New Murals Make a Splash in Downtown Lowell

The mural by artist David Zayas is located at 207 Market Street in downtown Lowell. Depictions of children, animals, and traditional Puerto Rican symbols feature prominently in his art.

Have you noticed anything different in Downtown Lowell lately?

Project LEARN is deeply grateful that our collaboration with Beyond Walls, Community Teamwork, and the artists David Zayas and Evaristo Angurria has brought two breathtaking murals to our city.

David Zayas is a Puerto Rican fine artist and activist who has exhibited artwork and painted murals globally. His mural (above) is located at 207 Market Street and overlooks the Athenian Corner parking lot. Zayas is honored to represent Lowell's vibrant Puerto Rican community, the city’s largest Latino population with more than 12,000 residents. His mural is dedicated to the strength and resilience of women worldwide who have endured hardship during the course of the 2020-2021 Pandemic. Traditional Puerto Rican symbols, such as the rooster, which represents strength, are often depicted in his murals. Society is the central theme of his work, which he portrays through images of children, women, and animals. He received his Bachelor’s in Painting from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico in 2003 and is currently a professor at Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan, where he teaches the only Urban Art course offered in Puerto Rico.

The mural, created by the Dominican artist Evaristo Angurria, is located in the Gates Block Garden at 167 Dutton Street in Lowell, adjacent to the Community Teamwork Youth Opportunity Center. His mural honors Mechanic's Hall, an abolitionist historical site recognized by the National Park Service.

Evaristo Angurria is a Dominican artist, graphic designer, and activist with more than 20 years of experience in the advertising industry. His mural (above) can be found in the Gates Block Garden located at 167 Dutton Street, which is home to Community Teamwork's Youth Opportunity Center. This mural honors the history of Mechanic's Hall, an abolitionist site recently recognized by the National Park Service. Angurria has taught courses for the School of Arts of Chavón, APEC University, Brothers, Centro Leon and Creative Box. He currently lives in Los Alcarrizos, a municipality of the Santo Domingo province in the Dominican Republic, with his spouse and family.

Subscribers can read more about this awesome collaboration between Project LEARN and Beyond Walls in The Lowell Sun.

Lowell’s Untold History

Angurria's Mural Honors Lowell Historical Site Recognized by the National Park Service

Barbershops and hair salons have historically served as safe spaces for BIPOC and marginalized immigrant communities. Angurria's Dutton Street mural honors the legacy of a Black-owned barbershop that functioned as a meeting place for abolitionists during the 1850s.

Mechanic’s Hall on Dutton Street in Lowell as it appeared in 1912. Source: National Park Service.

In 1850, Nathaniel Booth, an escaped slave from Virginia, opened a barbershop on the first floor of Mechanic’s Hall on 141 Dutton St., which became a center for abolitionist activity.

Angurria's Dutton Street mural belongs to an ongoing series titled, Doña Patria: Dominican Beauty, which reclaims the cultural legacy of the Black and Afro-Latino peoples who once occupied this space. The series celebrates the everyday beauty of Dominican and Afro-Latino women and honors his mother, who owned a hair salon in the Dominican Republic where he grew up. Preparing your hair in rollers is something that many Dominican women do in private, which Angurria reveals to the rest of the world.

Communal spaces like hair salons and barbershops can be life-affirming for BIPOC and immigrant communities, even today. Safe spaces aren’t always about literal, physical safety from violence; they are necessary for settings where the social-emotional well-being of marginalized groups is not prioritized by dominant social structures.

Mechanic’s Hall and other sites recognized by the National Park Service network were announced during a presentation led by Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff, and Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland.

This site joins nearly 700 other sites, programs, and facilities in the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom program, which preserves and promotes the history of Black resistance to enslavement throughout the U.S.

Learn more about Mechanic's Hall and Lowell's Black history at visitdtl.com and nps.gov.