Trinidad celebrates 150 years with student-made murals and history exhibit

Trinidad’s 150th birthday is being written on walls, in classrooms and inside the Trinidad History Museum, where students and local historians are choosing which parts of the city’s past will be seen, remembered and celebrated.

The project comes as Trinidad marks a rare triple milestone in 2026, sharing its 150th year with Colorado’s sesquicentennial and the statewide America 250-Colorado 150 commemoration. Colorado became the 38th state on Aug. 1, 1876, and Trinidad was incorporated the same year. The city’s sesquicentennial celebration, launched at a February event that drew more than 200 people, runs through Dec. 31.

At the center of the effort is “150 Framed: A Visual History,” an outdoor installation made up of 14 murals, each tied to a different decade in the region’s history. Trinidad State College art professor Ily Reiling and her students worked with the Trinidad History Museum to translate local stories into public art, giving younger residents a direct role in shaping the city’s official narrative at 150.

Reiling has taught studio art and art history for more than 15 years, and Trinidad State College says her research focuses on using visual art to drive environmental change in rural communities, especially for underrepresented populations. Her students are bringing that approach into Trinidad’s streetscape. Juan Zamora’s mural centers on the coal strikes that helped define life in a mining town whose economy was tied to the Coalfield War of 1913-14. Bella Jackson’s work looks to the 2000s, while Kyra Dominguez focused on the A-bomb and the Cold War, showing how wide the city’s memory can stretch when students are allowed to interpret it for themselves.

Millie Duren, the education coordinator at the Trinidad History Museum, said the museum’s collection holds “some gems” that helped shape the project. Duren also visited schools, shared museum photos and artifacts, and helped spark collaboration between student artists and professionals. Reiling said of the students’ work that it is “always nice to see how creative they can be.”

The art project also points back to why Trinidad mattered long before tourism and anniversary banners. The city grew as a stop for travelers crossing toward Raton Pass, then as a mining hub aided by fresh water, rail access and geography that made it a gateway between Colorado and New Mexico. Its downtown historic district still preserves many late-19th- and early-20th-century adobe and brick buildings from those boom years.

With the murals on display and the sesquicentennial continuing through the end of the year, Trinidad is not just celebrating a date. It is deciding, in public, how its story will be told to the next generation.