Thanks to local podcasters Chris Rodriguez and Evon Hernandez, the cultural diversity mural is becoming a reality.

“We wanted to represent all the different cultures in the melting pot of Dunkirk,” Rodriguez told the OBSERVER.

Hernandez and Rodriguez host the Small Town Big Minds podcast where they talk about local things and basically have fun. Their latest endevour had big results though raising money with GoFundMe and other crowd funding sources to the tune of $3,700 to create this new work of art.

“We kept saying that we’re going to do it,” Rodriguez said.

Gretchen Weidner, the artist, works on the Culturally Diversity mural.

“We talked to the mayor he was really supportive, he helped us talk with Glenn (Christner), the building inspector. Everybody was supportive.”

Rodriguez who was a Marine for five years lived in California for 10 years and talked of the abundance of murals that litter the state.

“There’s murals everywhere so they’re not something that’s just like a bandaid to a low income community,” Rodriguez said. “These are very wealthy cities that are using murals to build and boost moral, making things more inclusive.”

Following the completion of the hands and tree, Gretchen Weidner, former Dunkirk Middle and High School art teacher and the mural’s artist, will paint representations of each different ethnicity that make up Dunkirk. They will include Puerto Rico, Mexico, Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy.

“We want to hit all the ethnicities that are here and then there’ll be a native woman on the other side to represent the land,” Rodriguez said. “The hands are all different colors coming from the Earth, the world, so we all come from nature even though we’re all different colors. The hands are like roots for the tree that represent that we all came from different areas and sometimes we’ve lived here so long that we’ve forgotten our roots.”

“For the past six years I’ve been there muralling all over California and I come back where my roots are which is Buffalo and do some murals here about three to four months out of the year,” Weidner said. “Christopher first reached out to me on Instagram for some guidance about putting a mural up in town and it just so happened that eventually it turned into me doing the mural and working together to go create a positive message in the city of Dunkirk. Having some roots here myself I was very honored to come back and give to the community that I also feel a strong bond with.”

The group is currently on the third day and expect it to take at least another two, painting eight t nine hours a day with a lot of her old students coming back and volunteering their time to paint.

“I’m happy to be bringing some art into the community.”