Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
As the Birthplace of Rivers, Pocahontas County is the ideal place to promote a clean water initiative and so it’s fitting that the county’s library system will host a mobile mural created by the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.
The mural was painted at the Clean Water for All event held January 9 in Charleston and features brushstrokes by more than 100 supporters of the Rivers Coalition.
“We commissioned a local artist, Nicole Westfall, to help us paint a mural,” Rivers Coalition communications manager Maggie Stange said. “She focuses on making big murals that pack a lot of meaning into them. She also does a lot of community focused paintings.”
The mural was painted on a freestanding canvas which also has a frame. This makes it easier to travel around the state, and Stange said she is excited to see the mural kick off its maiden voyage.
“It definitely wasn’t something that was within our plans,” she said. “We knew that we wanted to have some sort of arts initiative to talk to people about water quality issues and kind of do something meaningful at the event. As we started planning more of the event and confirmed that Nicole Westfall would be the artist doing the mural, we sort of dreamed big and decided to make it a traveling mural.”
The mural is currently at Green Bank Library and will move to McClintic Library in Marlinton before leaving the county and heading to 11 more West Virginia counties this year.
From there, the possibilities are endless.
Stange said she hopes to eventually see the mural make it to all 55 counties and has even had inquiries from an organization in Kentucky that would like to display the mural, as well.
“There’s potential for this mural to go beyond West Virginia, but right now our focus is within the mountain state,” she said. “We’re so happy with the engagement it’s provided us.”
The mural has the saying, “In each drop a dream: all our mountain streams run clean,” and depicts two small children playing in a stream full of aquatic creatures that call West Virginia streams home.
“Within the mural, there’s a bunch of West Virginia motifs – from the great blue heron to opossums and native brook trout, as well as rainbow trout and a box turtle,” Stange said. “One of the children is leaning down to pick up a crawdad out of the river.
“The crawdad, for us, is almost like an inside joke,” she continued. “It has sort of become a mascot in a sense. We’re really excited to have it worked into the mural, as well. It’s just such a tangible memory for people in the region who have grown up catching crawdads.”
The mural is a reminder of what the streams have been like for past generations and, hopefully, also serves as a reminder that West Virginia wants its streams to continue to be welcoming and, more importantly, clean.
“We tried to make it encompass what the future of our waters in West Virginia would look like,” Stange said.
The mural will be at the Green Bank Library until July 23 and will then move to McClintic Library to be on display from July 24 to August 7.