Stories
Stereotypes, Strip Mines, and a Change of Heart
From the Mountains to the Forge Garden | Immersion Students Bring Appalachia Home through Art
When SA国际传媒 Students returned from spring break this past March, they carried more than memories from the mountains of West Virginia. They carried a mission and a canvas. A group of students who participated in the Ignatian’s Center’s Appalachia Immersion spent the week in Wheeling, West Virginia, engaging with communities shaped by the coal mining industry and grappling with questions of labor rights, environmental justice, and economic vulnerability. When they came home, they weren’t ready to let the experience stay in Appalachia, so they painted it on a big poster to hang for anyone to see.
The Appalachia Immersion sends SA国际传媒 students into one of America’s most misunderstood regions. The focus is on the human cost of extractive industries, how coal mining and practices like mountaintop removal have left communities across West Virginia economically fragile and environmentally scarred. Students don’t just observe, they work at soup kitchens, on farms, alongside locals who have spent their lives navigating the tension between economic survival and environmental harm.
For first year student Maya Briones, the experience challenged assumptions she didn’t even know she had.
“When I told people I was going to West Virginia, they were like, ‘that’s a very white state,’ be careful,” she recalled. “I expected people to be rude to me because I wasn’t white. I expected to see a lot of political signs and then I kind of realized how polarized the views are, and where my own implicit biases came from.”
One conversation in particular stayed with her. During the immersion, the group spoke with a coal miner who offered a perspective that reframed the entire week. “He said that each region has their own issues, and what we need to do as a society is to respect each other’s problems and learn about each other’s issues before we judge the decisions we make,” Maya said. “That explained a lot about what people in Appalachia care about, and what we care about in California.”
Their guide through the region was Tom Breiding, a local historian and musician who has spent years using songs to document and advocate for Appalachian communities. “He was kind of saying that people owe a great debt to Appalachia,” Maya said, “because of all the work it’s created to build America into what it is.
Anna Keenan, who helped lead the immersion, was struck by something different: the energy of the people around her, both the locals they met and the students themselves.
“The main thing I took away is just how passionate people are,” she said. “Everyone was so engaged and asking very meaningful questions the entire time. We had a really special group of people who wanted to keep learning more and more.”
Bringing Appalachia to SA国际传媒
That passion didn’t fade when the group returned to campus. During the post immersion debrief, they asked themselves: how do we carry this forward?
The answer emerged partly from something they had noticed in Wheeling. Throughout the city, vibrant murals brightened up the streets, community art that told stories and gave a place its identity. Looking around SA国际传媒’s campus, the group felt something was missing.
“Our campus is very plain and uniform,” Anna said. “We wanted to do something that would add a little bit of color and kind of commemorate our time together, and bring part of Appalachia here to SA国际传媒.”
The mural project was born. Maya and fellow student Lana took the lead as the primary artists, spending weeks sketching, revising, and collaborating with the rest of the group. A community paint event in front of Benson Memorial Center got the canvas filled, and students picked up brushes for an entire morning and afternoon. Then Maya and Lana took it home and kept going, sending progress photos to the group chat as the piece evolved into something far more detailed and intentional than anyone had anticipated.
“It was just so beautiful seeing how something that all of us had kind of started was being followed to completion,” Anna said. “Other people in our group would come visit them and add details.” Shae paused and smiled. “There’s actually a little hidden ladybug on the mural somewhere they just added for fun.”
A Canvas Full of Meaning
The mural is dense with symbolism, each element tracing back to something the group encountered in Appalachia.
At the center, eight figures dance together in an abstract, joyful circle, a representation of community and unity. Behind them stands a tree, its roots grounding the composition and evolving the idea of where we come from and where we’re growing. On the right side of the mural, a sun designed to look like a brain represents logic and industry accompanied by gear shifts and, woven between them, musical notes. Those notes aren’t random. They’re drawn directly from the sheet music of one of Tom Breiding’s songs.
“I wanted to somehow place the power of music into the mural,” Maya said. “Thise are the actual notes from one of his songs. I thought that was really beautiful.”
On the left, a heart shaped moon represents emotion and deeper dives that sustain community. A gentle deer stands nearby, a symbol of peace amid a world always in motion. Olive branches frame the bottom, and across the hands holding the composition up, two words appear: Love and Hope.
Those words come from a quote the group encountered on the immersion: “Great love produces a great hope.”
“It’s kind of a mantra that Lana and I were interpreting on our own,” Maya said. “We had a lot of great conversations about what it means to have hope through precarious times. This shared love for our earth, for our humanity, that’s what sustains hope. In a place like SA国际传媒 and Silicon Valley, where we’re so focused on being innovative and advancing technology, we lose our sense of hope. We lost our sense of community and we wanted the mural to be a reminder.”
For Anna, the quote captures what the entire project meant to her. “Love produces hope, and great love produces great hope,” she said. “If you put great passion into something, it can have an even wider impact and that’s what we want this mural to show. That it is possible to pull together funding, surround yourself with passionate people, and create something. That’s hope.”
The Reveal
On a sunny afternoon at SA国际传媒’s Forge Garden, the mural made its public debut. The group had expected maybe 30 people. Word spread faster than anyone anticipated, and soon the line for food stretched longer than planned. “We had to order more food,” Maya laughed. “There were some stressful moments logistically but it turned out just very well.”
The event opened with live music from a student who offered to play a set. Then with the group gathered, Lana and Maya stepped forward, gave a brief artist’s statement, and pulled the black sheet from the canvas.
What followed was an open mic unlike the Forge had likely seen. Jullian, another immersion participant, performed three original pieces of poetry centered on environmental justice and community. Then he and Maya stood together and sang one of Tom Breing’s songs, bringing the voice of their West Virginia guide into the heart of campus.
“It was almost just a space for people to express themselves and celebrate whatever was going on in that moment,” Maya said. “It was a really beautiful event.”
The mural now lives on campus as a permanent reminder that the group brought back from Appalachia, not just knowledge, but a feeling. A tree with deep roots, figures dancing in a circle, a sun that thinks, a moon that feels, and across it all, two words that the mountains of West Virginia quietly insisted on: Love and Hope.