When you think of an art unveiling, you might not envision it taking place in the blazing-hot sunshine of a busy grocery store parking lot at rush hour on a Monday afternoon. But that’s exactly what happened last week, when a crowd of warm but thoroughly joyful artists and community members gathered to celebrate “Why We March,” a new mural commissioned by the nonprofit Howard Center for the side of its building facing City Market in downtown Burlington.
The mural, in three sections each about 12 feet long by 5 feet high, pictures a stylized crowd of colorful-shirted figures, many of them holding protest placards. The Vermont Statehouse is recognizable in the left panel and the Chittenden County Superior Courthouse in the right. A floating heart takes center stage at the Battery Park band shell in the middle panel, a rainbow arching over the structure. Green trees and a view of Lake Champlain unite the background as a single scene.
Howard Center serves a wide variety of clients, including people with developmental disabilities, a history of addiction or a lack of housing. Around 60 of them make up Howard Center Arts Collective — a group whose members take part in open studios, exhibitions, events, and weekly community Zoom calls to discuss their ideas and artwork.
Arts collective coordinator Kara Greenblott met artist Julio Desmont at Burlington City Arts’ BTV Market. On his website, she saw a painting with an earlier version of the mural’s imagery and shared it with Catarina Campbell, Howard’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion. They were both inspired by it and thought the constituents they serve would be, too.
“Our work in DEI is really expansive,” Campbell said. “It involves both addressing reality as it exists but also dreaming about the reality we hope is possible and committing our energies to that every day.”
Like the scene pictured in the mural, its creation was a collaborative effort by a diverse group of people. Greenblott and Campbell brought in as lead artists Desmont and muralist Raphaella Brice, whose work can also be seen on the Fletcher Free Library. Desmont, 42, of Essex Junction, was born in Haiti; Brice, 27, of Montpelier, is of Haitian descent. Iraqi painter Amjed Jumaa, now of Burlington, contributed major assistance on the piece, which received $5,000 in funding from Burlington City Arts and a $10,000 grant from the Vermont Community Foundation.
The artists presented mockups at multiple arts collective meetings, receiving feedback on their designs. Despite the challenges of incorporating sometimes contradictory opinions, collective member Steve Tall said at the reception, “They responded to that and made the work way better.”
Altogether, more than 60 community members were involved in the project. Once the composition was set, more than 30 artists completed the piece over the course of three community paint sessions at Howard Center’s Westview House and Knight Lane facilities, as well as at ANEW Place homeless shelter in Burlington. The slogans on the placards in the mural — such as “Compassion Not Condemnation,” “Fear Less Love More” and “I Am Here” — were chosen from 95 community submissions.
For Desmont, those messages are not just slogans. “They’re actually things that can happen, if we collectively make them happen,” he said. “And the most interesting ones are not up there — I mean, they’re in people’s hearts. They’re in people’s minds,” he added. “Because every day that we wake up, we march for something.”
“Why We March” is installed at 102 S. Winooski Ave. in Burlington. Learn more at howardcenter.org, raphdraws.com and juliodesmont.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2025.
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