A wall in downtown Van Buren now tells the town’s story through 20 oversized postage-stamp panels. Each panel features a local place and shows the distance from that landmark to the mural. The 60-foot-long, 14-foot-high installation, called ‘With Love, From Van Buren,’ was completed after a yearlong community effort, WAGM reported Oct. 2. The station reported that 14 organizations and more than 450 community members helped bring the project to completion. Those numbers describe a public artwork built through a process that involved far more than one person painting a wall.
Artist Leah Cook started the project by designing and painting the first group of stamp-like images. She then invited people in the community to suggest places they wanted represented. In a second phase, those ideas became nine additional designs, which residents came to paint alongside Cook, she told WAGM. The process joined an artist’s initial visual approach with local knowledge about which places mattered enough to appear on the wall. The finished mural is both a designed artwork and a record of choices made with residents.
The postage-stamp format gives all 20 locations a consistent frame, while the mileage figures connect each image to the mural’s downtown site. Instead of presenting the town as one scene, the panels point outward to distinct places around Van Buren. Cook described the designs as a way to feature places in town and celebrate what the community has. WAGM reported that the final wall spans 60 feet; the project’s title, ‘With Love, From Van Buren,’ makes the postcard idea explicit without turning the installation into a literal mail piece.
The mural also sits within a longer local effort to revive Main Street. Cook told WAGM that Van Buren had faced economic decline after an international bridge was relocated and that work to rebuild the street was already underway. She said public art can encourage people to leave their cars and walk, potentially bringing activity to local businesses. That is the artist’s rationale for the work, not a measured result reported by the station. The project’s confirmed place in the town’s revitalization plan gives the artwork a civic purpose alongside its visual one.
Funding came from the town and Maine Creates, according to WAGM. The Maine Arts Commission lists ‘With Love, From Van Buren: A Mural Stamp Project’ among the funded Maine Creates projects and identifies Van Buren in Aroostook County as its location. The state initiative is designed to train teaching artists, strengthen community connections and support well-being through the arts. Its program description says funded projects are meant to use collaborative, intergenerational artmaking in settings that include rural towns, libraries and schools.
That statewide framework helps explain why participation was built into the mural’s design. The commission says the inaugural Maine Creates program trained more than 35 teaching artists and supported local projects developed around community needs. Side x Side, the Maine nonprofit that partners with the commission, describes Cook’s project as a collaboration with residents around local places and identity. The organizer’s page still describes the design process in future tense, so the completed mural details here rely on WAGM’s on-site reporting, while the state and organizer pages confirm the project’s name, location and program context.
The completed wall gathers the project’s two layers in one place: Cook’s original designs and the later images shaped by residents’ suggestions and painting sessions. Its 20 place-based panels make the town’s geography part of the artwork, and the mileage labels give each image a relationship to downtown rather than leaving it as an abstract symbol. WAGM’s account places the work within a year of collaboration involving more than 450 people and 14 organizations. The result is a public artwork whose later panels reflect places residents suggested and helped paint.
A town mural cannot by itself reverse economic change, and the reporting does not document a measured business impact. What it can do is make shared places visible in a public setting and give residents a role in deciding how they appear. In Van Buren, those decisions took the form of stamp-like panels, local suggestions, nine designs painted with neighbors, and a 60-foot wall large enough to bring the set together. The Maine Arts Commission’s project listing and WAGM’s report show both sides of the effort: an arts program’s community-centered aim and a finished local project made with the people it set out to involve.
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