There is nothing like art to bring people together and heal, even in the face of human tragedy on a massive scale.

With more than 4 million Syrians having fled their country to build new lives, local St. Louis artist and muralist Chelsea Ritter-Soronen, wanted to build awareness about the struggles they are facing. "When we look at images of warfare through a screen, it’s very easy to become immune to those images," she says. "I wanted to take the images from the media, take them away from a screen and put them into a real world setting." 

Using permanent marker on blank newsprint, the 29-year old public artist has been drawing actual media photos of Syrian refugees and affixing wheatpaste murals of the drawings to walls belonging to three businesses in the Cherokee and Grove neighborhoods of St. Louis. Wings and gears are consistent motifs in Ritter-Soronen's work, portraying the grind and pain of fleeing one's home country and the freedom that the refugees seek. Since her first wave of murals, a dozen of other businesses have contacted her to offer her space to make a mural. 

She hopes that her murals build both awareness and empathy. 

"It’s a choice, to listen to the radio or turn on the TV. And it's just as much of a choice to choose not to. But this is a crisis," she says. "By putting these images on the side of a market, or a side of a bar you frequent, that choice gets taken away and you have to look at it for second. Anybody can relate to the image of a father holding his dying son. When those images are in in front of you, you forget what religion they are or what country they’re from. You just want to know that they're okay."

See more photos of Ritter-Soronen's murals, like the one here, at the link below. All photos are by Ritter-Soronen.