blood of our dead and the future of our children, we defend the revolution,” the center one reads. “AMNLAE, the national women’s organization, is named for a woman killed by the National Guard under Somoza.” At the time of writing, the organization had 60,000 members and influenced “policies related to health, education, child care, adoption, family law and employment. In León, the Sister City Project was instrumental in opening a women’s legal office under the auspices of AMNLAE.”
The third poster is perhaps the most direct: “The Nicaraguan people will never surrender.”
The piece is part of “Sisters! Visualizing Solidarity & Resistance,” a joint project of The New Haven León Sister City Project and the Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library, curated by Martha Willette Lewis and Maxim Schmidt and running now at the Institute Library at 847 Chapel St. through April 5.
The NHLSCP’s work has “promoted social justice, education and sustainable development in the New Haven and León communities for 40 years. In New Haven they work to build new projects and coalitions to confront the climate crisis,” “address root causes of poverty and injustice,” and “build empathy globally and locally,” an accompanying note states. “The show displays posters, art and banners from NHLSCP’s decades of work in Nicaragua, New Haven and beyond.” The materials include from pieces from the NHLSCP archive and “more recent projects done locally with school groups and students.”
“This exhibition is a celebration of that history and of the wealth of ingenuity, pathos and beauty that goes into effecting change. It is a testament to the fundamental importance of the arts to free expression and to changing hearts and minds,” the accompanying note continues.
“The show connects to themes of solidarity with vulnerable people in Nicaragua trying to rebuild after the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979, and NHLSCP’s ‘people to people’ diplomacy in the 1980s, that rejected US government hostility to the new Nicaraguan administration. The exhibit also explores more contemporary efforts as NHLSCP works to limit climate change impacts (droughts, floods, hurricanes) on vulnerable villages where the organization also runs education, women’s and public health programs.”
The show illustrates “all NHLSCP and the New Haven community have done in the name of social and ecological justice.” It also illuminates a deeper point about leftist movements for social change and resistance at a time when protests have erupted in New Haven and beyond against the still-new second Trump administration.
Among the subjects the boldly designed posters reveal are the power of coalition building, between groups that at first glance may not necessarily work well together, but can if united in a common effort. Side by side in the same campaigns were Christian and Marxist groups — which, under the prevailing spirit of liberation theology in Latin America at the time, were much closer in common cause than they are in the current American political context — but nonetheless had their differences that they could (apparently) put aside to lend their hands in the longer struggles for social equity and supporting democracy.
The activists of the 1980s documented in the show also had a keen sense of the ways their struggles were not unique. At that time, the similarities were perhaps too sharp, as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua alike were suffering armed conflicts between Marxist rebels and the U.S.-backed regimes. But beneath the shooting wars lay deeper parallels of social and economic inequalities as well as environmental depredation that last to this day. The constant awareness of international trends appears today as well, as America’s shift to the right, and the political chaos in its wake, have their analogues in ongoing political turmoil in Europe and Latin America. We can recognize that we are not alone, as they recognized it then.
The more recent pieces — from New Haven, and dealing primarily with the environment — lean even harder into that global perspective, casting a glance across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone and its rapidly vanishing coastal places. All coasts are seeing the effects of climate change, but some more than others. Maybe they are harbingers of the problems that await us all; maybe they’re places that just have the bad luck to have to suffer more. Either way, the attention matters.
In the sum of its parts, “Sisters!” shows the interconnectedness of social movements across issues, across geography, and across the decades. It gives a perspective that zooms way out past our current moment, offering an angle that lends some clarity. It’s easy to get tossed and turned by each breaking headline, sometimes a few a day, and to feel exhausted by them. “Sisters!” reminds viewers social struggles are much, much longer than that, governed ultimately by forces far beyond the scope of one or even a few presidential regimes. To engage in them is to get involved in the work of more than one lifetime. That work began before we were born and will continue after us. Those who do that work often don’t live to see the results of their labor. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.
“Sisters! Visualizing Solidarity & Resistance” runs at the Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through April 5. Visit the library’s website for more details.
