Hazleton Mural Artist Selected The Downtown Hazleton Alliance for Progress and its partners have selected a professional artist to paint a large outdoor mural within the central business district. Mary Veronica Sweeney, a Hazleton native, reached out to the Alliance when a longtime friend, Terry Bauder, told her about the project. Sweeney, an accomplished visual artist, muralist, and educator, now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her commissions have included images large and small for organizations like PBS, Scholastic Books, Bantam Doubleday, and St. Martin's Press. Sweeney also co-curated a well-received exhibition in 2005 with the Smithsonian Museum of Art about the 101 year old American treasure, muralist Bernarda Bryson-Shahn. In 2015, she had an exhibi-
tion of her landscapes at Harvard University’s Gutman Library. “I was really excited about the project when I first heard about it. I felt like this was my chance to give something back to my hometown,” said Sweeney, who graduated from Bishop Hafey High School in 1975. Sweeney, who went on to receive her master’s degree in fine art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a master’s degree in arts education and innovation from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, recently finished a large mural project in Lindstrom, Minnesota. She has been working on murals for years thanks to inspiration she received from the rich tradition of mural artists dating back to the WPA period in American art history, and her arts training in Philadelphia, home to the world-renowned Mural Arts program within the Thomas Eakins House, where Sweeney was a year-long arts-resident. Currently she teaches art at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Downtown Hazleton Alliance for
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Progress, who is commissioning the artwork in partnership with Hazleton POWER!, believes that the message the mural conveys will be very important. “We solicited recommendations from the community as to what they wanted the theme of the mural to be, said Krista Schneider, who serves as Executive Director of the Alliance. “The feedback we got was that people wanted the mural to recognize the city’s history—the coal mining history and the European immigrants who came here in search of opportunity—but they also wanted the mural to be about the future as well. And they wanted the mural to convey optimism: a community with new immigrants where everyone is coming together to make the future bright. And that is what Mary Veronica’s mural is going to be all about,” said Schneider. Sweeney reached out to Schneider and to several local historians, including Charles McElwee at the Historical Society and Tony Greco at the Standard Speaker, to learn about the history of the mural site and the role that that particular stretch of Wyoming Street has played in the City’s past. She found that it was home to not only the Feeley Theatre’s motion pictures, Hazleton Hall’s vaudeville acts, and the Hazleton House’s shops and apartments (now the site of Hazle Drugs), but it was also home to Thomas Edison’s Electric Illuminating Company, which was established a power plant in 1883 at the southwest corner of Wyoming and Green Streets (now the site of the city’s Northside Parking Plaza). Edison founded this company with several local businessmen to electrify the city. Hazleton became the third city in the country to have electric lights (New York City and Sunbury had them sooner). “So here you have America’s greatest inventor and entrepreneur investing in Hazleton in 1883, which speaks to the city’s promise, innovation, and optimism of that time period,” said Sweeney. “I thought how great it would be to carry this into the future—to have Edison’s creativity and confidence transcend time and inspire what is the future of the community—the children.” In addition to Edison and other historical references, children’s faces will be an important component of the mural, and Sweeney would like to incorporate the faces of local children into the painting. She wants those faces to represent the ethnic heritage of the