Putting a stamp on the community

Institute collaborates with Dismas House on mural honoring returning citizens

November 19, 2025

Having grown up in Chicago, Jose Hameem Otero remembers seeing countless murals of people who had impacted communities like his. 

He never imagined that one day he would be on one.

“I did nine and a half years in prison,” Otero shares from his apartment at the newly opened Dismas Hub, a community space for individuals exiting incarceration that expands the work of Dismas House of Indiana into the broader community. “I got out last year in March, and I ended up getting connected with Dismas by one of my success coaches from the program that I graduated from while I was incarcerated.”

Through hard work, dedication, and the support of the community, Otero rose from resident to senior resident, house manager, and now director of resident life at Dismas House. So it is only fitting that he’s featured on a new mural that portrays the joys, struggles, and resilience of returning citizens at Dismas House.

“I am right there in the middle,” Otero says, gesturing toward the mural, which spans the entire west side of the Dismas Hub. “It is unbelievable, honestly. But it shows that I’ve actually put a stamp on the community, being here at Dismas.”

The mural is the culmination of a semester-long collaboration between Dismas House and the Institute for Social Concerns. 

Out of the conviction that a just world is a beautiful world, the institute offers the course Art & Social Change each semester, where Notre Dame undergraduates connect with organizations and communities in the surrounding region to research ways to tell their stories through art. Previous course collaborations have resulted in murals at La Casa de Amistad, Foundry Field, and the historic WUBS radio station—as well as at the institute’s home, Geddes Hall, through a collaboration with Notre Dame’s Building Services staff.

The idea for the Dismas Hub mural emerged out of a long-standing partnership between Dismas House and the institute’s carceral engagement staff. As Dismas House was preparing to launch Dismas Hub, executive director Andee Huxhold discussed the idea of a mural with her staff. They were seeking a partner who shared their vision when Michael Hebbeler, assistant director of community partnerships and programs at the institute and instructor of the Art and Social Change course, happened to reach out with the same idea. 

“It was an incredible experience,” Huxhold recalls from her new office at Dismas Hub. “Mike said, ‘Let me see what I can do,’ and next thing I knew, he was bringing forward this incredible plan.”

That plan included South Bend–based artist Nate Baranowski, whose work has been featured everywhere from the Lincoln Park Zoo in downtown Chicago to Downtown Disney in Anaheim, California. A resident of South Bend, Baranowski jumped at the opportunity to contribute art to his local community.

“It makes me proud,” Baranowski shares as he puts finishing touches on the mural. “This is my first mural in South Bend, so getting to do some art in the place that I live is very cool.”

Baranowski attended each session of the course along with the Notre Dame students and Dismas House residents and staff. Together they discussed the challenges to reentry and researched the ways art can serve as a means of knowledge production and shape public perception. These conversations and collective research resulted in the theme and subject matter for the mural.

“We talked a lot in those sessions about this tension that Dismas holds,” Huxhold recalls, “and it was so beautiful because we latched onto this idea of the hopes and hurts in reentry. So the mural was created to represent that—to represent the hopes and the hurts and these people coming together to create something beautiful.”

Students and residents not only got to decide whether to be included in the mural; they also had the opportunity to join Baranowski in its creation. In the end, 27 residents, former residents, community members, and Notre Dame students were featured in the mural—each of whom had a hand in its creation.

“I think what’s most striking about the mural are all the different pathways, the stairs going up and down,” Otero states. “It’s a collage of different views, different angles of people’s lives. We’ve got people deep in thought. We’ve got people relaxing, reading books, smiling. Some people have never smiled. They were like me—they didn’t have anything to smile about. And this mural represents the empowerment that Dismas has put down for individuals coming from that darkness. This is a light.”

“The course was eye-opening,” says Notre Dame senior Ijeh Nwaezeapu. A psychology major from Chicago, he admits that he came into the course harboring negative stereotypes toward incarcerated individuals. But after connecting with Otero and others in the course over their shared love of Chicago sports, he came to realize that returning citizens are “people who had made mistakes rather than bad people.”  

“What I learned is that I have to have more conversations with people with different life experiences, different backgrounds than me,” Nwaezeapu says. “When you see each other as human, and you’re able to have discussions across different viewpoints, that’s when true education occurs.”

On a chilly Wednesday evening in early November, members of the community gathered at the Dismas Hub for a ribbon cutting ceremony, during which the completed mural was formally unveiled. 

“I’m thrilled to be the mayor of a community that cares about its people—all of its people, not just some of the people, but all of its people,” said South Bend Mayor James Mueller in his remarks at the event. “And that’s truly a testament to the character and values that our community has and continues to live and demonstrate.”

Notre Dame junior Grace Tadajweski shared at the event that at the beginning of the course she didn’t believe she had anything meaningful to contribute. But throughout the course, Dismas House’s director of community empowerment and former resident Andrea Gordon instilled in the students that each of their diverse perspectives and experiences were valuable to the whole.

“We crafted a mural through conversation and communal effort, made possible by the same diversity of knowledge, proximity, and passion that grounds every community,” Tadajweski described. “Through this process, I realized the differences that I thought made my voice unfit to shape our mural instead made our mural richer.”

Divine Miller joined the course shortly after being released from prison and arriving at Dismas House. “Anyone facing reentry from being incarcerated may have many struggles,” she shared at the event, “but we are more than our struggles. We are not alone. This is how we discussed and designed this beautiful, well-thought-out mural.”

“We’re deeply grateful to our friends at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, who invested their time, their creativity, their resources,” said Huxhold in her remarks. “They came and got proximate, y’all. They came out here and spent time with us. They spent weeks listening to residents and alumni, designing alongside this community, and ensuring that this art reflects the actual lived experiences of those in reentry.”

“This mural is stunning,” stated Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the Institute for Social Concerns, following the event. “It’s truly hard to put into words just how extraordinary this project is. It’s such an honor for the institute to be able to collaborate with the community in a project like this—a project that brings beauty to our community as an expression of our shared vision of a just world.”

Now open at 402 E. South St., in South Bend, Indiana, the Dismas Hub offers free public programs in recovery, child-parent relationships, financial literacy, workforce readiness, and more.

All photos by Matt Cashore for the University of Notre Dame.

Related Stories

---