Sisters! Visualizing Solidarity & Resistance, celebrating 40 years of the New Haven/León Sister City Project, runs at the Institute Library through April 4. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The first thing you see is her smile, radiant against the grainy, crowded background, the pressed white fabric of her shirt. She is luminous, bright-eyed, only 19. Then there's the baby, just four months old and latched onto her left breast as his tiny hand plays with her collar.
It's only after a cursory glance that the rifle, slung casually over her right shoulder and touching the baby’s shin, comes into focus. There's a dissonance there: life and death, the astounding power to begin and end things. And yet, her smile is easy, casual even. As if she knows this is exactly where she needs to be.
The "Miliciana de Waswalito" (The Militiawoman from Waswalito)—now identified as Blanca López Hernández, with her infant son, José—is at the striking and surprisingly moving heart of Sisters! Visualizing Solidarity & Resistance, celebrating 40 years of the New Haven/León Sister City Project at the Institute Library (IL) in downtown New Haven. Curated by Martha Willette Lewis with context from New Haven/León Director Chris Schweitzer, it blends pro-Sandinista and socialist ephemera with posters from the New Haven Climate Movement (NHCM), weaving a thread between two anticapitalist struggles separated across generations and geographic borders.
In so doing, it offers a crash course in a specific, often under taught chapter of Nicaraguan history and a powerful call to action in the face of unchecked government power. It runs through April 4 at the Institute Library, with a protest and sign making workshop planned for Saturday, March 29.
"This is hopeful," Lewis said on a walkthrough of the exhibition earlier this year. "It shows our commitment to long-term solidarity. I find that in moments like this, it's important to remember the rest of the world."
Top: Lewis with part of the installation. Bottom: Art by youth in the New Haven Climate Movement.
When Lewis and Schweitzer began talking about the exhibition last year, they started with the objects themselves, stored for years in a third-floor room at Unitarian Universalist House on Whitney Avenue. There were hundreds of posters piled atop each other in sleeves, documents of cultural exchange that went back to the 1980s. She began to sort through them, ultimately choosing an arrangement that felt thematic rather than chronological.
Taken together and apart, they form a timestamped, literally vibrant record not only of revolution, but of vested American interest in the cause.
Part of that of course, is the history of the New Haven/León Sister City Project itself. In 1984, New Haveners Alan Wright and Paula Kline—partners in both life and organizing—co-founded the project to foster greater understanding between the U.S. and Nicaragua, and support solidarity between the two countries. At the time, many young Americans had taken notice of the U.S.-backed Contra war against the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a socialist party that had in 1981 overthrown Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
"Part of our mission was to just get people to see for themselves what was going on in both countries," Wright said in a phone call last month, from his home in Pennsylvania. "We sent about 50 delegations over the course of about half a dozen years."
The project started sending delegations at a time of transition in Nicaraguan history. In 1981, the FSLN rebellion had ended what many historians call the Somoza Dynasty, a decades-long exercise in nepotism and dictatorial tactics that lasted from the 1930s through the 1970s. In response, the U.S.—under a first-term President Ronald Reagan—began using the Central Intelligence Agency to train Contras, a shorthand term for anti-Sandinista Counterrevolutionaries. Many Americans, already swept up in a wider movement that centered Latin American solidarity, took note.
Once the delegations started traveling to Nicaragua, they developed a sort of rhythm, Wright remembered. Armed with containers of supplies and material aid, people linked up with their counterparts: an American dentist might work with a Nicaraguan dentist, a teacher with a teacher and so forth. In addition, the Sister City Project had task forces, each committed to a specific discipline like education, mental health, environmentalism and medical support.
"It was a very intense time," remembered Ginger Chapman, a former Sister Cities board president who met Wright in the 1980s and traveled to Nicaragua in the early years of the project. "We did a lot of good work over the years," from building a preschool to engaging in climate sustainability efforts like energy-efficient EcoStoves. By the 25-year mark in 2009, over 1,000 New Haveners had made the journey.
Some of that history, like a massive canvas from 1989, is directly reflected in the show. That year, Wright remembered, New Haven/León members got permission to place one of their 40-foot material aid containers on the New Haven Green, a hub of activity and connection at the center of the city. Before a delegation departed, they draped a canvas over the container and hired a band, to raise awareness around the work that they were doing.
The result is a giant black-and-white image, painted by dozens of New Haveners, that features two women arm in arm as their hair flows back behind them. Between their chests, people smile at each other, their young children in tow. Beneath them, black and white lettering spells out "People to Pueblo."
Many other posters and prints in the show, artifacts of delegations that have long since moved on, come without such localized context, and it's on a viewer to learn the histories, look closely and critically, and make of these objects what they choose to. They are lucky if they do: these posters teach the history and power of not only a sustained social movement, but of its intersections with culture-bearers, from Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío to religious figures to photojournalist Orlando Valenzuela.
Take, for instance, a display close to the IL's front windows, which look out onto Chapel Street below. With a cartoon-esque lion in yellows and oranges, a poster urges the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) movement forward, its caption reading "Seguimos del frente con el frente!!" (We continue from front to front).
Beside it, another image documents the 15th anniversary of CEPAD (Comité Evangélico Pro-Ayuda al Desarrollo), showing the intimate, interconnected and long relationship between faith, politics and worker solidarity. Another print nearby, in brilliant, colorblocked reds and blacks of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, urges Nicaraguans to vote in an upcoming election.
In a season that has seen the courage of faith leaders—perhaps most prominently and immediately Bishop Mariann Budde, although she is one among many—to speak out against economic and political injustice, anti-immigrant rhetoric and action, anti-Black racism and an assault on LGBTQ+ rights, it is a reminder that this work is not new, nor should it stop in the face of authoritarianism and tyranny. To the contrary, it is perhaps more urgent than ever.
What helps ground these pieces in the present, meanwhile, is work by New Haven's current youth, active and former members of the NHCM who have acknowledged (and spoken out passionately about) the link between climate justice, reproductive rights, food security, equitable transportation, education for all and an end to corporate greed. The language and imagery may be different (fossil fuels and sea level rise instead of Sandinista demands, for instance) but the villain is not: both lay bare the cruel machinations of white supremacy and late-stage capitalism.
Together, these works are a reminder that the history of struggle is a long one, full of missteps, government meddling, challenges to authority and experiments in governance and power that do not always work. Following a wave of youth-led protests in 2018, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra began cracking down on political dissidents, going so far as to close thousands of nonprofits, snuff out anti-government protest with violence, and strip people of their citizenship as his government became increasingly severe and repressive.
Since that time, Schweitzer said, there's no world in which sending a delegation back to León would be possible. At least, not for now. And yet, the spirit of the work is still strong: the project officially celebrated its 40th anniversary with storytelling events and a reception at Koffee? on Audubon Street last year.
"It's a mess for people in Nicaragua," he said. What little international aid the government does allow now comes from NGOs and small businesses, rather than groups dedicated to international solidarity. "It's very precarious."
It’s also a reminder that there is a reason to document history, including and especially that which is considered ephemeral. When FSLN members began printing posters over four decades ago, they didn't do so for some New Haven viewer in 2025 any more than they did for the person boycotting the Reichstag Fire Decree in 1933. And yet, the messages that persist—of worker solidarity, of access to education, of a government for the people—are ones that don't feel so far away at all.
In January, Sisters! opened just days before the second Trump Administration took office. It closes less than three months later, as disappearing people, stripping women, children, and LGBTQ+ people of their basic rights, and dismantling civic infrastructure becomes commonplace and normalized. In all the quiet and not quiet moments in between, the pieces seem to come alive, to chatter and rustle from the walls to see how history has continued in the years since they were forgotten.
They ask viewers: What are you going to do? What will you have to show for it, 40 years from now? How will you ever find the blueprint for freedom, or at least for change, if you aren't looking in the first place?
Sisters! Visualizing Solidarity & Resistance runs at the Institute Library through April 4. The Institute Library is in downtown New Haven at 847 Chapel St.