Library Unveils Community-Created Mural
The mosaic mural, funded by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council, celebrates the community's values and the individuals that compose it.
By Claire MacDonald
Hinesburg Record Staff Reporter
(Editor’s note: The audio above is an edited recording of a conversation with the glass artist Terry Zigmund. Click the arrow to listen.)
The Carpenter-Carse Library revealed its new mural – a community-created piece made up of more than 100 mosaic tiles, titled “Who We Are” – on July 1, in a celebratory evening accompanied by a potluck, sprinklers for the kids, and free ice cream.
The mural, funded by a $4,800 grant from the Vermont Arts Council, was a collaborative effort between the library, Hinesburg residents, and Burlington-based glass artist Terry Zigmund to construct a piece of art associated with the country’s 250th anniversary and ask questions such as: what are our values? Who are we? What does it mean to be an American?
Library Director Jill Andersen said she had been wanting the library to have a mural, similar to a previous one that had deteriorated, for a while. In the fall of 2025, when Vermont Humanities announced its collaboration with the Vermont 250th Anniversary Commission and Vermont Arts Council to award over $62,000 in grants to different communities around the state for arts and culture projects commemorating the country’s age, she applied for the opportunity.
“I think it’s really difficult for many people in our society to even celebrate or mark a lot of our country’s anniversaries, because there’s so much complicated and negative history surrounding how this country has been created,” Andersen said. “I wanted to come up with a way to visualize some of the people who make up this nation. I wanted it to be colorful; I wanted it to bring joy and be a happy and positive experience.”
She emphasized her desire to have as many Hinesburg individuals contribute to the piece as possible.
“I thought a collective piece … would potentially have more meaning to the community and be a lasting experience [rather than] having somebody come and talk about some event in America’s history that we don’t have any connection to,” Andersen said.
The library put out a call to artists in the area to help guide the project. Zigmund proposed the idea of a color-coded mosaic.
Each mosaic tile, made by residents over the course of six free workshops that started in April, incorporates colors representing different values of the community: purple for citizenship; blue for history; green for belonging; yellow for ecology; orange for culture; and red for society.
“The way that Terry simplified it with the color-coding [made] it very accessible,” Andersen said. “It wasn’t overly complicated … it gives people something to talk about and think about as they look at it.”
She added that accessibility was a main focus of the project; children as young as two and three made tiles. Whether or not the person wanted to choose their colors based on the coding, as well, was up to individual choice.
Judy Curtis said she enjoyed the freedom of the color selection.
“I chose yellow because I wanted to make a bee, kind of as a symbol for my children,” she said.
Zigmund added how much she enjoyed seeing the tight-knit nature of Hinesburg while hosting these workshops.
“The experience of working with those folks has been great, to see how much social cohesion there [already] is,” she said. “To see all these adults who haven’t touched an art material in forever having such a good time, spending an hour to make something that’s four inches by four inches…that’s so cool.”
The workshops were advertised via the library’s website, their monthly newsletter, and Front Porch Forum. Andersen said they were largely well-attended.
“By the time we got to the last one, we were popping popcorn and playing music and everyone was sitting at the same table,” she said. “That part of the experience, I think, is just as meaningful as whatever you want to glean from the color coding … a collective effort to create something beautiful.”
Claire MacDonald is this year’s recipient of the Hinesburg Record Journalism Fellowship. In June she graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in political science.